Employee Survey Benefits
A well-implemented employee engagement survey can raise productivity and profitability, increase customer satisfaction, and improve employee retention rates. Employees feel a sense of respect when acting on survey results, which positively impacts organizational culture. Knowing management values their input and focuses on making positive changes helps improve overall employee morale and loyalty.
So why then aren’t all organizations conducting an employee survey regularly? Many HR professionals know the challenges but don’t understand how to overcome them.
Survey Challenges
- Cost of Implementation – These include the hard costs of a software solution to launch an employee survey, collect data and provide reporting or perhaps hiring an employee survey vendor to implement for you. In addition, soft costs should be taken into consideration. This includes time spent by employees taking the survey, front-line managers to communicate and reinforce participation and leadership to project manage and analyze and interpret results.
- Participation – Leaders need to be trained to understand the purpose and method of the employee survey to ensure they are on-board with the process. Properly trained front line leaders will increase participation rate to the industry standard of 85% and higher.
- Data Interpretation – You may be using a quality employee survey software package but you still need to understand which reports and charts are meaningful to your organization. And again, communicated the results is absolutely key to the overall success of the project. Knowing who should receive which survey results; with different reports to senior leaders, mid-level managers and employees themselves is crucial. Lastly, understanding the results you are looking can be difficult if you are working in a vacuum. If 75% of employees agree their leader is engaging them in their role in the organization, is that good? Or is the standard for your industry more like 85%? Perspective is important so you know which results point to the need for immediate fixes. You can’t boil the ocean, so where do you start?
- Follow-up – This is where so many organizations can struggle. An employee survey should be, by definition, an actionable project. We’re asking employees these questions so we can take action and improve a variety of components of the organization. Follow-up is crucial for the leadership team to maintain credibility.