Employee Survey
The employee survey is an instrument utilized by companies to determine the level of employee engagement and assess employee attitudes toward their work environment. There is a direct correlation between positive results in employee surveys and company success. If you truly have an engaged workforce, you will have a highly productive company. Therefore, the effort a company initiates by conducting an employee survey will provide valuable insight on what the company is doing right, what the company needs to stop doing and what the company needs to continue doing to be successful.
If you conduct employee surveys over a period of time, you will be able to measure the improvements of your company.
There are many benefits for having an employee survey that will improve company results. The following are a few reasons to conduct a survey:
- Improve employee communications. Creating a two-way sharing of information.
- Improve employee relations by showing the employee that the company values their input. This usually results in a direct correlation in employee retention.
- Increase the trust level of employees with the company. If the survey is kept confidential, employees will trust the company if they act on the results.
- Provides you with advance notice of any workforce problems. For example, you could determine if certain leadership is creating morale issues in the workplace.
- Ensures that the existing initiatives to improve employee morale is really working. For instance, is the company picnic (which cost the company a great deal of money) really valued or dreaded each year?
- Identify team issues between different departments.
- Focused approach to improve the company. It will show which areas in the company need to be improved.
- Increase customer satisfaction. Happy and engaged employees usually means happy customers.
In essence, an employee survey is a catalyst for discussion for later focus groups. The critical part when conducting an employee survey is to not just respond to the numerical results. If you believe you can take a raw number from a survey and take action on that number, you could be making a serious mistake. Why?
- Depending on the comprehension levels of the individual, they could misinterpret the question.
- If the survey is too long you could have employees just checking boxes to get through the survey.
- Poor participation could provide an inadequate representation from certain departments within the company.
- Could have a negative result on a question and the corrective action could be something the employee doesn’t care about.
Having a trained facilitator conducting focus groups on the survey results will allow you to consolidate and prioritize what is the true issue. Initially, utilizing someone outside the company is critical until the trust level is built between employees and the company on the confidentiality of the information being shared. An alternate approach would be to have the Human Resources department conduct the focus groups since they typically remain neutral. Employees will need to trust the company not to use the focus groups to identify and eliminate alleged troublemakers within the workforce.
Employee surveys can be internally designed or purchased. Surveys created internally allow you to focus solely on your company. Surveys created by a third-party also save time and usually allow you to compare your company results against the competition.
The most effective surveys ask questions which will lead to corrective actions that improve employee engagement and company performance. For example, in it’s Q2 Engagement Survey, Gallup examined a dozen questions that measure employee engagement that are directly linked to business outcomes such as retention, profitability, customer engagement and safety.
The following is a sample of those questions.
- Do you know what is expected of you at work?
- Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work properly?
- Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
- Do your opinions seem to count?
- Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel that your job is important?
- In the past year, have you had the opportunities at work to learn and grow?
These types of questions will give you a feel of the power and impact a survey can have on your company.
As a final note on the actual survey, I highly recommend that you have a spot at the end of the survey where employees can provide additional input about themes that were not brought up in the actual survey that could bring to light additional issues.
Once the survey has been analyzed and focus groups developed, it is important to summarize the data into a few action items. You want to be able to address the issues to show your employees that you value their input and that it is important to the company.
You need to remember that not every issue in the survey or the result of a focus group can be addressed. If you focused on every issue, you would lose focus on running the company. However, if the company prioritizes the issues and communicates to the employees what, why and how things are being addressed; employees will buy into the survey process. When you address concerns brought forth by either the direct result of the survey or the follow up focus groups, important issues can be solved, leading to increased engagement levels overall and increased participation in future survey efforts. To summarize, survey results should be used to strategically determine where and how to focus resources to maximize your return on this investment. Ultimately, the survey will create a data-based approach to planning your company’s engagement strategy.
The tendency when conducting your initial survey is to over promise and under deliver. This will create distrust from your employees. Make sure during the implementation planning process that you have an adequate budget to address the issues.
As a final note, do not plan your next survey until you have implemented all your corrective actions from the initial survey. The momentum from communicating all the corrective actions to your employees should ensure the success of future surveys.
Employee surveys are a strong tool to improve employee engagement and corresponding success of your company. It gives you a blueprint to build a better culture for your workforce which inevitably provides a better bottom line against your competition.