Tips on conducting staff satisfaction surveys
When designed and executed correctly, staff surveys can provide invaluable information to any organisation and act as an effective performance management tool. The benefits of finding out your employees’ views and acting on them are endless and include improving staff retention and increasing productivity, as well as providing a benchmark to measure improvement.
However, there can be pitfalls so the following pointers are worth considering:
- Conduct employee surveys using a mixed methodology of online and traditional paper based approaches. Online surveys save money and respondent time and paper surveys are essential in meeting hard-to-reach groups who don’t have access to the Internet.
- Market the survey internally via email, notice boards or the Intranet and promote the benefits of taking part to increase response rates.
- Make sure you have “buy-in” from senior managers and that they “own” the results. Appoint an internal project manager who will liaise closely with your management team.
- Protect and communicate the anonymity of the employees’ responses and you are more likely to receive honest feedback. One method of assuring employees of confidentiality is to use a 3rd party to conduct and manage the survey.
- Other benefits of using a third party to conduct your staff survey are increased response rates, objectivity in writing the report, experience in questionnaire design and access to dedicated resources when required.
- Communicate the results to your workforce whether they are positive or negative. Do this quickly to show you’re being serious, then feed back the actions.
- It’s not enough to just conduct staff surveys! The management needs to make sure they act on the results and communicate their actions to their employees. A positive plan of action needs to be put into place to address some of the key issues.
- Finally run an employee satisfaction survey at the same time each year to gauge the difference in satisfaction levels and highlight any problems. Together with other staff engagement mechanisms such as performance reviews, workshops and exit interviews, this can build a picture of staff satisfaction and ensure that you retain your most valuable resource – your employees.
Remember SurveyShop is an expert in conducting staff surveys. So if you want to outsource your survey to help ensure the anonymity of employees’ replies give our experienced team a call to receive a competitive quotation.
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