Employee Satisfaction Surveys: Benefits and How to Get Them Right

A study by Gallup found that organisations with engaged employees deliver 50% higher sales, 50% higher customer loyalty, and 38% above-average productivity.  Hence it might be surprising to you that most companies mess up on understanding employee satisfaction and analysing it. The reason is a lack of clear understanding of how to track this.

A happy employee is able to achieve satisfaction in their work, performs well, deals with ad-hoc situations without panic, and is able to contribute to a positive work culture. To find out if your employees are actively engaged or just simply doing 9 to 5, employee satisfaction surveys are a great tool. Employee satisfaction surveys aid in gathering feedback and assessing the ground reality about the work culture and environment.

A major part of the responsibility of ensuring employee engagement and satisfaction is shouldered by managers and team leaders. Employee satisfaction surveys help in evolving and growing team building strategies, provide honest feedback about previous interventions, identify needs, and help organisations make informed decisions to boost overall employee satisfaction and happiness.

Benefits of Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Builds trust and transparency

Trust and transparency are two pillars for open conversations. Satisfaction surveys give employees a channel to voice their concerns. Periodic employee satisfaction surveys allow the employees to be honest, communicate clearly, and adopt growth and change. After all, to get the best out of your employees, you need to earn their trust. And it will only happen if they are heard.

Provides real time insights

Employee satisfaction surveys provide immediate insights into, and help in evaluating the impact of, previous interventions. Through such surveys, management can evolve their decision-making process and plan interventions that will bring in effective results. Managers should not commit the fallacy of presuming they know their employees completely. A proper feedback-collection mechanism is critical for understanding and engaging employees.

Identifies areas for improvement

Using tools like employee engagement and satisfaction surveys, management is able to step into the employees’ shoes and use that perspective to implement customised solutions. Information gathered from the employees can be used to create a gratifying employee experience, thus increasing happiness and overall increased efficiency.

Provides an action-driven approach

Employee satisfaction surveys pave the way for an action-driven approach. The deeper the information gathered from the employees, the higher the chances of hitting the bullseye. Periodic and well-crafted employee satisfaction surveys reduce trial and error, allowing managers to make well-informed and tailored decisions. And the price that organisations would pay by not ensuring employee satisfaction is very high.

How to Get Employee Satisfaction Surveys Right

Now that we know the importance of employee satisfaction surveys, it's crucial that we get it right. To ensure honest responses, reliable information and effective interventions. Because while the use of an employee satisfaction survey is supposed to give you insights and help you make informed decisions, it can only happen if you have a tool that is able to give you a clear understanding of your employees. If you have ever created a form/survey, you would already know that the language of questions is crucial in getting the right answers.

Here are some tips to get your employee satisfaction survey right.

Focused objectives

Having clear objectives increases the impact of the survey. It helps in creating the questions, keeping in mind the full experience of the survey. Hence every question in your survey should be aimed at discovering more about the focus objective. Understand that you want to keep this an accessible and user-friendly tool too.

Open-ended questions

Open-ended does not mean vague. You want to stay true to the objectives and be open to all possible answers. Having directed questions, gives the employee a direction for their responses. So try to keep questions that do not already make the reader lean in a certain direction.

Measuring and driving engagement

Keep a section in the survey that gathers feedback on the on-going engagement measures at your company. These insights will help you tweak or change these measures. After all, it’s not about just sending out questionnaires, but opening a channel to get to know your employees better.

Avoid personal questions

Make sure the employee survey isn’t pushing into employees’ personal boundaries. Avoid mentioning controversial incidents in the employee survey. The goal here is to make the employee feel involved in the growth of the company.

Do them regularly

Rolling out employee satisfaction surveys at a periodic interval takes the surprise element out of the process. Employees can establish trust and use it as a regular mode of feedback.

Periodic employee surveys also allow the managers to keep growing with changing times and provide solutions for real time needs.

Share the results with employees

To make the employee satisfaction survey more effective, share the results of the process with the employees. This involves the employee in the process and gives them a picture of reality as well. It creates awareness and well-informed employees.

Follow up with action

The process of an employee satisfaction survey will only complete a cycle when the survey is followed up with relevant actions. It's vital to plan necessary action items based on the information gathered in the employee surveys. It makes the process fruitful and rewarding for the employees.

A Guide to Improving Employee Satisfaction

Keep it simple

Avoid using complicated jargon or vague questions. Direct questions that cover the objective of that employee survey will make the process efficient and rewarding.

With these tips in mind, you should be able to come up with an employee satisfaction survey that gives you a real insight. But remember this is a continuous process that requires optimisation. So make sure to get real-time feedback and then act on it.