How to Run an Effective Employee Survey

Any company that wants to stay competitive and achieve excellent results should care about the corporate culture. Owners and management teams should get an insight into what is going on in the workplace. This helps to keep employees motivated, productive, and efficient, and the business grows!

Employee surveys are one of the tools HR managers use to solve the task of measuring employee satisfaction. But are employee surveys effective? What are the best practices for conducting them? These are the topics we will cover today.

Why do companies run surveys?

There are multiple benefits of conducting employee surveys. Here are the two biggest ones:

• Surveys provide an understanding of the workplace. Asking employees their opinion on how they evaluate some decisions made within the office often gives insight into what things people dislike, frictions in the business processes, and productivity growth points.
• Increased retention. When people don’t like something about the job, but nobody cares, they leave at some point. This can be harmful to the business, so regular surveys help identify problems and fix them, preventing employees from burning out or finding a new place for a fresh start.

Types of employee surveys

There are multiple forms and ways companies conduct employee surveys. First, surveys can be divided into groups by their regularity: weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly surveys can show global trends or highlight recent issues. Also, the goal of the study may vary; there are:

Surveys for measuring employee engagement

Engagement is the term that refers to the level of enthusiasm employees have with the company. An engagement survey aims to measure how motivated team members are and identify their likelihood of staying with the organization in the long run.

So, such surveys usually include questions that refer to the emotional connection, what things motivate employees, and what lets them down. Knowing the factors that affect motivation is crucial to keep employee engagement and retention at a high level.

Employee satisfaction surveys

Surveys of this type focus on how content employees are with their jobs. To solve the task, such surveys usually include questions on the satisfaction with compensation, workload, teamwork and culture, work/life balance, relations with management and other team members, etc.

Employee experience survey

These surveys can be dedicated to measuring the overall experience of the specific group of people like candidates going through the series of interviews, new hires that are asked to evaluate the onboarding process, exit surveys are for those leaving the company to collect some valuable feedback when there are no practical reasons to be silent about the problems.

Employee performance appraisal surveys

PA surveys focus on employee appraisal is one of the main tools in human resource management. We evaluate an employee before he or she becomes our employee, but after the employee is hired, the evaluation process only begins and should be performed periodically throughout the employment period. In general, it’s one of the most important surveys in the company HR processes.

Employee exit surveys

In most companies surveys directed at employees are already a standard, exit and stay interviews are still not so popular. And they should, because these are simply surveys directed not to current, but former employees. The exit interview questionnaire is directed to all employees who end their cooperation with your company — it should be sent to them after the termination of the contract.

Employee feedback surveys

In general, this type of survey helps HR managers to know what your employees think to be successful in managing your business. Measuring employees' opinions (including job satisfaction) allows those responsible for HR policy to focus on the areas that need improvement in the first place. Thanks to employee feedback surveys, it is often possible to identify the cause of rotation or communication problems in one of the departments.

Employee onboarding survey

These surveys can be the process of adapting an employee in a company usually lasts from three to six months. The employer himself is largely responsible for the pace of the process. A great way to verify the degree of acclimatization both in the team and in the industry is to conduct an adaptation survey.

What can go wrong

Surveys are beneficial for the business, but you should also understand that this tool will give no practical value if used wrong. There are common problems preventing companies from unlocking the full potential of employee surveys.

Employees tend to avoid taking surveys as something that does not directly relate to the job. There are multiple reasons for such behavior:

• People do not believe taking the survey will help to fix anything.
• They do not know whether the survey is anonymous or not; nobody wants to tell bad things about business processes that people developed them to read.
• Employees perceive surveys as a waste of time and something they will not get any reward for.

How to increase the participation rate

Boosting participation rates is not an easy task, but there are ways of solving it. Here are the steps to follow:

Communicate the value and focus the survey

The goal of the survey should be clear to employees. If people do not understand how their answers will be used and is there any real impact, they won’t be motivated enough to spend their time. Also, it is a good idea to communicate the main and only goal of the survey. Focusing on the main thing helps to improve the participation rate.

Name your surveys properly so that everyone understands the goal. Use BrainyHR to do this

Reward participation

If you need your people to share their feedback, then use some incentives! Reward those who’ve participated in the survey. BrainyHR combines surveys and rewards, and team members can earn bonus points for taking surveys. This significantly increases employee engagement and make survey reports more relevant and complete.

Provide anonymity options

As said above, if there is negative feedback, people might not want to share it publicly. But if nobody will ever know who exactly described the problem, the barrier falls. Anonymous surveys have two sides: on the one hand, they provide much more valuable data; from the other, the truth may be ugly and shocking.

Anonymous survey

It is your decision whether you want it or not, but the fact is that anonymity increases participation.

Final thoughts

BrainyHR is a tool that helps companies to run surveys that provide insights and data. However, to make surveys effective, you need to use collected insights in real life.

Running a survey is like a promise to react and fix issues employees are facing. If this is the case, surveys will become very useful in making business processes polished and flawless and boosting employee morale and satisfaction.