Conducting employee engagement surveys can be an extremely useful tool to understand exactly how you employees feel about their current state of employment. Large companies such as Waitrose and John Lewis produce an annual staff survey to measure how happy their employees are. This helps to get employees involved and engagement with the running of the business. Employee surveys have become a huge part of the running of both small and large businesses with the importance of staff happiness increasing.
The first step in any staff engagement survey is measurement. Without being able to measure the effect then the survey can be useless. Creating the survey first is very important to the whole process as it means that you can get the control information and issues that require improving.
It is then useful to have regular surveys to you can track and measure the response and ensure everything is going in the correct direction and if any other issues arise they can be addressed immediately.
There are the 3 important words to refer to when thinking about staff surveys:
Annual – One of the first important steps to be taken into consideration. By having a regular staff survey you are able to track and measure any improvements. Too often companies only feel the need to conduct the one survey. Although this is good to get an idea on how your employees feel it doesn’t give a constant image of what is happening, like watching the first episode of a television series, it gives you an idea of what is happening but not the full story.
– Making people accountable for the results are very important. This puts enthuses on people of authority in the business to make effort to alter these changes for the better. It is a good idea to ask managers and team leaders to focus on managing changes rather than senior managers as they have more face-to-face time with employees. In the past, companies have left it only to senior managers and staff to action the changes but it can prove difficult to have a positive impact due to a heavy workload.
Action– Action is a big role to play in a successful survey process. Tackling the issues head on it can be a great way to overcome the issues from the staff surveys with an up front approach. Another option is to analyse the information and hold a staff meeting. By holding a meeting with staff to discuss the outcome, senior members of staff can learn more about the issues raised and what the staff would ideally like to be done. Top-level members of the business can then effectively plan a course of action to help prioritise and implement changes.
Remember that if you invest in creating employee surveys, it is not affective if a business fails to do anything with the results if improvements within the company are required. Employee engagement surveys can often be very time consuming and expensive so it is crucial to do them correctly, using survey companies such as Employee feedback can ensure surveys are created and used to their maximum potential.
More information on our employee satisfaction survey
