Maximizing Your Workforce Using Employee Satisfaction Surveys

The employee satisfaction survey is an efficient and practical tool that organizations can use to maximize the performance and engagement of their workforce. The attitudes and motivations of your employees play a crucial role in influencing motivation, productivity, and overall success. Smart companies realize the importance of understanding the attitudes, behaviors, and motivations of staff and yielding this power to maximize their workforce.

Why conduct an employee satisfaction survey in your organization?

If your company has never launched an employee satisfaction survey or it has been more than six months since a survey was last deployed, there are some solid reasons to update your workforce assessment:

 Assess your current organizational culture and climate
 Gauge the level of employee engagement in your workplace
 Ensure your organization is operating ethically and honestly
 Determine the success rate of past objectives
 Examine communication levels throughout teams and coworkers
 Investigate work/life balance issues
 Uncover any job security issues of your workforce
 Gain insight into the relationships of employee and manager

Most employees want to feel like their opinions count and their job knowledge plays a role in helping the organization succeed. The simple act of launching an employee satisfaction survey begins to send the message that your workforce’s opinions are valued and appreciated.

What steps lead to a successful employee satisfaction survey?

 Identify the organizational topics you wish to gain insight into.
Begin by targeting any rumbling issues or hot topics within your organization. By carefully choosing the organizational topics you wish to measure you can develop a focused employee satisfaction survey tailored to the present needs of your organization.

 Protecting staff anonymity is crucial.
In order for honest communication to occur, the feedback and answers received from your employee satisfaction survey must be anonymous. Otherwise, employees may not feel comfortable providing candid feedback because they fear being identified by management. Using a 3rd party vendor to host your survey can help ensure staff that their identities are safe.

 Respond to your survey in a timely manner.
It’s worse to launch an employee satisfaction survey and never respond to the concerns of your staff than not launching a survey at all. Organizations are not expected to correct every concern raised in the employee satisfaction survey, but it is crucial to let your staff members know their voices have been heard.

What are the advantages of a web based employee satisfaction survey?

Web based survey systems have quickly proven themselves to be a convenient and effective surveying method for the following reasons:

With internet technologies continually improving, web based surveys are now less expensive, more interactive, and easier to deploy than their paper predecessors.

Web based surveys offer organizations a high level of survey customization while still maintaining a low price point.

Web based surveys often enjoy a higher response rate and shorter response time.

Web based surveys allow for response/report viewing while additional surveys are still being submitted. