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Starter Guide: How to Create an Employee Engagement Survey

By Nick Schäferhoff Published January 28, 2025

Conducting an employee engagement survey is an effective way to understand how the people in your organization feel about working there. Surveys allow you to gather feedback from your staff so you can create a better working environment.

In this starter guide, we’ll cover the benefits of employee engagement surveys, the types of questions you should include, and then we’ll show you how to create one for your own WordPress site.

Let’s dive in.

Benefits of Employee Engagement Surveys

Company engagement surveys can help you gauge the level of morale, work satisfaction, commitment to the job, and perceived value of your workers.

All of this matters because it affects everything else in your business, from productivity to employee turnover. Therefore, employee engagement surveys can offer many benefits including:

• Provides an accurate picture – By asking everyone in your company about their work engagement, you get a more comprehensive view, not just the opinions of those who tend to be most vocal.
• Signals that you care – Gathering feedback is a great way to show that you are not indifferent to how people in your company are feeling about their experience working for you.
• Positive changes – Knowing what is and isn’t working for your employees allows you to take practical steps to improve your work environment and company culture.
• Increases productivity – When employees feel that their company cares about them, they also tend to care more about the company. Gathering feedback and then acting on it can have this effect.
• Reduces turnover – Checking in with people who work for you helps you identify systemic issues that keep them from performing at their best or would make them consider leaving. You can then take action to make this less likely.
• Improves your business – As mentioned, employee engagement translates into every part of your business, from performance and innovation to customer interactions. (By the way, to find out how your customers are feeling, check our guide for creating customer satisfaction surveys.)

Create Effective Survey Questions

The kinds of questions you include in your customer engagement survey can make or break its effectiveness. After all, you can only discover important issues if you ask for them.

Here are some strong examples of questions you could include in your survey, broken down into different categories:

Company Identification

• My company’s mission or purpose makes me feel my job matters.
• I would recommend [company] as a great place to work.
• I rarely think about looking for a job somewhere else.

Leadership

• I have a clear idea about the direction of my company.
• I receive regular, constructive feedback on my performance.
• My manager is a great role model for the rest of the employees.

Enablement

• I have all the materials and equipment I need to properly do my job.
• I have the freedom and autonomy to improve products, processes, and services.

Alignment

• I know what is expected of me at work.
• I receive appropriate recognition when I perform well.
• I am paid fairly for the work I do.

Development

• I feel confident about my options for career advancement in the company.
• My supervisor seems to care about my professional development.
• In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.

Open-ended Questions

• What do you especially enjoy about working here?
• In your opinion, what would make working here better?
• Is there anything else we should have asked in this survey?

You may want to add other questions based on your unique business and organizational structure, but the above examples are a good starting point.

Other Factors to Keep in Mind

In addition to the survey questions, it’s also important to consider and implement the following tips surrounding the survey, to reinforce your purpose and intent:

• Clearly communicate the modalities – Explain the reason and goal behind the survey, how it should be completed, and when it should be turned in.
• Keep it to the essentials – Keeping the survey to a concise length will help your employees complete it in a reasonable time frame and with appropriate diligence.
• Be ready to act on the results – If your employees regularly take surveys but nothing changes, they might feel that their participation is a waste of time. Be ready to take action on the outcomes of your survey.
• Repeat surveys over time – To see if your changes have made an impact, you need to re-run the survey regularly. Otherwise, how will you know?

How to Create an Employee Engagement Survey in WordPress

With Gravity Forms and the Survey Add-On, it’s easy to design an employee engagement survey form to your exact specifications, without the need for technical knowledge. You can do most everything with simple mouse clicks. Plus, you’ll have great flexibility when it comes to the survey’s design and content..

To follow along with this tutorial you’ll either need a Gravity Forms Elite or Nonprofit license, or you can follow along by using our free demo site which has all of the features you’ll need.

1. Install Gravity Forms and the Survey Add-On

To get started, install and activate the Gravity Forms plugin on your WordPress site if you haven’t done so already.

Next, install the Add-On by going to Forms → Add-Ons in your WordPress dashboard.

Find the Survey Add-On in the list and then click Install. Once the installation process finishes, be sure to activate the add-on on your site.

