Employee surveys are one of the most valuable yet underutilized market research methodologies available. With numerous benefits, organizations can move in the right direction by understanding the needs of their team. These surveys help answer questions like:
What’s on your employees' minds?
What do they like most about your organization?
What needs improvement?
What are their views on leadership?
Conducting an employee survey is a highly effective tool for creating real change in the organization and improving job satisfaction. In this article, we will discuss the top 12 benefits of employee surveys.
Benefits of Employee Surveys
Employee surveys are a valuable tool for organizations to collect objective feedback from their employees and make data-driven decisions to improve workplace culture and employee satisfaction. Specifically, the benefits of employee surveys include:
1. Cost-effective Feedback Portal
Employee surveys provide a means to collect feedback, with the most cost-effective methodology being online surveys via email. This involves a simple exchange list of employees’ email contacts after signing a non-disclosure agreement.
Invitations and reminders are scheduled to maximize response rates. Among all types of market research surveys, employee surveys often yield some of the highest response rates, as your brand's employees are the most engaged audience you can find.
2. Opportunity for Follow-up and Discussion
Another benefit of employee surveys is that they provide management with the opportunity to create follow-up meetings and discussions with teams. Although these are not as confidential as online studies, they serve as follow-up action items to take the next steps with the data. Here are some recommended tips for follow-up meetings:
These meetings should give management more time to dive deeper into survey results.
Follow-up meetings are not intended to single out specific employees.
Workshops should focus on general feedback and topics shared by all/most employees as part of the survey responses.
For example, if the employee survey identified three key areas needing improvement—employee benefits, communication with managers, and better evaluations—follow-up workshops will revolve around these topics using an independent mediator to gather more details and context.
3. Changing Satisfaction Over Time
This is an obvious benefit of employee surveys. By measuring satisfaction levels, you can compare your results against other similar companies.
In general, measuring employee satisfaction is important to understand if your team is happy with areas like company culture, benefits, morale, etc. This is a key metric to review year after year as it determines if changes made to the company have helped improve employee satisfaction.
Moreover, it’s important to compare employee satisfaction levels with those of competitors or within the same industry you operate in.
4. Understanding Key Areas for Improvement
Rome wasn’t built in a day, just as significant changes in a company won’t happen overnight. One of the primary benefits of employee surveys is that they can identify the most relevant areas for HR or leadership teams to focus on for improvement.
This vital feature pinpoints those key areas and factors that matter to employees but are also those they are dissatisfied with.
High importance and low satisfaction areas become priority action items for your management and HR teams. This ensures that after conducting the survey, you will spend your time on the items that matter most to employees.
For example, an employee survey might reflect that your team is least satisfied with the lack of proper training available.
5. Measuring Satisfaction to Retain Employees
It’s unlikely that employee survey results will show glowing reviews from your team. Don’t be discouraged. While most managers and HR specialists hope their employees are 100% satisfied, this is usually not the case.
The company conducting the employee survey will pay close attention to low ratings through regression analysis, which identifies the relationship between independent and dependent variables. In other words, what are the main drivers affecting overall satisfaction?
For instance, if loyalty is your main goal, your organization can identify the most impactful factors on loyalty. Essentially, this often uncovers hidden drivers of satisfaction.
6. Segmenting Results by Department
In addition to overall results, another significant benefit of employee surveys is that you can use post-segmentation. If your employee survey feedback shows that employees are generally dissatisfied with your company, look at the individual factors contributing to low satisfaction scores.
The employee survey program will use segmentation to divide and slice survey data by categories such as departments, employee managers, employee tenure with the company, and more.
7. Evaluating Satisfaction with Management
Employee surveys also allow management teams to delve into specific factors affecting employee satisfaction. Uncovering these key elements is a significant benefit of employee surveys.
This helps identify which managers are performing well and which are not, from their subordinates’ perspectives. It’s one of the most common primary goals of an employee survey.
8. Improving Communication
Another benefit of employee surveys is that they are a great step toward opening lines of communication with employees. Since everyone has the opportunity to respond, employees can share all good and bad feedback about the company.
