How can you truly know if employees are coming into work each day, ready to put their best foot forward? While most employers have considered using employee surveys to determine what changes should be made to enhance the business, it’s common to be hesitant at first. How can we know if the money and time investment will be worthwhile? The answer is that while employee surveys can be great tools that provide business decision makers with detailed information about their workforce, what a business does with that information determines the success of the project. Read this article to learn how to ensure that your employee survey is successful.
At a Minimum, Conduct Your Survey Annually
When you consider how current events, employee turnover, and even seasonal weather may affect the capture and reporting of employee attitudes, it’s easy to see how time plays a role in the usability of your employee feedback data. If, for example, your turnover rate is 30% annually, then a significant portion of last year’s data may reflect the attitudes of people no longer employed by the company. While many employers choose to survey annually, with a mini mid-year survey focused only on critical topics, the best practice of most employers includes surveying employees at least annually.
Leverage and Maximize Supervisor Relationships
It’s common for companies to share survey results with only senior executives, who then work with the human resources department to improve results. Modifying this practice to include all supervisors in some level of reporting, however, can increase your impact.
The relationship an employee has with his supervisor can be strong enough to keep him engaged or weak enough to encourage him to leave the team. Informing each supervisor of her department’s results, as they relate to the company’s overall results, can be a valuable exercise.
Create and Execute an Action Plan
One of the most important steps an employer can take is to determine where the opportunities are for growth and then take action to improve. Today’s employee surveys provide employers with information specific enough to take action on. Whether you’ve identified problems like poor supervision, communication breakdown or how employees feel about company policies, creating and executing an action plan can fix the problems that have been identified.
Talk about the Results
A common complaint of employees is that they feel like their feedback “goes into the black hole;” they long for acknowledgment. To avoid this feeling, which erodes the impact you’re trying to have, communicate about your results. Tell your employees that you value their opinions and are grateful that they’ve shared feedback with you. Point out your strengths and celebrate them. Choose 2-3 areas for improvement, tell employees that you hear them loud and clear, and outline a plan for change.
Take the First Step
It’s powerful to know what your employees think. You can identify problems like poor supervision, communication breakdown, and mounting plans to leave your company before expensive turnover affects your business. Getting your hands on your Employee Feedback Reports has never been so easy and affordable. Schedule a call today, to get answers about process, pricing and timelines.
