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Employee surveys, more recently known as Employee Engagement Surveys, have now been a mainstream activity for over 10 years. They survived the dotcom bust and 9/11 mini-recession, and have grown steadily in appeal and relevance right up until the current time.
The experience in our business over the last two years, and despite the current recession, is that organisations are continuing to invest to improve their understanding of the views, attitudes and work behaviours of their people. There are probably a number of reasons for this, including the relatively low costs of running such surveys compared to other business activities, but a core dynamic seems to be more to do with a real strategic shift in how organisations are measuring the way that they can best compete in today’s markets.
The recently published MacLeod Review, commissioned by the Department of Business, took an in-depth look at employee engagement and its potential benefits for organisations and employees. The Review includes many examples of companies and organisations where performance and profitability have been transformed by employee engagement; and in their work the review team claim to have met numerous employees who explained how their working lives had been transformed. The Review also makes reference to studies that show a clear correlation between engagement and performance – and, most importantly, between the improving of employee engagement and improving levels of business performance.
The response to the Review has been staggering, and the list of captains of industry that have signed up to the subsequent Sponsor Group is very high profile.
So what does this mean for the future of employee engagement surveys and measurement of employee engagement itself?
The first implication is that the measurement and diagnostic work around employee engagement levels is likely to increase in importance – in boardrooms, within industries, and across business and regional divisions.
Secondly, and because of this, employee engagement measures will have to be seen as even more robust and credible, than some of the ‘Employee Engagement Index’ products that have been promoted by suppliers over the past 3 years.
Third, in time companies will want to know much more about the profiles and make-up of ‘engaged’ employees. The answers that workers give in surveys is one dimension of this, but other key aspects include demographics, lifestage, personality preferences, career motivations, and so on. These factors are important to understand as they will affect recruitment strategies, and the development of the ‘employer brand’
Fourthly, there will be a trend to more regular employee survey measures, as well as more immediate results and reporting back to line managers. These managers in turn will be expected to produce action plans to improve employee engagement, and such action plans will be more high profile than in the past. This requires good IT and deployment of web-enabled tools for the pro-active management of employee engagement.
Finally, what of the specialist companies that currently provide services in employee engagement and talent management surveys and software? We believe that they will need evolve from pure ‘survey providers’ to more holistic support partners. They will need to offer complete end-to-end employee engagement programmes consisting of the survey process and its communication, database management over time, reporting and IT systems, plus interactive web development, deployment and management. Some of us are already doing this, others are still pursuing the methods of the past.
Surveys are the oldest and the best way you can conduct research on your product. Until today, surveys have been used as a way to find out the general opinion on anything. These opinions can go a long way in increasing your performance and profits. It acts as a problem solver for the different problems that a company may be facing. Surveys can be used in different ways to find what the problem is.
There are different surveys that a company can use to find out problems that can be as a result of some internal factors or an external factor. The internal problem may be an issue you have with your employees. The external problem that you may be facing is with your customers. Problems relating to customers are very important because as a company you could make heavy losses as a result. The problems may be those regarding the image of your company or brand or the quality of your product. With the use of customer surveys and customer relation surveys you can find out exactly where your strategy is going wrong.
Customer surveys will enable you to maintain a good relationship with your customers. Customer relation surveys enable companies to find out how well they are actually doing in making their customers feel satisfied. These surveys also make the customer feel that they have a say in the products that they buy. Thus, customer surveys help increase your company’s profits.
The success of any business depends on customer satisfaction - if the customers are satisfied with the products and services that are offered, then the existing clients will stay and new ones are more likely to sign up! And if the customers remain satisfied, the company is more likely to sustain its position and, importantly, survive (in spite of competition from others). It all makes total sense!
Customer surveys play a major role in measuring and understanding client satisfaction - and also what could be done to improve service delivery, including the quality and range of what’s on offer. They enable you to get an insight into what customers really think, also their preferences and behaviours.
Another benefit, that’s often overlooked, is that surveys demonstrate to customers that they are really important to the company, and their opinions are valued - and the more that they feel this, the more loyal they will be.
Other benefits of customer surveys include promoting your business and familiarising customers with the positive aspects of your company - they can even make customers aware of useful products and services they didn’t know that you offered, thus increasing your potential to get more of their annual spend.
In a nutshell, the more customer-centric a company can be, and the more it knows about how it can improve client satisfaction, the more likely it is to survive.
In most organisations, managers occasionally speak to their employees about how they feel about the company - but employees are constantly talking amongst themselves about problems at work and what needs to happen to make things better. A great way to find out what’s on their minds is by conducting a staff survey.
However, there are some myths associated with employee surveys and these include:
Only disgruntled employees respond to employee surveys:
It’s not only dissatisfied employees who respond - those who share a connection with their employer, who truly want to contribute towards making the organisation a better place to work, will find that an employee survey is an excellent way for them to contribute their feedback, suggestions and ideas.
Employers use survey results to carry out a “witch hunt”:
When an employee survey is conducted in a climate of doubt and mistrust, it is understandable that some employees will think that the results may cause more harm than good. It is important to reinforce the fact that the survey will be conducted in a fair and impartial manner, and that analysis won’t identify who said what. This approach is vital if you want to ensure that as many employees as possible will contribute and make the whole process a success. At the same time, reassure staff that you will communicate the key findings and also your future plans of action, and you will build and establish trust between staff and management.
Customer satisfaction surveys are incredibly helpful tools that are used to measure the opinions of your customers. They allow you to evaluate both the products and services that are offered by your company, as well as those your customers would like you to be offering.
If a customer is disappointed by your product or service, customer surveys can help you to get underneath what went wrong and to understand what your client expects from you.
Customer surveys also help you learn to about the company’s client base - their expectations, their changing service needs, their perceptions of your brand, and even what they think about your competition! . By knowing the needs of its customers, a company is in a better position to adjust its production quality, its service range and its front-line customer service and therefby take the necessary steps to live up to the expectations of its target consumers.
A range of research methods is available - phone, online, or printed questionnaires work well and are very cost-effective. Alternatively, face-to-face interviews are particularly effective with senior-level clients, but can be quite expensive.
Probably the cheapest and quickest way to get feedback is online, by emailing a link to an internet survey - this is the least intrusive method (but you do rely on customers taking the time to complete the survey, so a timely reminder and/or a prize for taking part can be helpful in encouraging a good response!).
Whatver method you use, knowing your customers’ demands and expectations is a requirement of every business and is essential if you want to improve customer loyalty and, ultimately, your own profitability.
An employee survey can be considered one of the most important tools for any business organisation, helping to gauge levels of employee engagement, employee satisfaction and general morale at work, and identifying the factors that may lie behind these results.
In today’s competitive market it is harder than ever for businesses to survive. Employee surveys help you to understand and analyse the attitudes of your employees towards your company, and this information can be invaluable to business performance and growth.
The most important factor that should be considered before conducting any employee research is its main objective (and the best means for gathering this information i.e. online survey, printed/postal questionnaires, focus groups, workshops, interviews).
By demonstrating that management want to hear what staff really think, employee surveys help maintain good relations between the company and its employees, thereby motivating them towards greater engagement with your business and striving for higher efficiency.
Typically, employee surveys will look at topics such as: key aspects of employee engagement, how well the communication flow is working, perceptions of the company’s leadership, satisfaction with line management support and motivation, aspects of training and development, general working conditions and, importantly, the relationships within and between teams.
Employee research is very useful for identifying underlying problems in the workplace and barriers to employee productivity and customer service - but another important reason to run a survey is to identify and measure what is working well!! So often a survey is seen as a tool to find faults, when it can be even more useful in identifying the things a company is doing right, and that will attract and retain high quality staff: the highly marketable individuals you don’t want to lose!!
A first survey is usually broadly based, enabling you to “put a stake in the ground” - but as time passes, or if there is a key topic to be addressed, organisations may choose to run a more focused survey (sometimes on a single topic, such as the communication of a recent change).
Specific types of survey include exit surveys (for those leaving the company), “welcome” surveys (to see what new employees think, soon after they’ve been recruited), training needs surveys (to help the L & D team identify where their efforts will be needed in the coming year), and barometer or temperature check surveys (where you can test a few key questions on a more regular basis, or to look at a particular area where you’ve introduced changes).
Customers are the most important part of any business. Without customers, there simply is no business. Therefore, you need to make sure that your customers are kept happy and satisfied, and always stay ahead of the competition in these terms. Meeting the needs of every customer is not always easy, which is possibly why organisations so often seem to get this fundamental issue wrong. Organising to ensure that you get even just a general idea about the feelings of your customer towards your products and services so that you can improve is an important first step.
Establishing a process of customer satisfaction surveys is an important way of interacting with your customers on a large scale, especially where robust statistical measures of performance are required. Whilst no-one would advocate that this can replace the need for ongoing dialogue with customers on a day to day basis, customer satisfaction surveys offer the added benefit of objective, collective and holistic feedback on the voice of the customer. Properly conducted, customer surveys avoid the risk of single anecdotal comments from one customer being seen as reflective of the views of all customers - a common error that is made in analysing feedback from sales personnel, for example.
