When it comes to improving your company, it can be helpful to reach out to your employees to gain valuable insight. This helps you hear from people vital to your company’s success and may uncover things upper management may have missed. But how can you gather employee feedback in a way that’s trusted, valuable and organized?
Enter – surveys.
Workplace surveys are a great way to amalgamate crucial employee data to implement helpful changes that elevate your company. But when it comes to getting the truth from workplace surveys, what’s the best way to go about it?
Careful and Informed Design
While you may think that you can simply jot down a couple of questions and fire them off to your employees with great success, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Employee experience survey design matters. Both to your employees and the people reviewing the data.
The last thing you want to do is receive feedback that you can’t do anything about. What you want is information that allows you to act and uncover potential holes in your company’s foundation that need fixing.
Detail Your Survey Objectives
Before you send out a survey to your employees, it’s important to understand what you’re looking to achieve. Are you looking to measure overall employee satisfaction to see if morale needs a boost? Are you looking for ways to improve standard operations? Chances are you have countless business processes that need addressing – make sure you know what you’re looking to achieve before creating your survey.
Decide Who Should Be Involved
Depending on your objectives, it may make sense to issue out company-wide surveys for great results. Some surveys, on the other hand, should be reserved for certain individuals or departments to keep results focused and on point. This allows you to address opportunities and threats within certain teams, allowing for a more informed analysis and approach to improvement.
It’s also important to decide the type of employees you want to be involved with. Are you looking to interview line managers? Or maybe you’re more interested in hearing back from your entry-level employees. Whatever the case, define who should be involved well in advance.
Ask The Right Questions
There isn’t a single employee out there who doesn’t have their own set of ideas on how to improve their company. As surveys give your team members a chance to vent, make sure you’re asking the right questions to get answers that are worthwhile and valuable to your operations.
Avoid asking questions about non-essential information. This can cloud the overall process and lead to messy data. Keep your questions concise and impactful. This is the best way to elevate your employee experience survey.
Define Your Answer Model
While it’s generally recommended to avoid leading questions, there can be a time and a place to gather more informed feedback from your employees. Otherwise, it’s best to stick with closed questions that use checkbox answers to gain a more informed understanding of your data.
Keep It Short
The last thing you want to do is overwhelm your respondents with a survey that takes too long. This can discourage your employees from taking part or worse, can result in rushed answers that don’t reflect how they really feel. Be respectful of your respondents’ time and keep the survey short and sweet.
Focus On Two Subjects
While it may feel tempting to ask your employees questions about everything under the sun, try to keep the survey focused on two or three topics. This helps you make sense of the data in an efficient and worthwhile manner.
Conclusion
When it comes to getting the truth from workplace surveys, the power lies in the overall design. Stick to the recommended design features above and you’ll be on your way to an employee experience survey that generates valuable feedback and helps improve your company.