2. Create a New Form

Next it’s time to create a form for your survey. Luckily, you don’t have to start completely from scratch thanks to the Survey Template in the Gravity Forms template library.

To create your form, click Forms → New Form or Add New.

A new window will open. Search for the Survey Form template in the list, hover over it, and click Use Template.

In the next step, you’ll be asked to name your form and optionally provide a description. Click Use Template when you are finished.

After that, you will land in the Gravity Forms drag-and-drop editor.

Because we are using a template, the form will already contain some fields. Rearrange, delete, or add more fields from the right side bar as needed. We’ll share some commonly used survey questions below, if you’re looking for inspiration. You can also customize the form and fields further, by clicking on the form field and changing the settings.

3. Add Survey Questions

The benefit of using the Gravity Forms Survey Add-On is that it comes with a Survey field.

This field can be configured in a number of ways::

• Rating – Users can select a star rating.
• Dropdown – Users can choose one from a dropdown list of pre-defined options.
• Radio buttons – Another way of picking one from several choices.
• Checkboxes – Users can pick multiple options.
• Rank – Users can drag and drop options to rank them in their preferred order.
• Likert scale – Users can choose an answer from a scale of options.
• Paragraph text – Users can input multiple lines of text.

Based on your unique case, you can add this field as many times as you need to, and use some or all of the options on your survey. Here is an example of what the survey might look like:

4. Enhance Your Form

Depending on the length of your survey and the types of questions you plan to ask, you might want to play around with different ways to format and/or extend the functionality of your form. With Gravity Forms, there are many ways to do this.

Use a Multi-Page Layout

One way to make a long survey less overwhelming is to spread the questions across multiple pages.

Gravity Forms makes this super easy with the Page field. Simply add it wherever you want a page break to appear in your form and the plugin takes care of the rest.

You can even customize how the pagination should appear in the field settings.

Enable Conditional Logic

Conditional logic allows you to reveal parts of the survey, such as specific questions, based on user input.

For example, you could add a yes/no radio button asking the user if they see any need for improvement in their work environment, and then add a paragraph field where they can type their ideas. Then, you could enable conditional logic on the paragraph field to only display it if they answered ‘Yes’ in the previous question.

Make It Conversational

A great way to make your survey more interactive and user-friendly is with the Conversational Forms Add-On. With this add on, participants will encounter survey questions in stages rather than all at once. This makes filling out the survey less overwhelming and more fun.

You can check out our conversational forms gallery here. We actually have an example of a conversational employee engagement survey you can use as a template.

Receive Slack Notifications

With the Gravity Forms Slack Add-On, you can receive notifications whenever someone fills in your employee engagement survey. The message can go to a specific channel, group, your personal account, or to all of the above.

Learn more about the Slack Add-On here.

Customize Confirmations and Notifications

Confirmation messages are the messages that appear on the web page when someone submits your employee engagement survey.

They can be used to let employees know their survey has been submitted successfully and to thank them for their participation.

Notifications, on the other hand, are email messages sent out after a form submission. They can go to participants, you, or anyone else who needs to be kept in the loop.

By default, every form will have one of each. You can customize these, or create your own. For more information on how to do this, check out our documentation on configuring confirmation and notifications.

5. Embed and Test Your Survey

Once you are done designing your employee engagement survey, it’s time to test it.

To do this, click the small laptop icon at the top of the screen and then click Preview in new tab.

Test your form, and then head to your form Entries to ensure your submission was captured.

When you are ready to publish you can embed your survey form on a new or existing page using the Gravity Forms block or shortcode.

Once you are certain everything works properly, you can make the survey public by clicking Publish in the page editor.

6. Check the Results

Of course, the most important part of a survey is the answers from participants. To see the responses, head to the Survey Results tab in the form settings. Here you’ll be able to see survey replies at a glance and filter the results as needed.

Now all that’s left for you to do is conduct your survey and take action on the results.

Start Measuring Employee Engagement Today

If you truly want to get a feel for the pulse of your organization, you have to ask for the feedback directly. Conducting employee engagement surveys can help you do that by allowing you to gather valuable insights straight from the people who work for you.

By carefully designing your survey with purposeful questions and acting on the feedback you receive, you can foster a positive work environment for everyone.

With Gravity Forms and the Survey Add-On, this is as easy as can be. To get started, purchase your Elite license today!