Five tips to help improve your next employee engagement survey.
11/11/2019 9:00
Your employees are your most valuable assets, but all too often managers have a limited understanding of how happy they are or what parts of your company they wish they could change. Assessing employees’ satisfaction is one way to track and boost their engagement, which suffers when neglected, Collector magazine Managing Editor Anne Rosso May reports in the November issue.
Surveys can gather employee insights on your processes, leadership, workplace culture, benefits, office space and more, inspiring change that improves loyalty and productivity. Here are five tips you can use to improve your next engagement survey.
Addressing Confidentiality Concerns
If you want your employees to provide honest feedback, make sure they feel safe providing truthful answers to your questions. Deliver the survey online (try a free tool like SurveyMonkey) and don’t ask for any identifying information.
If your employees still fret that their answers will come back to haunt them, you might have trust issues in your organization that need to be addressed first.
“It’s not a great sign if employees don’t trust the anonymity of a survey if it genuinely is anonymous,” said Morgan Taylor, chief marketing officer and financial advisor for LetMeBank. “Employees and management are part of the same business, the same team, the same professional family. There’s a serious disconnect between employees and management if they don’t trust each other, which alludes to issues even without conducting the survey.”
Target Your Audience
You can go with an all-staff survey or you can craft surveys for individual departments to get feedback on specific processes and team communication trends.
For example, a 10-question survey for your collectors might look different from one for your admin team and can yield data that a broader questionnaire might not.
Fred Cooper, managing partner of Compass HR Consulting, recommends companies also create surveys specifically for new hires, asking for their thoughts on the interview process, how easy it was to locate the office building, parking convenience, the quality of their training and other items newcomers are most attuned to. Exit surveys for departing employees can serve a similar purpose, identifying any weaknesses in your management team, training, salary or benefits package.
Read more best practices for employee surveys, such as how to frame your survey questions and use the results to fix any issues at your company, in the November issue of Collector magazine.
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