Your employees play a crucial part in the success of your business, and measuring their happiness can provide valuable insight into potential areas of improvement within your business. Staff turnover can be costly and disruptive to your team, so you should always be looking at ways to retain and attract valuable employees.
What is an employee satisfaction survey?
An employee satisfaction survey addresses the basic concerns and needs of employees by determining how content your employees are with their jobs and workplace.
Numerous factors can impact employee satisfaction, including workload, teamwork, flexibility, perceptions of management, compensations, and resources.
Sometimes employees may not feel comfortable speaking up, but an online survey gives them the opportunity to share their opinion. Online surveys may encourage employees to be more honest, compared to in-person interviews.
Employee satisfaction surveys provide information you can use to build a positive work environment and fix any problems perceived by employees.
Why you should do an employee satisfaction survey
The happiness of your employees is important to the success of your business, as increased satisfaction leads to increased productivity.
Employees that are satisfied and supported in their role are more likely to go above and beyond for their employer. They are likely to stay with the same employer for years if given opportunities to grow within their role and take on new challenges and responsibilities that progress their career development.
Without employee satisfaction, your business may see high turnover of staff, and poor workplace culture.
Evaluating employee satisfaction gives you the opportunity to figure out what you could be doing to improve the happiness of your employees. This can boost employee engagement, leading to increased productivity.
If you take the time to send your employees a survey, don’t let their insights go to waste. Use the insights gained to make improvements to your business and employee happiness.
How to create an employee satisfaction survey
Creating an employee satisfaction survey does not need to be complex. With the right survey software you can easily create, distribute, and manage your employee surveys.
Avoid using corporate language in your surveys, try to keep the language more conversational to put employees at ease when answering questions. Using complex language also requires more effort from participants, and they may spend less time providing well-thought-out answers.
To get the most out of your employee satisfaction survey, you need to ask the right questions.
Ask questions around how employees feel about company culture, management, and the team, whether they have what they need to properly do their job and are provided with opportunities for career development, and if they feel their contributions are valued. These types of questions can be good indicators as to the satisfaction of employees and whether they are thinking of moving on to new opportunities elsewhere.
Use scale rating questions to gauge how satisfied employees are with their role and how happy they are with the workplace. It can also be a good idea to allow for employees to expand on their answers with optional text boxes following each question.
In order to receive honest feedback, you may want to make the survey anonymous so that employees feel more comfortable providing truthful feedback, especially if it’s negative.
Keep employee satisfaction surveys focused and clear, and only ask questions that allow you to measure satisfaction of employees. Survey data will be used to drive change within your organisation, which is why it’s a good idea to do employee satisfaction surveys regularly to stay on top of employee attitudes within your business.
Make sure to follow up
If after receiving data from your employee satisfaction survey you implemented some changes, it’s important to follow up with another survey to see if those changes have improved employee satisfaction. Following up can increase levels of participation, as employees will see that their responses are being acted on and that their feedback is valued.
When sending a new employee survey, compare the data received to that of the last employee satisfaction survey to see where improvements have happened, or if the same issues are still coming up and need to be re-addressed.
