Employee surveys can help companies identify problems with:
- Efficiency
- Morale
- Working conditions
- Company policies
- Communication
- Manager-employee relationships (in the sense of organizational effectiveness)
I would recommend you conduct employee opinion surveys (also known as employee climate surveys) when you want to gauge what your employees’ general perception of the company is.
Employee opinion surveys also can serve as a benchmark if you start doing them on an ongoing basis, such as annually or monthly. Surveys can help move a company in a direction that shows improvements for the employees.
Have an “Action Plan” Mindset
If you’re going to conduct an employee survey, you want to be sure to have some kind of action plan to make change. Obviously, if you’re doing one of these surveys, you’re asking questions and you need to not be afraid of what the answers are.
You want the employee to be honest with you when you’re asking these questions because you want to get to the root of what the issue is. So it’s crucial that you make changes based on whatever feedback comes from the survey, and when you implement changes, they need to also be in line with your company’s business goals, objectives and company culture.
That’s why you need to go into a survey with the mindset that you are going to be making changes.
Why Conduct Employee Opinion Surveys?
When you want to do a survey, you’re trying to find out how the employees feel about their job and the company.
Some of the reasons you might want to conduct an employee opinion survey would be:
- If you’re seeing high turnover in customers
- When you have low morale in employees
- When you have little motivation from employees
- When you’re seeing high turnover in employees
- When you’re having a lot of employee absences
- If your employees’ productivity level is declining
- If the quality of your products or services is low
- If you’re suddenly hearing from unhappy customers
These are just some of the times you might think about conducting an employee survey.
If you’re going to conduct an employee survey, you want your intention to be trying to working toward a happier workplace and a better workplace. You want to create a better workplace for your employees and in order to make them happier, you need to find out what the problems are. If you do this, it will impact your bottom line in a positive way.
There are some general steps you can take toward conducting an employee opinion survey.
My recommendation would be to either have someone like Insperity assist or find a third party vendor to help you develop the survey or find a consultant that only does employee surveys. You’re going to need somebody with a lot of experience and a lot of credibility behind them to help you do this because you don’t want to just jump into this venture on your own without any experience.
In my next Insight, I will discuss the steps you can take to do an employee survey of your workplace.