Incentivizing Employee Engagement

Hi ​@DesiB,

Great topic! Here are some related posts that could spark some initial ideas:

• Seeking Advice: Declining Survey Response Rates & Link Trust

• 4 Tips for Preventing Drop-Offs in Surveys

We don’t incentivise with tangible rewards or gifts, the incentive for our employees providing their feedback is that they’re contributing to creating a great place to work. Key to this is ensuring leaders are transparent with sharing the outcomes of the surveys, discuss the areas of focus, then engage employees into being part of the solution/s.

We want feedback as honest and voluntary as possible, we didn’t want employees just clicking through the survey so they could enter for a prize, or answering too positively with the assumption that positive answers = more likely to win. 

I tend to agree with ​@EmmaOGC  that I too would not suggest incentivizing employees to complete employee oriented surveys. Although this is not uncommon for consumer surveys, this would send the wrong signal to employees in my view.

Rather than reward employees with extrinsic gifts it is important the motivation comes from within. Employee engagement works in positive and trusting organizational cultures where management and the C-suite is seen acting on the submitted suggestions and where employees experience a clear difference after participating in surveys creating a positive feedback loop that incentivises (continual) participation. 

We don’t provide incentives for completing engagement surveys as it generally drives the wrong behaviour. We run participation completion %s as a competition between people leaders which works quite well for us. 

82% participation rate in our latest annual engagement survey.