Overall, it’s better to be aware of what employees think and need, rather than assume. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.
There are also types of employee surveys focusing on unique goals like diversity and inclusion.
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9. Showing Employees You Care
The simple act of reaching out and listening carries a lot of weight. It’s a proactive approach to showing you care, and it’s natural for employees to feel valued when an employee survey is conducted meaningfully.
This tone differs greatly from responding to employee complaints on a daily or monthly basis. All this anecdotal feedback can be measured through an online employee survey.
10. Driving Change
It’s important to use data and results to implement change. This is critical when conducting employee survey research. An employee survey is an excellent first step in changing the culture within the organization.
Since responses are anonymous, employees can freely share their thoughts. This not only is a significant benefit of employee surveys but also great for enhancing employee mental health (more on that shortly).
Often, disgruntled employees don’t share negative feedback with management; before you know it, they’ve left the organization and taken another role elsewhere.
While it’s great to seek employees’ opinions, it’s crucial to listen to this feedback and make necessary changes so that employees truly feel their opinions matter. Employee surveys help identify common issues and proactively address them in an anonymous forum.
11. Standout Results in Recruitment
It’s recommended to include some of the highest-rated key criteria in your recruitment and marketing campaigns. For instance, if you learned from the survey that there is extremely positive feedback about Friday lunches, flexible work schedules, and team camaraderie, these are all data points the company can highlight in its recruitment strategies, all from your employees’ voices.
Customer satisfaction starts from within your organization. If your employees are not satisfied, you’ll have a hard time achieving high scores in customer satisfaction metrics, including CSAT and NPS.
12. Enhancing Employee Mental Health
Now, for the final benefit of employee surveys—improving mental health. It’s no surprise that all the other benefits mentioned come together to create an environment where employees can share their thoughts openly. As a result, this automatically boosts mental health in the workplace, which we believe is more important than ever.
How can you improve your employees’ mental health? About 19% of current employees stated their mental health is poor. When employees are not in their “best mental state,” their work suffers. So, with this information in mind, how can you create a stable work environment through your employee survey results? Let’s discuss:
Find Ways to Lighten the Mood:
Think about how to make the office fun. Consider hosting holiday parties, monthly happy hours, and other non-work-related events. You don’t have to go crazy; allowing your employees to relax a bit and laugh will bring significant benefits.
Offer Sessions:
Depending on your budget, providing counseling sessions for employees can also positively impact their mental health. Such health-related initiatives can be implemented in various ways, but ensuring there is a space to relax and unwind is key.
Promote Workplace Flexibility:
Employees will deliver their best work when they are happiest and most comfortable. Maybe this is at their home office, maybe in the actual office, or perhaps in a café. We know different workplaces require different levels of in-person presence, but if your workplace allows for remote or hybrid work, implement it!
Training Sessions:
Employees feel valued when they feel that leadership believes in their growth. Implementing training courses—whether in-person or virtual—is a good way to create strong bonds with employees. However, whatever method you choose for these sessions, ensure they are tailored to the company’s needs.
In short, employees thrive when their needs are met, and most importantly, their mental health can improve by feeling comfortable in the workplace.
The Role of DocSuite HR in Conducting Employee Surveys
DocSuite HR plays multiple roles in conducting employee surveys, including:
Creating the Survey:
DocSuite HR can be used to create customized surveys to measure employees’ opinions on various aspects related to work and the organization.
Customizing the Survey:
Employee surveys can be customized using ready-made templates or by creating custom designs to meet the organization’s needs.
Sending the Survey:
DocSuite HR makes it easy to send surveys to all employees quickly and effectively via email, text messages, or even internal applications.
Collecting Data:
The system allows centralized data collection from employee responses, making it easy to analyze results, understand employee satisfaction, and identify areas needing improvement.
Analyzing Data:
DocSuite HR provides analytical tools to understand the data collected from employee surveys, helping to uncover trends and key issues.
Reporting:
The system can be used to generate detailed reports on employee survey results and recommendations for improving the work environment and increasing employee satisfaction.