Surveying employees can be precious for your business. On
Do you know if your employees feel satisfied with their job, benefits, company culture, pay, coworkers or any other aspects of their employment? If you don’t know the answer, it’s probably a good idea to consider finding out. There are a number of reasons why you should survey your employees. Employee engagement surveys can give you important insight into your company and what your employees think. Any leader who wants to create a happier, more productive and more successful work environment should survey their employees. Discover why you should survey your employees and what types of surveys you should send.
Identify Employee Satisfaction
One of the top reasons why you should survey your employees is to identify employee satisfaction in the workplace. With an employee-satisfaction survey question, you can discover what aspects your employees enjoy about their job and which aspects they don’t like. The suitable employee survey question will also tell you if an employee doesn’t feel challenged enough at work or if they would like to take on responsibility. You can choose to make your employee satisfaction survey anonymous or allow your employees to enter their names so HR can help each employee individually. Don’t forget to include a staff-satisfaction survey and allow all employees to express their thoughts.
You can also ask your employees how they feel about your company culture, if they like your health benefits, PTO policy, work environment, or anything else to which you want to know the answers. The survey might tell you that your employees love having a half-day on Fridays during the summer.
If possible, you could use this information to make every Friday a half-day to improve employee satisfaction. You might not know this information had it not been for your employee satisfaction survey. Use employee satisfaction surveys to see how your company is doing and how you can make life better for your employees.
Give Your Employees a Voice
It’s one thing to announce to your employees during a meeting that you care about how they’re doing, but it’s another thing to actually give each employee a voice as a way to solicit feedback that you can use to make changes.
An employee satisfaction questionnaire is a great way to see what you can do to improve the workspace and make it more pleasant for everyone. That is why expressions such as “great place to work survey” are more and more used to describe this type of survey. Besides that, you can enhance your working atmosphere by conducting some of the following similar examinations:
- Employee motivation questionnaire
- Staff satisfaction survey
- Employee opinion survey
- Employee feedback survey
- Employee pulse survey
- Employee benefits survey
- Onboarding surveys
When you give your employees a voice through employee surveys, you are showing them how much you care, which can increase the loyalty they feel toward you. You can increase your employee loyalty even more if you actually create changes based on the feedback you received from employee surveys.
We have mentioned that an employee engagement questionnaire can give you essential insight into your company and what your employees think. Here, you can see employee engagement survey question examples. Read how to write survey questions to make the greatest employee experience possible.
When you help your employees feel more loyal to your company, this increases their job satisfaction, which helps them become more motivated, more productive, and less likely to move on. If you want to have a low turnover rate, giving your employees a voice through an employee questionnaire is a great place to start.
Use Survey Results to Drive Growth and Change
If you send your employees a survey and the majority of the responses indicate that you don’t give them the support or technology they need to complete their job, smart managers will use these responses to launch an investigation to find out more details about why their current technology doesn’t work. They can then start researching new technologies that will work better for their employees. Once they pick one, they can send a follow-up survey to employees to see if the new technology has helped them perform better at work.
Surveys give you the evidence you need to make certain investments in your company. Without a survey, you might not have known that your employees need the new technology. In the long run, your company could waste millions of dollars on labor that better technology could easily replace.
Your employee survey might also tell you that your employees are unhappy with their strict work schedules. You could implement a more flexible work schedule to give your employees a better work/life balance and help them feel happier at work.
Gather Data Easily and Track it Over Time
One reason why companies feel hesitant about conducting employee surveys is that they think it’s time-consuming to distribute and then analyze the surveys. With SurveyPlanet, creating a survey is easy. We even have pre-made templates for you to choose from. From there, you can just send your entire employee contact list a link to the survey and they can take it. Best of all, your results are digital, so you don’t have to keep track of answers on paper and import them into a digital format. Creating your survey and analyzing it is easy when it’s in one place.
Not only can you gather data easily, but you can track your data over time to see how certain aspects of your company have improved. It’s important to see if the changes you’ve implemented have paid off. It’s also important to know when your employees feel overworked or when you need to address other problems. You can look at each survey overtime on an individual basis to see how an employee has changed their answers over time. This will tell you if your employee is going in the right direction or if you need to interfere and redirect them somewhere else. You can even chart your employee’s progress over time with regular surveys.
Learn More About Manager-Employee Relationships
Do you know how well your employees get along with their superiors? They might smile at each other in the hallway as a friendly courtesy, but if your managers aren’t giving your employees the support they need, you need to address it. One of the top reasons an employee leaves their job is because they don’t get along with their boss. You can prevent this situation by giving your employees an anonymous survey that discusses their relationship with their manager.
It’s important to keep these surveys anonymous so that your employees can provide a more honest response. If you send a survey out to the entire company and discover that 90% of employees from a certain department dislike their boss, this is a huge sign that you need to talk to that manager immediately. Surveys about manager and employee relationships can tell you when you need to provide managers with training on their areas of weakness or how to communicate better with their team. The survey might also indicate if you need to replace the manager or move them to a different position.
No matter how tough a decision might be, an employee survey can provide you with the necessary data to make that decision.
Compare Departments
Giving your employees surveys can also help you compare departments to one another. If accounting has nothing but great things to say about their boss but sales said their boss is the least friendly person on the planet, this can tell you where you need to direct your attention.
On the other hand, if your marketing department always feels overworked and stressed but your IT department says they don’t have enough work to fill their schedule, this can indicate that your marketing department needs to grow while your IT department might benefit from a downsize.
You can compare a lot of different factors between departments like stress levels, job satisfaction, flexibility, management, coworkers, technology and much more. You might discover that employees in a certain department feel unhappy at their jobs compared to the rest of the company. Use this data to make improvements and help your employees feel happier at work.
How Often You Should Conduct Employee Surveys
The frequency you send employee surveys relies heavily on the subject matter. Some surveys make sense to send once a quarter and others make sense only to send one a year. If the survey is about employee benefits, it’s probably best to send this once a year, before you choose your new health insurance plan. On the other hand, sending job satisfaction types of surveys every quarter can help you see stress levels and satisfaction throughout the year. Choose a frequency that makes sense for comparisons later. You also have to remember not to bombard your employees with dozens of surveys to take every month. You might even benefit from creating a survey that combines multiple subjects.
If you’re ready to learn more about your employees, their needs and what areas of your company need improvement, create your own employee survey with SurveyPlanet today. Choose from one of our templates or create your own. With unlimited surveys, questions and responses, the possibilities are endless. Sign up for an account to get started!
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