Customer satisfaction surveys have to be set up correctly. It is very important to ask all of the relevant questions in a manner that is convenient and clear to customers. Customer satisfaction surveys need to be as precise as possible, especially where questions are used as critical performance measures (which also means they are the most important questions!)
Once conducted, customer satisfaction surveys need to be analysed and acted upon, in order to bring about changes in products and services according to the likes and needs of customers. This in turn reinforces the relationship with customers and should drive improved loyalty, thus helping to increase the business.
Being the head of a large business can be tough, especially when you have a large number of employees to deal with. As an employer, you need to keep your employees happy so that they work efficiently. Therefore, knowing what your employees feel about you and the company is critical.
In today’s tough climate, more and more businesses are realising the importance of employee satisfaction surveys in their battle to maintain (and maybe to raise!) their profits. Being an integral part of your business, your employees know a great deal about its functions and workings and, as your success directly affects their job prospects, they have a vested interest in ensuring that you perform as well as you can. So, if you want to improve the efficiency of your business, it is important for you to know what is on the minds of your employees!!
Employee satisfaction surveys need to be structured well and conducted with care. When you run the first survey it needs to cover all aspects of your business that are directly connected to your employees - and after you’ve taken the initial temperature check, you can delve more deeply into what it is that your staff feel is helping - or hindering - their ability to work efficiently.
Encourage your employees to answer your employee satisfaction surveys truthfully and without any fear, and you will receive invluable information about how to improve your business. Keep the survey anonymous, in order to get honest answers, but ask sufficient information about people’s backgrounds so that you can get more focused results - by location, department, length of service etc.
Employee satisfaction surveys show that you take people’s views seriously and help to demonstrate your employees’ importance. But they do more harm than good if you do absolutely nothing with the results! You need to demosntarte that employees’ opinions and ideas matter, by sharing the results with them and encouraging discussion about the areas where they can make a difference - suggestions that will help improve their ability to do their work and, importantly, that will improve customer satisfaction too!
To plan the company’s future, it is necessary to keep the people involved and happy. A good way of ensuring this is by carrying out annual employee surveys.
The most important survey practice is to keep the responses anonymous. The primary reason for this is that the employees can then voice their opinions without any fear - which might include criticisms of their line manager or perceptions that the company’s leadership are out of touch with what’s important to staff. They can also express their views on the changes they would like to see in the organisation, or the way in which current changes are being handled.
Measuring employee satisfaction, trends and engagement levels, identifying opportunities that will help in improving business performance and recognising the reasons for employee turnover are some of the main reasons why organisations conduct employee surveys by professional survey solutions companies.
However, it can be very damaging when a survey goes wrong, and so it’s important to understand the do’s and don’ts of a successful project:
DO
- engage the services of a specialist survey company, who can advise you on how to get the best out of your project
- know what you want to get out of the survey before the questions set is developed
- involve managers and staff - so that the project is done “with” them (rather than “to” them)
- get senior management commitment to listening to and acting on the results
- identify (and publish) the lowest levels at which the results will be analysed
DON’T
- underestimate the time it takes to develop and run a successful project!
- use language and topics that most employees won’t understand
- try to do it yourself - people will always think you’ve been able to work out who said what
- ignore the results and leave them in a drawer
- do one survey and then leave it for another 5 years: you need to measure and re-measure, to see whether your changes have had the desired effect!
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Employees are integral to the success of any business, so to improve the functioning of a company it is important for management to interact with its employees. However, it is not possible for the leadership team to make one-to-one contact with every member of staff, and so an employee survey is the best way to find out the key facts that you need to know.
There are plenty of survey tools on the market - but to get the most useful feedback, via a full and honest response, employee surveys should always be conducted by specialist companies: they know which questions to ask and, importantly, will ensure complete anonymity for your respondents. If they know you won’t be able to trace their feedback to specific individuals, employees will open up freely and provide information they would not normally feel comfortable about giving to you.
Surveys are not just used to look at major topics but can be invaluable in finding out about local problems which might be the very reason behind a particular team’s under performance. Employee surveys can also identify gaps in communication and understanding between the organisation’s leadership and employees which, if addressed, can be crucial in moving the business forward - particularly during a period of uncertainty and change.
Employee surveys are a must for every organisation that wants to improve its performance as they enable you to understand what your staff feel needs to change - and also what they value, and that you need to maintain!
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