Did you know that almost two-thirds of U.S. employees are disengaged?
This is according to the 2021 Gallup survey for employee engagement, which also revealed that as many as 14% of the employees actually go out of their way to hurt their organization.
Is your company also facing the woes of employee disengagement?
If yes, we have great news for you. 1
Online quizzes can help you improve and maintain workforce engagement in various ways.
In this blog post, we’ll learn about using quizzes to engage employees and boost productivity.
But before we learn about this uniquely powerful employee engagement strategy, let’s understand what employee engagement is and why it’s super-important for business growth.
Let’s get right into it!
What Is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is a measurement of how emotionally invested employees are in their job responsibilities and how committed and dedicated they are toward their team and organization.
Engaged employees believe in their company’s mission and values and work enthusiastically and passionately. They go above and beyond to produce high-quality output while meeting deadlines. They also try to come up with creative solutions to problems.
On the other hand, disengaged employees only do enough to keep their job as they don’t feel connected to their organization or motivated to see it succeed. They may also be searching for another job in their spare time.
Highly disengaged employees may even try to derail their organization’s progress to get back at their employer for real or perceived injustices. For example, they may deliberately provide poor customer service to hurt the company’s revenue.
Several factors contribute to employee engagement, including:
- A fun and positive work culture
- Healthy communication that is transparent and clear
- Opportunities for personal and professional growth
- Supportive relationships with managers and peers
- Work-life balance
- Feeling recognized, valued, and appreciated
- Fair compensation, benefits, and rewards
Employee Engagement vs. Employee Satisfaction
While often used interchangeably, employee engagement and employee satisfaction are different. The former is a much broader concept.
Employee satisfaction just means that the employee is happy with their job. It doesn’t take into account how invested the employee is in their work and whether or not they’re willing to put in any extra effort for their organization.
Disengaged employees may feel satisfied with their job if it meets basic requirements, such as getting the paycheck on time, a good salary amount, good working conditions, job security, etc.
A key thing to note here is that a “disengaged yet satisfied employee” may put in the same amount of work as an engaged employee if they have a strong sense of duty.
But, unlike their engaged colleagues, this duty-bound individual may not have a sharp eye on the results.
Why?
It’s because there’s no strong connection with the organization … no deep desire to see it succeed.
On that note, let’s learn more about why workforce engagement is crucial for every organization.
Why Is Employee Engagement Important?
A company’s employees are its biggest asset. If it wishes to move forward, the majority of its workforce needs to be actively involved in company efforts. This can only happen if the employees are engaged.
There are several benefits of employee engagement, all leading to better business outcomes. These include:
Higher Productivity & ROI
Engaged employees are more productive in their everyday tasks and play a vital role in boosting revenue. Meanwhile, disengaged employees provide the exact opposite results.
Less Absenteeism
Engaged employees love their job, so they take fewer leaves and look forward to coming to work every day.
Less Turnover
Engagement increases job satisfaction and loyalty and reduces burnout and turnover.
Employee Well-Being
Engagement tools help employees to manage challenging tasks and situations effectively.. So, they face lower job-related stress and make minimal health/safety-compromising mistakes.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
An engaged and energetic customer support staff can effectively handle customer queries and grievances and even cross-sell/up-sell through the positive customer experiences they create.
Fewer Mistakes
Engaged employees make fewer mistakes. This provides different benefits based on the profession. For example, it can result in better patient safety, higher product quality, fewer instances of incorrect shipping, and so on.
Effective Leadership and Collaboration
Employee engagement makes workplace communication more efficient and fosters mutual respect, making for better collaboration and leadership.
Read: Best Leadership Assessment Tools in 2024
More Creativity and Innovation
If the majority of your employees are engaged, you can easily establish an atmosphere of creativity and innovation where employees brainstorm and share amazing ideas.
Brand Advocacy
Highly engaged employees shine a positive light on their organization whenever they talk about it. The free positive publicity they provide can attract new prospects and customers as well as quality job applicants.
Now that you know what employee engagement is and why it’s crucial, let’s learn how to improve, optimize and maintain it using online quizzes.
