Do you limit engagement survey participants by start date? Why or why not?

[jdavies]

We are actively discussing whether to continue limiting participation in our annual engagement survey to employees who have > 90 days tenure. I would welcome hearing if this is a practice others follow, and why or why not.

One internal group sees this as the appropriate amount of time to form opinions about managers, leaders and teams. Their logic is that you need that much time before answering questions about the corporate culture.

Others see this as a limitation on getting the complete picture of our employees’ engagement. Yes, newer employees might have rosier beliefs or less complete perspectives than others with more tenure; that’s okay and we should include their perspectives when planning actions.

Where do you and your company land on this decision?

[kristiekent]

Our company involves all employees in engagement surveys. Although this may be for administrative convenience, personally I would side with the view that new employees are in a position to provide a unique view of culture, having not yet been ingrained to company norms.

[isabelleSAMA]

Surveys are a great barometer to valuate employee engagement but in addition to surveys have you looked at implementing other benefits like virtual coaching for specific teams / employees - this allows you to continually measure engagement through providing employees a more one to one approach which ultimately improves overall company culture - as well as retention and productivity across all levels of the organisations.

[kinglo]

For our large companywide engagement surveys, we limit participation to folks with +90 days tenure. Anyone with less than that takes part in a separate onboarding survey. We feel it’s more appropriate to do it this way as our new hires go through an expensive onboarding period so it would be unfair to have them take part in a survey where they would only have limited views of or perspectives at this time. For our monhtly eNPS survey, we include all employees irrespective of tenure.

[Kwame]

As a company whose core business is conducting engagement surveys, we recommend to our clients that only employees with more than three months tenure (+90) should participate in the surveys. We don’t think that an employee with less than that has had sufficient time and experience with the organization to make informed judgments on the questions in the survey. We also usually find that employees with the least tenure tend to have the highest engagement levels in their organization, justifying the exclusion of new hires from the engagement survey.