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Did you know that 88% of employees don’t have passion for their work? Even worse is the impact employee disengagement has on economy: employee disengagement costs more than $500 billion per year to the U.S. economy alone. Knowing all of this, I ask you, “What can your business do to address this major disengagement issue?” Start with listening to your employees. By receiving honest feedback from employees, you can quickly determine what it takes to engage them. You’ll be aware of what your workforce is unhappy about as well as what they value most when it comes to working for your company. The best way to receive honest feedback from employees is through employee surveys.
Company-wide employee surveys are a valuable use of HR technology, and their results can yield important benefits for employee happiness and company transparency. Furthermore, with increasing emphasis on pulse surveys, companies have greater access to real-time metrics pertaining to employee engagement. Here are a handful of helpful tips for what you should look for when you’re putting together a survey for your employees.
1. Open-ended questions
When you’re measuring employee engagement, it’s best to leave room for employees to elaborate on specifics pertaining to their survey response. Human Resources (HR) professionals need to hear about the details that make up worker safety and wellness, so it’s helpful to include some open-ended inquiries such as, “What can the company do to increase employee success?” With open-ended questions in your employee surveys, people get the opportunity to voice their opinion without any restrictions or influences.
2. Anonymity
You’re aiming for 100 percent participation in your employee engagement survey, and as leadership author Bob Herbold points out, anonymity is the best way to assure this. Quality HR technology software increases employee accountability by making sure that everyone has participated, while at the same time keeping individual responses private. It can also be useful in some cases to tailor the content of each survey to individual departments.
3. Individual analytics for each topic
Many companies are looking to quickly institute their survey initiative, resulting in a survey that is narrow in its scope. According to USC research scientist Alec Levenson , this mistake can have major consequences when tallying the results of employee surveys. Typically, it exists when a company aims for simplicity by averaging each person’s responses into one single index number. Levenson explains that this number ends up being meaningless because it doesn’t lead to actionable insights. For this reason, it’s essential that each surveyed topic be analyzed separately.
4. An action plan
Of course, when you give out an employee survey, you’d like to see nothing but glowing praise and complete employee alignment with your organization’s mission and values. In the real world, however, you’re going to hear from some team members who are less than thrilled with the status quo. Research on surveying shows that 48 percent of disengaged employees say that they “would stay with a company that asks them what they want and puts that feedback into action.” Don’t forget that the main reason behind pushing out an employee survey is to discovers areas your business can improve on to boost employee engagement and happiness. Make sure to include questions about employee engagement that you are truly willing to address which will help course correct your company culture onto the right path.
5. Professional expertise
Partnering with a professional survey provider yields numerous benefits and will yield a strong ROI in your employee retention and employee transparency numbers. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, Monster.com points out that experts in the survey field can give you valuable benchmarking data for your industry. It’s helpful to know where you stand with respect to your competition.
Start utilizing employee surveys
The next time you decide to send a company-wide employee survey out, consider our list of five things to consider when crafting effective employee surveys. Instituting regular employee surveys is the best way to create a responsive work culture. With regular feedback being provided by your employees, you’ll have the opportunity to quickly address any negative aspects of your company culture. This in turn will help in recruiting and hiring top talent, thus ensuring your company’s long-term financial health.
Are you ready to listen to your employees? Get started with Achievers Listen, the future of employee engagement. Achievers Listen allows employees to provide feedback to management on day-to-day issues via check-ins and pulse surveys, and lets front-line supervisors track trends through manager alerts. Also included with Achievers Listen is Allie, an intelligent, digital “coach” that interacts with employees in a familiar conversational way, while guiding employees with effective feedback and providing recommendations back to managers.