How to Improve Employee Engagement Using Online Quizzes
Online quizzes can be a simple, cost-effective, and impactful way to engage and energize your workforce. Here’s how:
Fun & Team Building
Where people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good work. – David Ogilvy #OgilvyCannes #CannesLions pic.twitter.com/hlJu1Qt2H1
— Ogilvy (@Ogilvy) June 24, 2016
Whether you conduct an exciting trivia contest or whimsical, BuzzFeed-style personality test, quizzes offer a lot of potential for creating memorable experiences for your employees so that they feel more connected to the organization.
You can let employees take quizzes individually or as teams. Either way, they’ll spark lively conversations about non-work-related things employees can bond over.
Your employee engagement quizzes can be a monthly event within a department, a fun way to start or end team meetings, or a part of your company’s HR team-building activities.
[ProProfs src=”https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/ugc/story.php?title=hollywood-trivia-quiz-template_1887l&id=3485296&ew=430″ width=”100%” height=”500″]
Quizzes are also especially useful for remote employee engagement. You can host employee engagement quizzes during virtual meet-ups and remote training sessions to inject fun into communication efforts.
You can create your fun employee engagement quizzes on various subjects, such as:
- Pop culture topics, such as movies, music, sports, fashion, etc.
- Information about the company, clients, employees, or field of work
- General knowledge about holidays, history, slogans, technology, etc.
- Personality quizzes
- Video/image-based quizzes
Related Read: 50+ Best Team Quiz Ideas to Try Out for Your Next Virtual Meet-Up
Here’s a video quiz you can conduct during in-person or virtual team meetings to find out which team member has the best attention to detail:
[ProProfs src=”https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/ugc/story.php?title=mzq5oda0mau2f6&id=3499241&ew=430″ width=”100%” height=”500″]
Watch: How to Make an Engaging Video Quiz
Besides making the workplace more fun, there’s another way quizzes can help in team building. You can conduct formative quizzes to help employees improve their communication and conflict management skills. This is especially helpful if you also have a learning management system on hand.
View Communication Skills Quizzes
💁Pro Tip💡
You can also use quizzes to identify employees’ communication and conflict management styles. When individuals know their conflict/communication style as well as their team members’ styles, it can boost collaboration effectiveness.
Read: How to Create a Conflict Management Style Quiz
Learning & Development
Continuous learning and career advancement opportunities are among the most important factors for employee engagement today.
Quizzes play a critical role in various stages of an employee training program. You can use quizzes to:
- Assess learning needs by conducting a pre-training assessment
- Track learning progress during training
- Make the training program more interactive and gamified
- Help learners understand concepts with instant feedback
- Measure the overall impact of the training program
- Boost knowledge retention by conducting refresher assessments
- Certify employees on in-demand skills
You can use quizzes to train employees on both hard and soft skills to help them in their personal and professional development.
Related Read: Employee Training Assessments Guide: Train Smarter to Boost ROI
Returning to the bar graph above, you’ll see that work-life balance is the most important factor for employee engagement.
Quizzes can help with this too. Using quizzes, you can help employees learn time, task, and stress management skills so they can maximize their efficiency and create the much-desired feeling of time affluence.
View Time Management Skills Assessment
💁Pro Tip💡
You can further streamline and empower your learning and development programs by providing employee training using an online learning management system. For example, ProProfs Training Maker lets you create highly effective training courses featuring interactive videos, quizzes, PPT presentations, surveys, and more.
Moreover, using this tool, you can leverage hundreds of professionally pre-designed courses, manage learners and course assignments using virtual classrooms, and set up an online learning community for your employees.
Most importantly, you can seamlessly train and engage your remote employees anytime, anywhere.
Watch: How to Train Remote Employees Effectively Using an Online LMS
Recruitment
One of the biggest reasons why many people feel disengaged at work is because they simply aren’t in the right role. You can steer clear of such situations by improving your hiring processes using quizzes.
For example, you can use quizzes to assess the skills and personality of job candidates to check if they have the abilities and mindset required for the job profile and fit well in your company’s work culture.
