Employee surveys

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As an employer, finding out what your employees think of you may be quite a daunting prospect. However, done properly and with the right intentions, it can be a valuable tool to help you with your employee retention and engagement.

There are a few ways of collating feedback from your people such as on a one to one basis (e.g. appraisals, individual meetings etc), or during team/company meetings. These approaches though do rely on individuals feeling comfortable and secure enough to be open and honest in providing their feedback to you, confident that any negative comments will not jeopardise their working relationship in the future. Sometimes, no matter how much you stress this point, it is understandable that people may still be quite nervous.

In order to really find out what your employees think, what they value and what would keep them engaged in your business, allowing confidential responses can produce results. Employing the services of a marketing expert to collate your results and present them back to you is a workable way of ensuring anonymity of your employees.

So, can employee surveys help to improve communication and enhance satisfaction within an organisation? I believe they can. Done well they can produce valuable results for the organisation which allows it to listen to the views and opinions of its people and take real action to address the feedback.

It is important to recognise though that the essential part of any survey kicks in after it has been conducted. Ensuring you act on the survey results is positive as this itself will create positive vibes in the company as your people feel they have had the opportunity to have their say. Acting quickly on the feedback is essential and there are advantages in looking for those ‘quick wins’ i.e. action that can be taken immediately, with little time and effort, that would be well received by the employees. Taking action based on the results of the survey is critical to get right because it shows employees their opinions are valued and acted upon and this itself can have a huge impact on satisfaction and motivation. If employees do not see direct benefits from having taken part in the survey then cynicism and distrust may arise, or increase. It is important, therefore, to fully commit to such a survey which involves all the action that may arise once the results are received.

Conducting a survey of this type does take time and effort of all those involved which is potentially company wide. A strong willingness of the team responsible for carrying out the actions is essential as is a commitment from the senior management team who must support the exercise. For the company, fully embracing the results of the survey may mean being prepared to be flexible in its vision, or its priorities. However, if all this sounds a bit daunting don’t let it put you off. At the very least, conducting and acting on an employee survey does demonstrate your commitment to proactively seek the views of your employees. This in itself demonstrates a willingness to make a difference to the way you interact, communicate, and involve your people.

If you are considering conducting a survey for your employees, consider………………
1.Where possible, make provision for surveys to be responded to anonymously, and so confidential.
2.Consider the questions carefully and ensure each one will provide feedback in line with the objectives of the survey. Where appropriate (e.g. where the organisation has little or no experience of staff surveys) consider using the services of a Market Research expert.
3.Keep the questions to a one page document – it has been found that 20 questions can provide a wide variety of pertinent and appropriate feedback.
4.Include general and open questions as part of the survey. They allow a general feel to be gained and the verbatim comments can prove extremely valuable when considering what action to take.
5.Ensure the company responds to the feedback as soon as is possible and communicates its progress towards doing this along the way.
6.Agree a budget for the exercise and ensure that the relevant senior management team have agreed to the expenditure in advance. This ensures all the hard work does not go to waste because it is later determined to be too costly for the business.
7.Be flexible with the action the company is prepared to take. It may require a realignment of certain business objectives to ensure employee objectives are also taken into account.

The survey does involve management time, which undoubtedly is a cost to any organisation. The costs of communicating and facilitating the survey results could be a negative aspect of the survey for the business. However, if positive action is taken which leads to real improvement for the employees then the time spent can be justified as a worthwhile investment. Whilst it can be argued that this time and money may be better spent fixing some of the problems that already exist (rather than trying to find some more!) gaining real honest feedback from your people may help to alleviate the problems in the first place – pay for the prevention instead of the cure.

So, the survey will take time and will require commitment on your part. However, the results can provide valuable information to support your people strategy within the business. Good people are hard to find and the costs of recruiting them can be significant. When you do find them make sure you hang on to them. In addition, whilst retention of good people is important, so is engaging them. Having individuals who believe in what you are doing, feel valued, have the opportunity to openly contribute ideas and feel a part of your organisation will undoubtedly be the ones who make the difference to what your business is capable of achieving.

This article was written by Elizabeth Mills, Director, Broker Network
An edited version of this article was published in Insurance Times