Keys to crafting an effective employee survey
Keys to crafting an effective employee survey
BoomPop Team · 5/17/2022
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Employee surveys are the most powerful tool for businesses to check the pulse of their organization. Here are the factors that go into designing effective employee surveys.
Your employees are the heart of your organization. So, how often are you checking in with them to make sure there aren’t irregularities? According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace, only 20% of the global workforce felt engaged in 2020. Sure, we can attribute that to the pandemic, but only 22% of the global workforce felt engaged in 2019.
Consider what it would mean for your business if only 1 in 5 employees truly feel engaged at work; it’s no secret that employee disengagement has a direct impact on business performance, retention, and overall workplace culture.
The good news is that you have a simple, effective tool at your disposal to check the pulse of your organization: employee surveys.
Why you should conduct employee surveys
Employee surveys are a useful way to gather insight into what’s important to your employees and make them feel heard, whether they’re new to the company or have been there for years. If your employees don’t feel appreciated or if they can’t see a direct connection between their role and your organization’s purpose, they’ll quickly disengage.
Although employee surveys have been around for decades, they don’t always give a holistic view of the employee experience. So, it’s important to perform different employee surveys with varying goals to understand current levels of engagement & satisfaction, employees’ perception of leadership, and their understanding of their impact on the business.
Types of employee surveys
Depending on the goal and timing, there are a few different common varieties of employee surveys. Here are five of the most common employee surveys.
Onboarding & exit interview surveys
Onboarding surveys give employees an opportunity to rate their overall experience with the recruiting and onboarding process. This will also open that line of communication and make them feel invested in the company from the start. On the flip side, the exit survey can help improve your organization and the specific role that’s being vacated.
Employee engagement surveys
Employee engagement surveys are one of the most critical types to help reduce employee turnover. An effective survey will help you understand what helps your employees feel engaged or disengaged with their work and their emotional state. The focus of an engagement survey is how employees feel about your organization and leadership.
Employee satisfaction surveys
While employee engagement surveys tap into the broader areas, employee satisfaction surveys go into more specific factors like compensation, employee benefits, job satisfaction, company policies, and other work-related issues.
Management performance surveys
We’re all familiar with annual review surveys where employees receive feedback about their job performance and how they can improve, while creating a historical record of their performance that affects promotions and compensation. Management performance surveys are like the annual review survey, but the focus is on leadership. These surveys give employees an opportunity to evaluate how they feel their management is performing.
Pulse surveys
Life moves pretty fast and so do the factors affecting your employee satisfaction & engagement. Pulse surveys are short and frequent surveys that regularly measure the health of your organization.
How to design an effective employee survey
If you’re wondering why you have low participation on your employee surveys, there’s a simple answer: You’re not putting in the time and effort required to create effective employee surveys. Just like any business initiative, creating employee surveys requires a detailed project plan and strategy with defined goals and metrics.
Not all employee surveys are created equal and they should apply to your organization’s specific needs. If you’re a startup, you’ll focus on different goals than a company with 50,000 employees. A company with a remote workforce around the globe will have different goals than a brick-and-mortar small business. Here are the factors that go into effective employee surveys across the board.
Purpose: Each survey should have one primary theme to give you clear and actionable data, with questions that will result in feedback that you can act upon. A survey with multiple themes will also confuse employees, affecting the quality of their answers. Some themes you can explore are career progression, business alignment, employee engagement, and wellbeing.
Simplicity: Your employees’ time is valuable, so to boost participation rates, keep the survey simple and relevant to them. Also take the survey type into consideration. A pulse survey will be shorter than an employee engagement survey.
Anonymity: Emphasize the anonymity of submitted information to encourage honest answers.
Format: Will it be multiple choice, open-ended, or a mixed format? The answer to this question depends on the goal of each survey.
Questions: You want accurate, actionable responses, so avoid questions that are full of jargon, too demanding, or too difficult to answer.
What to do with employee survey results
The real work begins after you’ve gathered the data from employee surveys, which is why it’s important to identify the goal for each survey. Once you’ve gone through the data to understand the results, there are two things you need to do:
Share the results with your employees. When you’re sharing the results with your employees, don’t just dump a bunch of data points on a slide. Instead, use the data to tell a story to create an emotional impact and motivation.
Create an action plan. Employee surveys help leadership identify areas for improvement, increase employee engagement, and create a positive workplace culture. The action plan is a critical step to the survey process. If the purpose of a survey was to understand how employees feel about their career progression, an action plan can include evaluating professional development opportunities and implementing leadership training.
Keep a finger on the pulse
Your employees want to be heard and understood. They want to feel engaged and satisfied in their work. But remember that employee engagement is just as complex as the individuals you work with every day.
It’s critical to keep a finger on the pulse of employee morale and motivation, and employee surveys continue to be the most powerful tool.
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