Thought Leadership in Action

Surveying your employees is a great way to get honest feedback about what’s going well in your organization and what could use some improvement. Surveys help give employees a sense of ownership in what’s going on around them and can show human resources their top concerns so you have an opportunity to address them in a meaningful way before they grow into systemic problems.

Here’s what you need to know about employee surveys and how to use them to help your organization.

The Benefit of Surveys

"Surveys function as a health assessment for an organization," says Don MacPherson, president of Modern Survey, a human capital measurement solution. When employees are able to voice their concerns and see that leaders care and will act on their opinions, it’s quite empowering and engaging.

Beyond just giving employees a voice, leadership gets to take a real look at how its staff works. Surveying employees "gives you insight into their engagement, which is a combination of trust, satisfaction, commitment and motivation," says Jonathan Erwin, CEO of Red e App, a mobile messaging platform for non-desk bound employees. He says he likes that surveys can be done anonymously, which encourages honesty and candor.

Why Don’t More Companies Use Surveys?

One of the biggest misconceptions about employee surveys that MacPherson says he encounters is the amount of work involved. "People think surveys are complicated and that gathering the feedback is the hard part, but that’s not the case," he says. "It's the follow up and action-planning phase where the real work occurs. The survey is like stepping on the scale to weigh yourself. You know what you weigh afterwards. Now what are you going to do about it?"

Start With Smart Survey Design

"A survey needs to begin with the goal/objective of collecting the data. All questions should support that goal," Erwin says. He cautions not to make the survey too long. If it’s time-intensive, the response rate may be too low.

MacPherson suggests limiting most surveys to no more than 60 questions so they can be completed in approximately 10 minutes. He also suggests organizing the survey so questions cover one topic at a time. Trying to cover two or three concerns in a single question may confuse the respondents, especially if employees have different feelings on each of those topics.

Make Good Use of the Results

"The biggest failure for organizations is when they don't follow up on the results. That is a waste of time and money when that happens. HR needs to get leadership commitment to follow up on the survey before it is launched," MacPherson says. Designing an action plan based on survey results and following through on it is essential to changing the organization.

"It's difficult to over-communicate to employees what is happening with the action plan. Give employees high-level results within two weeks of the end of the survey and communicate with a monthly frequency about the action plan's progress," MacPherson says.

"Your action plan should have clear expectations, assignments and timelines associated with them," Erwin says. He recommends holding yourself and the staff accountable for implementing changes. And HR should be ready to coach them along the way. "Don't expect overnight success without some assistance."