Why your employee survey is important
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Ask any seasoned HR professional about employee engagement surveys (or staff surveys, as they’re also often called) and they’ll probably give you two answers: the first is that they chew up time and effort; the second is that they’re totally indispensable.
According to Forbes, the average response rate to employee surveys globally is between 30 to 40 percent, yet they take enormous effort to organise, promote and facilitate – and that’s before you even think about analysing the responses and implementing any resulting actions.
And it’s not as though running a staff survey is cheap, either. The most basic version is estimated to cost between £4,000 and £10,000, but in large and complex matrix organisations that need a more sophisticated and agile process, that can rise to well over £100,000.
So, if your employee survey is going to suck up all of your time and effort and strip thousands of pounds out of your bottom line, and only 3 in ten people are going to complete it, why do it at all?
Well, there are several answers to that.
1. You’ll get to hear from the most disaffected people in your organisation
Generally speaking, employees are more engaged with staff surveys when they’re unhappy, and unhappy people are bad for business because they infect the workplace culture, are less productive and tend to account for the majority of absenteeism.
That’s not to say those people are wrong (or right) to be unhappy. They may have a legitimate axe to grind, or they may not – but they’re unhappy for a reason, and their unhappiness contributes negatively to general morale.
So, you need to be able to understand what is causing that unhappiness so you can take a view on whether it’s something you could and should address.
Also, by offering a confidential platform from which to feed back to you, you will also give a voice to those employees who may be legitimately unhappy but who might otherwise not be heard.
2. You’ll discover quick wins to build better relationships
While big-ticket items like pay and conditions tend to dominate employees’ view of you as an employer, you’ll often find it’s the smaller things that have a disproportionate impact on how people feel about working for you.
From flexible working opportunities and recognition schemes, to free tea and coffee, retail perk initiatives and ensuring the toilets are working properly, your employee survey offers you some genuine opportunities to engage with and fix the things that cause dissatisfaction.
This apparent willingness on the part of the employer to be seen to be listening and acting on the feedback given has a consequent positive impact on how valued people perceive themselves to be.
3. You’ll see what your organisation looks like from the inside
Business leaders are there to lead. That’s obvious, right? But the business of leading means the majority of leaders spend the majority of their time operating at a strategic level within the organisation.
The accounts may be healthy and the workforce may be generally productive, and you may well believe that your company is a happy ship sailing through the calm waters of profitability.
But even in the most successful of companies, the realities of the employee experience can be very different to how an executive board sees things.
When you get engagement from your employees through a survey you may find themes emerge that paint a very different picture of your workplace.
These may be themes that only become visible through collective engagement.
For example, when given a response option to a question about training and development, an employee may say they haven’t received any opportunities in the previous year.
That response may not even be framed as a complaint, and although most businesses would want to offer at least some sort of CPD opportunity to every employee each year, one person being overlooked is unfortunate, but not a total disaster.
But what if 40 people are saying the same thing? Suddenly, what would otherwise seem to be an unfortunate isolated oversight has become a systemic issue that needs to be addressed.
4. You’ll learn how effective your management structures are
While there are plenty of work-related issues that relate to organisational structure and policy, there are others that have more to do with internal team dynamics and management.
Your staff survey will help you to identify how effectively your people are being managed. Finding out your systems are working and people are being led well is just as important as discovering there are shortcomings that need to be addressed.
5. You’ll improve employee engagement
Done well, a staff survey will help you to improve engagement with your workforce. Improved communication with teams does depend on a commitment from the organisation’s leadership, though.
First, the opportunity to engage (the survey itself) needs to be promoted properly to ensure everyone in the business has had multiple opportunities to become aware of it and understand how to engage with it.
Second, the survey needs to be simple to complete and your line managers need to ensure employees are given time during their working day to take part. You may even choose to incentivise this engagement in some way.
Third, and almost more importantly, once the business has had the chance to evaluate the responses, it needs to report back on its findings and communicate an action plan to address them.
Finally, having committed to action, your employees must see it happen.
Over time, and with continued surveys, you should see engagement start to rise and, hopefully, each passing year will steadily reflect ongoing improvement in leadership and in staff satisfaction and engagement.
If you’d like to find out more about how Constantia Consulting can offer advice and practical support to develop and run an employee survey, please get in touch for an informal no-obligation chat.
