Best tools for collecting & sharing employee engagement results

Data is powerful. For employers, data collected from your employees can tell a powerful story about how motivated and engaged your workforce is; how committed they are to their tasks, their teams, and to your company; and where there are any gaps that need to be quickly addressed. 

One area on which you should be focusing your attention is employee engagement. Decades of research has shown that when employees are engaged, organizations are in the best possible position for high performance. In fact, employee engagement is viewed as so crucial to firms’ ability to fulfil their goals and objectives that it is now the key concept that HR practitioners recommend that employers capture through employee surveys. Moreover, sharing employee engagement results with your workforce actually has the power to improve engagement even further, creating a win-win for both you and your employees. But what exactly is employee engagement, and how can you track it and share the results? In this article, we’ll explain the value of using surveys to measure employee engagement and share the results. We’ll also introduce you to some handy tools that integrate seamlessly with the SurveyMonkey platform to help you capture and share employee engagement data and drive business excellence.

But first: what exactly is employee engagement, and why should you measure it? Simply put, engagement is a psychological state that subsumes characteristics such as motivation, satisfaction, commitment, and enthusiasm. Engaged employees work hard physically and mentally, put thought into their work, enjoy their jobs, and exhibit high levels of wellbeing and satisfaction. 

There are actually three dimensions to employee engagement: a physical element, a cognitive dimension, and an emotional aspect.

These three characteristics of engagement are not independent of one another, but may in fact be interrelated: when an employee is personally engaged, they are physically involved in, cognitively vigilant of, and emotionally connected to their work. When an employee expends effort and energy in the fulfilment of their work (the physical dimension), they are more cognitively attuned to the work (the cognitive dimension) and they tend to develop a positive mindset towards the employer, their working conditions, and the organization (the emotional dimension).

This definition makes it obvious why it's crucial to measure employee engagement. When employees exhibit low levels of engagement, their performance—and your company’s—are likely to drop. Customers may be dissatisfied, KPIs might not be met, and absenteeism might increase: all factors that contribute to your bottom line. Measuring employee engagement is the first step in helping you to understand whether you have the human resources needed to meet your goals, and to identify where the gaps lie, so you can take swift, corrective action.

Gallup says it is possible to distinguish between three types of worker:

Using SurveyMonkey, you can measure engagement quickly, explore patterns in engagement across the organization, and gain actionable insight that will help you design processes and mechanisms to keep your employees engaged, and your organization on the up.

Measuring employee engagement is only the first step towards building a responsive, engaged, and forward-thinking workforce. One key step in the process is sharing the results with your managers and employees, even if those results are unfavorable. There are three main reasons why you should always disseminate the results of your employee engagement survey:

SurveyMonkey has hundreds of different analysis tools to help you visualize your data, evaluate patterns and pinpoint trends and key takeaways. But, did you know that our platform also integrates with 100+ others to help you make sense of your results? Here are seven of the best tools you can integrate into your employee engagement survey for powerful, actionable results.

Tableau is a data visualization platform. Its popularity stems from its ability to simplify large amounts of raw data, and to transform it into a format that is comprehensible to anyone at any level in your organization.

Using Tableau, non-technical users can create customized dashboards—ideal when managers want to disaggregate engagement data in a way that's specific to their department. Tableau is a powerful add-on to SurveyMonkey, allowing you to:

Ready to start? Learn more about setting up and using the Tableau integration here.

Part of the Microsoft Power Platform, Power BI is a free-to-use business analytics solution that enables you visualize your data and share insights both inside your organization and outside of it. A web browser link can be created, or you can share insights  via mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android. Even better: data visualizations can be embedded into your own app or website, which is handy when you want to celebrate your employee engagement levels with customers, investors, or other stakeholders.

Using SurveyMonkey’s Power BI integration, you can pull in data from your employee engagement survey, break down the results, create appealing visuals for sharing, and even incorporate data already in Power BI to help you better understand your results. One of the major benefits of this tool is that you can create collaborative workspaces where you can share reports and dashboards with colleagues. Pushing SurveyMonkey data into Power BI is a breeze—just follow this handy guide.

Like Power BI, Data Studio by Google is also a free tool for creating fully customizable dashboards and reports. You can use it to transform your raw data into interactive dashboards and visually appealing reports that are easy to understand, easy to digest, and easy to share. The number of visualization tools available is huge—in addition to pie charts and bar charts, you can add scorecards, pivot tables, and even treemaps. Data integration happens in real-time, allowing you to save time pulling reports every month, or quarter, and freeing you up to focus on executing your strategy for improving engagement.

One of the best features of Google Data Studio is that it offers a wide variety of templates for creating and sharing reports: templates with fonts that can be customized in line with your brand and items that can be added or removed. All you have to do is to load SurveyMonkey data to a database or cloud data warehouse, connect Google Data Studio, and start analyzing your data.

DataHero is a business intelligence software platform designed for sharing data insights with your team, clients, or other stakeholders. Like some of the other tools that integrate with SurveyMonkey, you can create beautiful, powerful data visualizations. But DataHero has some other benefits too: you can create visualizations of multiple surveys, allowing you, for example, to compare employee engagement results with the results from your customer surveys, or to track changes in engagement over time. If you gather survey data regularly, you’ll also find that their drag-and-drop interface makes it quick and easy to select the combination of datasets you need for sophisticated, detailed analysis. Take a look at how the SurveyMonkey DataHero integration works here.

Unlike some of the other tools we’ve considered, OfficeReports for Microsoft Office Suite isn’t free. However, you’ll find it invaluable if you’re a regular user of Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel, because it helps you to transfer data from one to the other in moments. And with our SurveyMonkey integration, you can automatically export your survey data from the platform into Excel, ready to create charts, figures, tables or other visuals in OfficeReports, or even export the data directly into PowerPoint. What's more, OfficeReports also has the ability to automatically repopulate your spreadsheet or presentation when new survey responses come in, so you can be sure that your results are always accurate and up to date. See here for more on how to use OfficeReports with your SurveyMonkey data. 

Like some of the other tools, Dasheroo integrates with SurveyMonkey to help you create visualizations of your survey responses. A major feature of this platform, though, is that the visualizations can be automatically imported into emails that you can share on a regular basis with your team. Imagine, for instance, that you send out a quarterly employee engagement survey. You could manually export the results, perform new analysis, and send our reports every three months. When Dasheroo is connected to SurveyMonkey, you can save valuable time by automatically updating reports with new responses, and automating emails to go out to your team on a quarterly basis. In addition, you and your colleagues can upload comments on any of the visualizations, allowing you to share real-time reactions when engagement changes or a new insight emerges. Learn more about how to set up and use the Dasheroo integration here.

Finally, Crunch is a sophisticated web-based platform with an easy point-and-click interface that helps you clean, weigh, analyze, and share your data via PowerPoint or Excel quickly and easily. If you need to perform detailed, multivariate analyses, Crunch is the tool for you. And, there’s no need to download your data or keep it in a separate database: your SurveyMonkey data is securely archived and fully searchable within Crunch, and can be accessed by you and your teammates in just a click of a button. Start integrating with Crunch now.

So there you have it: why you need to capture employee engagement data, why you should share it, and more importantly—how. Ready to take the next step? Here’s how to start collecting employee data, and how to create shareable reports.