Global employee engagement surveys: measuring engagement in multiple languages

In today's globalized world, companies are expanding their operations across borders and building a diverse workforce. However, it's not always easy to understand the unique needs and concerns of employees from different countries and cultures.

This is where global employee surveys in multiple languages can play a vital role. By offering surveys in native languages, your organisation can improve survey participation, get accurate feedback, and create a more inclusive workplace culture. In this article, we'll discuss how global employee surveys can benefit your organisation and provide tips for conducting your own.

Keep reading to learn more about:

• Pulse surveys in multiple languages

• Benefits of global employee engagement surveys

• KIOSK functionality

• AI, Machine-learning and survey translation

• Eletive – a global People Success Platform

Pulse surveys in multiple languages

If your organisation operates in many countries, or if you have a diverse workforce, you need to provide all employees with a way to answer the employee engagement surveys in their own language. The Eletive surveys are multi-lingual and support more than 39 different languages.

Employee pulse surveys are a valuable tool for collecting frequent, real-time feedback from your employees. By conducting these surveys in multiple languages, you can ensure that they're truly capturing the perspectives and experiences of your whole workforce.

Pulse surveys typically ask short, targeted questions to provide a quick snapshot of employee attitudes and sentiments. By using pulse surveys in multiple languages, you can identify issues and concerns in real-time across your whole organisation, and take immediate action to address them.

Benefits of global employee engagement surveys

Measuring employee engagement is an important first step toward improving employee engagement and employee experience. And the more internationally distributed your workforce is, the more you rely onemployee surveys to collect feedback to get an overview of your organisation's engagement levels. Multilingual employee surveys conducted provide a number of benefits:

• Increased participation and engagement. By offering surveys in multiple languages, you canincrease participation and engagement from employees who may be more comfortable and confident responding in their native language. This can result in higher response rates and more accurate and honest feedback.

• A better understanding of employee needs. Conducting surveys in multiple languages helps you gain a better understanding of the needs and concerns of employees across different countries and cultures. This will lead to more effective and targeted initiatives and policies to support and engage employees.

• Improved communication and collaboration. Employee surveys conducted in multiple languages help to break down language barriers and promote better communication and collaboration among team members from different backgrounds. This improves teamwork, productivity, and overall organisational performance.

• Better tracking of progress. By conducting global employee surveys in multiple languages on a regular basis, you can track progress over time and identify areas where improvements have been made and where more work is needed.

• Data-driven decisions. Global employee engagement surveys take all guesswork out of the equation. By turning engaement data into valuable insights, you can use it to inform your business strategies and action plans. 

• Increased diversity and inclusion. Offering your employee surveys in multiple languages demonstrates your organisation's commitment to diversity and inclusion. This can help you attract and retain a diverse workforce and build a more inclusive workplace culture.

• A better employee experience. Many employees feel most comfortable using their native language. A multilingual survey allows everyone in your organisation to read and answer the surveys in their preferred language.

• Global benchmarking. Using the Eletive platform, you have access to global employee engagement benchmark data. This means you can use your collected data to compare different segments in your organisations, based on any HR data, to understand what parts are working and where there is room for improvement.

• A complete overview. Withintelligent employee surveys and user-friendly dashboards showingintuitive heatmaps of your whole organisation, you know exactly what is going on – and where you need to focus your attention. 

KIOSK functionality

In some countries and some industries, it's less common for all employees to have access to a company phone, computer, and company email. Therefore, Eletive offers a functionality called Eletive KIOSK, commonly used for employees working in warehouses or production.

When using KIOSK mode, neither phone number nor email is needed. Instead, each employee receives a unique code that they can use to answer the survey on the device of your selection. That device can, for example, be a shared tablet or computer that everyone can access. Employees simply enter their code and answer the survey.

AI, Machine-learning and survey translation

It's best practice to include open questions in employee surveys, to allow employees to elaborate their survey answers and provide more detailed information. In the Eletive platform, there are a number of ways that employees can communicate in free text. The channels where free-text answers are possible include:

• Comments in the employee surveys

• Anonymous chat

• Whistleblower channel

Free-text answers are essential to gain a deeper understanding of the employee experience in your organisation. At the same time, large amounts of free-text answers can be challenging to read, interpret, and analyse. And if you have hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of employees, reading each free-text answer becomes near impossible.

To solve this problem, Eletive offers a feature called Listening AI. This feature is built on advanced AI and NLP analysis, to help you analyse, categorise and visualise large amounts of free-text answers. Listening AI automatically scans all the free-text answers to provide an immediate overview. You can see what topics are the most prominent and whether the sentiment is positive or negative. This way you always know what’s going on in your organisation so that you can apply a proactive approach. Listening AI supports all 39 languages in the Eletive platform.

Related reading: Listening AI – Employee Listening at scale

How Eletive can help you measure and increase global employee engagement

In today's global marketplace, employee engagement surveys in multiple languages are no longer a "nice-to-have" but a "must-have" for any organisation seeking to understand the needs and concerns of their diverse workforce.

By making it possible to answer your employee surveys in any preferred language, you will gain valuable insights into employee attitudes, experiences, and opinions, which can be used to improve communication, increase participation, and create a more inclusive workplace culture.

With the help of modern technology, conducting these surveys has never been easier. And at Eletive, we're happy to help you get started! So, if you want to attract and retain top talent, improve productivity, and build a more engaged and satisfied workforce, start by listening to your employees through global engagement surveys.