How to Develop and Conduct Employee Surveys
Employee surveys should be regularly conducted by businesses to get insight into important issues including corporate culture and employee happiness. Surveys provide companies a better knowledge of how workers feel about the company, giving them useful information to enhance the working environment.
In order for organizations to gather the most data, identify important leaders, and provide insights that can be put into practice, we’ll look at designing, carrying out, and evaluating employee surveys.
Types of employee surveys
Depending on your objectives, different employee survey formats provide specialised information. Do you wish to gauge staff engagement, for instance? Do you desire the opinions of your staff on your corporate culture?
Here are a few standard employee questionnaires that might help you learn more about your business and staff.
Annual review survey:
This yearly survey is used to assess an employee’s overall performance. An successful performance review, the identification of areas for growth and improvement, the creation of a performance record, and the facilitation of a professional development path are the objectives.
Company culture survey:
This poll evaluates how closely a company’s actions adhere to its stated beliefs. Utilize the findings to enhance corporate strategy, leadership practices, and future financial commitments.
Employee engagement survey:
This poll gauges how highly appreciated workers believe they are by management and the company. Surveys of employee engagement are essential for lowering staff churn.
Employee satisfaction survey:
This study gauges how happy and in control the workforce feels. It may address concerns relating to work, such as workplace rules, contentment with one’s employment, pay, and perks.
Exit interview survey:
This survey should not be included in the employee’s personnel file since it is utilized after an employee departs your business. Utilize the findings from exit interviews to enhance your company, the precise job description, and the duties of the vacant position.
Management performance survey:
This survey is for management, although it is comparable to the yearly review survey. This survey is completed by workers to rate their bosses’ effectiveness. Enhancing internal communication and elevating leadership capability are the objectives.
Onboarding questionnaire
A new recruit receives this after being on boarded. Employees rate their overall satisfaction with the hiring and onboarding procedures in these polls of recent hires.
Pulse survey:
This survey gauges the health of a company and is quick to complete (it takes five minutes), frequent (it’s done once a week, once every few weeks, or once a month). Employees provide brief observations on issues such as duties, satisfaction, communication, and work environment.
Training survey:
Conduct a training survey after staff training to evaluate the program’s success. This will support the development of efficient staff training procedures.
360 survey:
This poll offers a thorough analysis of an employee’s performance. The survey is completed by the employee as well as multiple team members (managers, coworkers, and subordinates) to provide a 360-degree assessment of the person’s performance.
How to develop your employee survey
Planning is necessary in order to create an employee survey that produces useful findings. You’ll take into account a number of factors, such as subject, time, length, structure, and questions. To make sure you accurately assess your progress, you’ll also decide on a frequency plan, particularly for follow-up surveys.
Use the following five steps to create your staff survey:
1. Choose the employee survey topic.
Every survey has to have a clear focus and objective. It might be tempting to mix several survey questions regarding various facets of your company into one. Employees can get confused about the survey’s genuine objective as a consequence, and you might end up with ineffective findings. To be relevant to workers, survey questions should reflect the present state of affairs inside the organization.
2. Consider the timing of the employee survey.
Timing is crucial. Employees need to be encouraged to consider their current experiences in a wider context if surveys are to be developed effectively. Prepare corresponding questionnaires based on the events that are happening in your company that you wish to learn more about.
Franchise Business Review CEO Eric Stites stated surveys should be brief and timely while also giving workers time for reflection on particular events or experiences. Franchise Business Review conducts research on employee engagement and satisfaction.
In contrast to conducting the survey several weeks or months after the training event, when employees can better reflect on what they did and did not learn and how the training session could be improved, Stites told Business News Daily, “for example, if you have a day of employee training followed by an immediate training effectiveness survey, you will probably receive much higher ratings.”
3. Establish a length and frequency for employee surveys.
A survey might provide crucial information about your business. But it’s important to choose only a few survey kinds that are most relevant to your objectives and line of business. An yearly review, for instance, is probably not going to provide you with enough information about your business, and weekly pulse surveys may make you get survey fatigued.
The frequency of administering surveys and the ideal length of each survey must be carefully balanced.
A quarterly cadence of surveys, requiring no more than 10 minutes of employees’ time, can be ideal for promoting participation, preventing survey fatigue, and providing leadership with timely and useful information, according to Sarah Skerik, director of marketing at the employee engagement platform Engagement Multiplier.
The frequency of your staff surveys should, however, also take into account the present environment, such as the recent worldwide epidemic. Stites said that it’s essential to conduct staff surveys more regularly than the once-a-year average used in the past.
Small firms may benefit from shorter pulse surveys conducted on a weekly, biweekly, monthly, and quarterly basis, according to Stites. These surveys can also help organisations be much more flexible in addressing important growth opportunities and obstacles. And remember that employee surveys are crucial for managers and company owners as well as giving your staff a voice.
4. Choose employee survey questions that will yield actionable results.
Choosing the right questions is one of the key components of creating a successful employee survey. A core set of questions is included in certain surveys to allow for a direct comparison of development over time. Others have unique queries that are focused on current issues or occurrences.
Each question should only contain one variable in order to reduce misunderstanding (for example, avoid using the term “and”). Furthermore, it’s critical to ask questions that will provide useful feedback.