The insights you gain from such pre-employment assessments also make aligning newly hired remote employees to the right roles easier
Explore Pre-Employment Skill Assessments
How to Create an Assessment Quiz for Hiring or Training
Related Read: How to Use Online Testing to Change Your Recruitment Game
Onboarding
Policies & procedures, product knowledge, company culture, structure, mission & vision, values & ethics – new employees need to absorb boatloads of information during their onboarding. But if done right, this process can have a massive impact on employee engagement levels.
Quizzes can make your onboarding training more effective and less tedious. By testing knowledge and providing feedback, quizzes can help employees understand and retain information better while also providing much needed breaks to reflect and recharge.
They can also help reinforce your people-first culture!
Watch: How to Provide Effective Onboarding Training
The best quiz tools let you create visually appealing quizzes featuring images, videos, and various types of interactive questions. You can even add your logo, colors, and graphics to showcase your branding. All of this further contributes to improving the onboarding experience.
Watch: How to Choose the Best Online Quiz Tool
Work Culture & Leadership
Toxic work environments can cause stress, burnout, and mental health problems in employees, lowering their engagement levels and breeding resentment.
Quizzes can improve your work culture in various ways, such as:
- They can help you provide better employee training on work culture-related topics, such as diversity, equity & inclusion, workplace ethics, business etiquette, emotional intelligence, email etiquette, etc.
View Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Assessment
- By improving hiring and training, quizzes can help build a skilled human resources team capable of shaping and maintaining a positive work culture.
View Ethical Work Culture Course & Quiz
- Quizzes provide the ideal way to conduct leadership and management assessments for hiring or succession planning. This way, they help facilitate engaging and impactful leadership, which can have a tremendous positive effect on work culture and employee engagement.
View Leadership Skills Assessment
Related Read: What Is a Leadership Assessment & How to Conduct One
Another way quizzes help improve leadership and management is by helping managers better understand their subordinates via personality assessments.
Using personality assessment quizzes, managers can identify employees’ personality types, communication preferences, and conflict style, and find out how engaged they are.
They can then use this knowledge to make the employees feel more motivated, engaged, and inspired, build trust, and improve their connection with the team and the organization.
View Employee Personality Assessment
Health & Safety
Employee well-being and employee engagement have a reciprocal relationship. Engaged employees try their best to stay out of harm’s way and encourage others to do the same.
At the same time, all employees expect their organization to be firmly committed to their well-being. A company that doesn’t prioritize the health and safety of its workforce can never hope to engage them.
Quizzes can make it easier to establish a strong safety culture compliant with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards. You can use them to spread safety awareness, boost understanding and retention of concepts, and refresh knowledge of critical workplace safety topics.
View Safety & Compliance Assessments
Related Read: How to Create a Workplace Safety Quiz
Employee Surveys
Online quizzes can double as engaging surveys. Using quizzes, you can conduct employee surveys to measure employee engagement levels, understand reasons for employee disengagement, and find out what your workforce expects from you.
What’s more, if you’re creating fun employee engagement quizzes, you can use such survey quizzes to collect quiz topic ideas from the employees themselves.
💁Pro Tip💡
Besides sharing survey-style quizzes, you can also track employee engagement by conducting polls and net promoter score (NPS) surveys using an online survey tool such as ProProfs Survey Maker.
Survey Maker lets you build surveys quickly using hundreds of professionally-designed templates and 100k+ ready-to-use questions. You can ask survey questions in 20+ ways and easily make your surveys stand out by adding themes, images, and your brand logo.
Related Read: Employee Engagement Surveys: Everything You Need To Know
So those were the various ways to improve employee engagement using quizzes. But how can you create an engaging and effective quiz? Let’s quickly look at the process in the next section.
How to Create an Employee Engagement Quiz
Whether you’re creating a quiz for hiring, training, or just for fun, all it takes are a few easy steps to get it up and running using online quiz software. Let’s look at these steps taking ProProfs Quiz Maker as an example.
