Employee satisfaction plays a significant role in a company’s success.
An employee that is satisfied with his or her job is not only willing to stay in the company, but also eager to do their job well. Now, what company doesn’t want great employee retention and optimal productivity rates?
All HR departments have their own way of conducting employee satisfaction surveys. Some use survey software that is specially designed for internal company feedback, while others use simple tools such as Google Survey or the traditional pen-and-paper style. Either way, an employee satisfaction survey would not do its intended purpose without the right goals, questions, and execution.
To gather and manage genuine feedback from your employees, you must give them a survey that is worthwhile answering. Here’s how.
What are the goals of workplace satisfaction?
Before survey questions are created, HR personnel must recognize the goals of maintaining employee satisfaction. Why conduct a survey in the first place? Well, a satisfaction survey should find out:
- The current environment of the workplace, moral issues, and relationships between employees
- The level of trust that employees have with their company
- The willingness of employees to stay in the company, and the level of loyalty they feel towards the company
- The overall satisfaction that employees have with their job, pay grade, benefits, environment, etc.
How do you create an employee satisfaction survey worth answering?
After identifying the goals of an employee satisfaction survey, the next challenge is to create a study that employees want to answer. Not all employees are motivated to answer the survey with full thought and honesty, and this can lead to inaccurate results. So, how do you craft a survey that they would want to answer?
1. Keep it short and simple
No one wants to spend a big chunk of their work time answering an unnecessarily drawn-out survey. In general, an employee satisfaction survey should take about 20 to 30 minutes to answer. Therefore, create a survey with more or less sixty questions, with concise sentences that all employees can respond to quickly.
2. Emphasize the confidentiality clause
Make your employees more comfortable with answering the survey by emphasizing confidentiality, and if needed: anonymity.
3. Use the right survey software
Select a software that is easy to set up and use, presents data in an easy-to-understand manner, provides benchmarking data, and can give you freedom of customization.
4. Ask the right questions
Focus on the critical questions and do away with the trivial ones. Ensure that your questions are written with clear, concise sentences that all employees will understand them easily.
5. Choose the right survey model
Most HR departments create satisfaction surveys with the agreement scale (“strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”), the rating scale (“very poor” to “very good”), and sometimes the yes-no model. You can try different templates in one survey to vary question types, but make sure to use a 5-point scale to keep things simple.
The results of employee satisfaction surveys give a company a deeper understanding of how to promote and maintain employee loyalty, happiness, work-life balance, and overall productivity, among many other aspects. By following these tips, you can create a survey that not only aims to get accurate results but to also serve as an effective employee engagement technique.