Why Conduct an Employee Engagement Survey?
Employee engagement surveys help inform business owners and managers of how staff feel about issues or topics within the business. The aim should be to allow for open and honest feedback between employers and staff. This should uncover exactly what the innate needs are among your employees and clarify how to help them thrive at work.
By providing an opportunity for direct communication about whether your organisation is succeeding, you give employees a chance to ask for more support if it is needed. And most importantly, running an employee engagement survey tells your people that their voice matters. By feeling like active participants in the development and future of your organisation, you empower your employees.
How to Conduct a HR Employee Survey
Firstly, decide what type of employee survey you want to conduct. Then choose a format. Paper forms or face-to-face meetings are an option, but both mean more time spent on collating the information at the end, and they can sometimes lack the anonymity needed for truthful answers.
Using a digital communication tool that can deliver and present the employee survey in an engaging way will help more staff complete it. The information can be collected easily and collated in a meaningful way, which makes it easier to use.
What Type of Employee Surveys Can You Carry Out?
There are several different employee engagement surveys that will give you the staff feedback you’re looking for. These will help you identify any issues and will help you decide how to take the right steps to address them.
To accurately measure employee engagement, here are some options to choose from:
1. Employee Satisfaction
The most common type of staff survey is based on employee satisfaction. This is a broad look at how an employee is feeling and can show whether any areas need to be addressed.
If anything challenging is identified, measures can be taken to work through them. If more information is required, a more detailed employee survey can be used as a follow-up to find out exactly what is wrong.
When looked at holistically, the results from employee satisfaction surveys can give an overall indication of how employees feel collectively, which can be very useful if you are looking to create lasting change.
2. Employee Motivation
The employee motivation survey is a deeper dive into more specific aspects of employee feelings and behaviour. While some may be engaged and happy with their place in the business, they might not be as happy when it comes to their daily tasks and responsibilities.
Over time, these feelings can grow in resentment, but they can be easily fixed by looking at an employee’s development and progression, as well as what other tasks and responsibilities are available for them to take on.
3. Workplace Culture
Focusing on workplace culture is increasingly important to management teams as they look to attract and retain talent within their organisations. Whilst employees might like their job and the tasks they do, if they don’t feel aligned to the company culture, you will potentially lose them.
Workplace culture encompasses the environment you create for your employees and the character and personality of your organisation. It is what makes your business unique and is the sum of your values, traditions, beliefs, interactions, behaviours, and attitudes.
If employees feel the workplace culture isn’t positive and supportive, it can create feelings of unease and discontent. Understanding the true extent of the problem is important – is it contained within a team or is prevalent throughout the organisation? By identifying this, action can be taken to resolve it.
4. Mental Wellbeing
A focus on employee mental and emotional wellbeing is increasingly common within business as employers understand their role within this area. Employee surveys that ask staff how they are feeling can help managers identify issues and offer support where needed.
When difficult situations arise, these surveys can also provide a tool to help businesses learn from them and find better ways to handle them in the future.
5. Staff Performance
Staff performance surveys focus on how employees are performing in their role. These can be self-evaluating surveys that let managers see how staff view their role, skills, and results.
Managers might also find themselves answering questions on the performance of their staff, or staff evaluating their managers. Staff performance surveys can vary depending on the business and what information is being gathered.
How to Interpret the Results of Your Employee Survey
It is vitally important, if you are going to undertake employee surveys, to accurately collate and make sense of the data received. You need a platform that shows this data being updated in real time and can be shown in an easy to digest format. That’s why workplace analytics are so important.
You can not only sort the information into a digestible format, but you can also see metrics such as time to completion, and the wait between the message being sent, seen, and acted upon.
The analytics can show data from other actions, tasks, and metrics across the platform, so you can combine all of these to get the most accurate view of what’s happening in your business.
By quantifying the information, dissecting it, and looking for trends and patterns, you can use it to inform your future decisions.
Using Employee Feedback to Improve Your Business
Obtaining employee feedback is highly valuable as the information can create a stronger, more harmonious workplace. Positive and negative feedback is important because it helps break bad habits, reinforces positive behaviour, and enables teams to work more effectively toward their goals. It can provide insights into the organisation that may otherwise be invisible to leaders, generate new ideas and provide opportunities for learning and improvement.
By asking your employees for feedback you help to make them feel more confident in their performance and more committed to your company. By making them aware of their skills and strengths, you also give them a sense of value in the workplace – the key to employee success.
The OurPeople platform brings team management and business processes all under one roof. The amount of data you can gather increases dramatically, and you can use this to inform any decisions you make. To find out more about what OurPeople can do for your business, and how you can use data and feedback to improve, contact us today.