Step 1: Pick a quiz template or start from scratch
Choose from thousands of quiz/assessment templates to make your quiz in minutes, or start building your quiz from the ground up.
Step 2: Set up an attractive cover page
Add a compelling quiz title, description, and cover image/video to make your quiz more appealing and enhance employees’ quiz-taking experience. Here’s an example of a good cover page:
Step 3: Create or import questions
Create your questions from scratch or import them from the public quiz library containing over a million ready-to-use questions.
Make sure your question statements and answer options are clear and concise. Also, if you’re making a fun quiz, limit the number of questions to under ten.
💁Pro Tip💡
Ensure you have a good mix of question types in your quiz to make it more engaging. Also, include highly interactive question types, such as video-response, hotspot, drag-and-drop, order-the-list, and matching, and add images or videos to your questions/answer options.
Step 4: Automate grading & feedback
Step 5: Configure settings
Configure settings based on the type of quiz you’re creating.
For example, if you’re conducting a hiring or training assessment, you need to configure various security and anti-cheating settings, such as proctoring, password protection, tab switching prevention, copy/print prevention, shuffling, question pooling, etc. You may also want to add a time limit to the quiz.
Step 6: Customize the theme & results
Make your quiz visually appealing by adding a theme to it. You can choose from and customize a pre-built theme or design your own. You can also add your logo to the quiz.
When choosing or designing a theme, make sure your background image and colors align well with the topic of your quiz and/or your brand identity.
Besides customizing the various design elements of your quiz, you can also customize the results display, as shown below. Displaying upbeat, motivating results in a quiz is a surefire way to engage employees.
To take it up a notch, you can also add a custom certificate featuring your logo to the quiz results. You can set a passing score, expiry date, and automated reminders and notifications for the certification.
Awarding certificates is a great way to motivate learners and improve the outcomes of your training programs.
Watch: How to Automatically Award Custom Certificates to Quiz Takers
FAQs
How can I measure employee engagement with quizzes?
You can measure employee engagement with quizzes by conducting surveys or personality tests.
If you conduct a survey, you directly ask the employees how engaged they feel with questions such as “How likely are you to recommend this company?” or “Which of our organization’s values resonate most with you?”
If you conduct a personality test, you take a more indirect approach to employee engagement assessment with questions such as this one:
- How do you approach challenging tasks? (Select all that apply)
- a) I figure things out independently.
- b) I seek advice from colleagues or supervisors.
- c) I try to make the task more manageable by breaking it down into smaller steps.
- d) I tend to avoid or procrastinate on challenging tasks.
What are the best practices for employee engagement?
Here are the top employee engagement ideas and best practices:
- Conduct quizzes for team building
- Provide professional development opportunities
- Foster a positive work culture and competent leadership
- Prioritize health and safety
- Hire the right people for your organization
- Ensure role alignment
- Regularly conduct fun employee engagement activities
- Facilitate work-life balance
- Offer recognition and rewards
- Provide an excellent recruitment and onboarding experience
- Implement clear communication
Which tool is best for creating employee engagement quizzes?
The best tool for creating employee engagement quizzes is easy to use yet offers a great set of features and functionalities. Here are some features you should look for in a quiz tool:
- Ready-to-use templates and questions to speed up quiz creation
- DIverse question types
- Excellent customization options
- Robust security and anti-cheating functionalities
- Insightful reporting and analytics
- Automated certification program
- Easy options for sharing quizzes
- Quiz creation in multiple languages
Also, check out the best employee engagement software tools for increased retention.
Boost Employee Engagement With Quizzes
By now, you must have understood that quizzes can play a crucial role in employee engagement and the success of your business. They provide a uniquely effective way to improve employee experience, teamwork, leadership, and your hiring and training processes.
The best way to create effective engagement quizzes is to use online quiz software.
ProProfs offers a highly-intuitive quiz-making platform with 15+ question types, automated scoring, security & anti-cheating settings, advanced reporting, virtual classrooms, and much more.
It also comes with a massive quiz resources library containing 100+ professionally designed skill assessments and over a million ready-to-use questions so you can build amazing employee engagement quizzes in minutes.
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