Employee Opinion Surveys

You can survey employee satisfaction with an annual employee survey to determine how satisfied an employee is in their role and how invested they are in the organization. The survey can be anonymous and conducted once a year or more frequently so you can get a consistent set of results over time. The questions should be directly related to employee morale. For example, you could investigate employees' opinions on their management and performance, benefits, service, training, and development opportunities. It's important the questions are clear and straightforward so that the survey is easy to understand and complete.

A satisfaction survey should center on three focus areas - company culture, management, and the job itself. With regards to company culture, a survey should establish whether employees feel connected to their colleagues and the company values. What aspects of the company culture do they get behind or relate to the most? Do they feel comfortable with the company culture or are there things that don't sit well with them? In relation to management, do they feel heard and valued by management? How well do staff feel that their managers accept feedback or how available do they believe their managers are? Is communication from management clear, timely, and respectful? With regards to the job itself, how supported do staff feel in carrying out their work? Is their workload manageable and fair? Do employees find their work meaningful? Do they have the tools and resources they need to do the job? Is there adequate professional development? Do employees have the opportunities for advancement they desire? Are they using their skills and abilities? Are job responsibilities clearly defined?

A satisfaction survey should be well designed and concentrate on questions that staff can answer about specific, observable behaviors based on their own firsthand experiences. There should be some questions that can be compared with actual facts or statistics and the questions should be directly linked to that employee's performance as opposed to assessing staff's general knowledge of the company.

Like any tool, a satisfaction survey is only truly effective if it has been well designed and executed. Our surveys are tailored to your organization to make sure we're asking the right questions to get the kind of honest, constructive feedback you're after, which can be a game-changer for clients. Surveys are great predictors of behavior, so if an employee indicates they're likely to consider leaving in the next 3 years, that's probably what will happen. Even if employees don't respond to the survey at all, that's an indicator of an employee on their way out of the door. At Facebook, they discovered that people who don't fill out either of the 2 annual employee surveys are 2.6 times more likely to leave within the next six months.

Highly engaged teams are 21% more productive than teams with low engagement, so it's worthwhile using surveys to explore employees' opinions on engagement to be able to address any potential weaknesses and empower staff to do their best work. To heighten the impact of employee surveys, you could combine the surveys with other tools such as focus groups and suggestion boxes to derive further feedback. These kinds of tools are great at giving staff an opportunity to express their views and helping the organization understand their experiences. And in fact, surveys are only going to become more important over time since big data can better help ascertain what matters most to people.

For companies to get honest answers out of a satisfaction survey it's, of course, necessary that respondents are open and truthful. Employees are often concerned that questions around demographics such as questions about salary levels and departments will give away their anonymity, however, the purpose of these questions is to analyze trends among various segments of employees. If there is a group of employees expressing a similar sentiment, this is a key piece of information for a company's leaders to take action on.

If employees are concerned about repercussions for expressing honest opinions, it can be worthwhile for a third party to speak with employees about any concerns they have, rather than dealing with the employer directly.

If issues or concerns arise with any particular manager or member of staff, it's important a company handle these issues sensitively to maintain trust with staff to give honest feedback in surveys. If staff feel insecure that their manager will know their identity from their responses and that there'll be negative repercussions for that employee, then it's very difficult for companies to obtain accurate data from employee opinion surveys.

When analyzing feedback, employers should assess the survey answers which have the greatest impact on job satisfaction. Some HR teams look at the questions which had the weakest performance, but the weakest performing questions aren't always most strongly correlated to engagement, so focus on the areas that are most related to job satisfaction, even if they are not the very weakest response.

Because different parts of the organization operate differently, from location to location or team to team, an overall average result might not be the most accurate analysis. You need to segment your results based on the demographics that make sense for your organization. This allows you to develop more targeted improvement plans.

Leadership participation is critical in the process of an employee survey. A survey is useless if leaders don't follow up with their team and use the survey results to address feedback on their team. There's no room for managers to be defensive. If there's no follow-through from management, engagement is likely to drop even more.

To motivate managers to handle survey results appropriately and implement improvement plans based on the results, companies could make the employee engagement score a KPI for managers to drive their accountability. It's also important to provide resources for managers to develop the appropriate follow-through such as articles or training which can demonstrate for managers how to move forward.