Your survey’s objectives will determine the precise questions you ask. Here are some starting points and resources for your consideration:
- 20 survey questions to ask to measure employee engagement
- 15 survey questions to ask to measure employee satisfaction
- 14 survey questions to ask to measure management performance
5. Select a format for the employee survey.
Choose the survey question format to use in order to get useful results for each survey. Multiple-choice employee surveys are useful for the majority of businesses because they provide consistent results that are simple to assemble and evaluate.
Open-ended question surveys are another option, albeit they may be more challenging to compile and utilize for useful data collection.
According to Skerik, Engagement Multiplier employs a hybrid strategy that combines scoring and encourages unstructured comments.
This method, according to Skerik, is especially effective for tracking organizational development over time while also making sure that pertinent suggestions and detailed criticism may be recorded. While we emphasize important topics in the written comments and utilize AI to gauge emotion, we also stress how crucial it is for leaders to personally analyse the survey data pertaining to their team.
How to conduct your employee survey
The following are some excellent practises to keep in mind while conducting your staff survey:
Clearly communicate its purpose to your team.
Find out the answers to the following queries: What does the survey want to achieve? What actions will be made as a result of the survey’s completion and analysis? What is the anticipated timetable for the events?
Encourage participation.
To get workers to engage in the activity, emphasise its goals and significance.
Emphasize anonymity.
Make it known that the staff survey is confidential. Employee responses to questionnaires that are anonymous are more truthful. You may utilise a partner or third-party system to carry out the survey in order to guarantee anonymity (e.g., SurveyMonkey, SurveySparrow, QuestionPro).
Share key findings.
What occurs after a survey is finished may be the most important factor in its success. For participation in future surveys, “sharing the survey’s major results in a timely manner is crucial,” said Stites. Better still, including workers in the action plans to address survey results promotes engagement and streamlines change management since they will feel like they are contributing to the solution.
For employee surveys to be as successful as possible, Engagement Multiplier developed a six-step process:
Explain results and themes.
Inform your staff of the survey’s findings and major topics.
Select action items.
Choose three survey findings that you can make meaningful progress on in a fair amount of time and present them to the team. This action could include establishing key performance indicators (KPIs).
Institute improvements.
Concentrate on enhancing those three areas and inform the team of your progress.
Assess the impact of changes.
Before re-surveying the team to get input on the effect of the changes, provide an end-of-quarter report.
Resurvey the team.
Take another poll of the workforce.
Rinse and repeat.
Follow the steps for ongoing development.
Importance of employee surveys
Employee surveys may reveal a lot about your business and its operations. Effective surveys provide information that may be used to grow your organization.
We listed the main advantages for businesses and workers to help you better understand how important employee surveys are:
1. Anonymous employee surveys give employees a voice.
Employee surveys provide the opportunity for workers to express their true feelings about what is going on inside the company, which is one of the most important advantages. Even while frequent check-ins might be useful for ongoing feedback, many workers are reluctant to express unfavourable comments out of concern for the consequences.
Anonymous surveys provide an opportunity for workers to be honest, which has an influence on various elements of your organisation, such as:
- Improving the working environment
- Fostering management that is more open and transparent
- Improved peer relationships
- Creating chances for long-term professional growt
According to Stites, “having a voice and the freedom to offer your unique opinion empowers workers and helps encourage self-worth, which has a big trickle-down impact on other employees and consumers.” “High customer and employee happiness and engagement contribute to the company’s financial success and, eventually, provide possibilities for people to progress financially and professionally.”
2. Surveys get your employees thinking critically.
Employees sometimes lose sight of long-term goals because they are so preoccupied with daily chores. According to Stites, well-crafted survey questions might prompt respondents to consider a scenario or experience in a broader context than they could in face-to-face interactions with supervisors and coworkers. The identification of important problems and their answers might come from this kind of critical thinking.
3. Surveys can improve employee performance and reduce turnover.
A well-designed employee survey, in Skerik’s opinion, may serve as an early-warning system for organisational issues. It may show when teams are losing their focus or when disengagement is beginning.
A well-done employee survey “gives the firm the truth about what’s actually happening in the organisation and what people are really thinking, and delivers insights executives otherwise wouldn’t have,” the author said.
Early detection of these internal problems allows team leaders to address them before they spiral out of control, increasing morale, performance, and retention among workers.
4. Surveys help identify key leaders.
Employee surveys may aid in identifying areas for development within your company as well as what – or who – is succeeding. For instance, high management performance surveys may reveal which managers are doing a fantastic job, and favourable employee engagement results can suggest effective leadership within that team. The efficiency of different leadership philosophies may also be assessed.
5. Surveys provide you with actionable next steps.
Employee surveys, when properly handled, may provide your company vital information about where to go next. According to Skerik, surveys should provide a comprehensive image of the company that is suited for various management levels.
She remarked, “senior leaders need to be able to understand the larger picture.”Team managers and department chiefs should be able to examine the comments from their respective jurisdictions.”
Team leaders may use this input to develop an action plan to fix issues and keep using the tactics that are effective. You may get a clear picture of where your business is and where you want it to go by regularly polling your workers (and keeping track of the findings).
Build and grow from your employees’ feedback
You may believe that as a small company owner, increasing client happiness is your top responsibility in order to increase sales. That is accurate, yet it only gives half of the story. When your staff members are happy, they’ll work harder and be more involved, which will result in better output. And that’s a route to happy customers. You may grow internally before expanding outside by conducting staff surveys.
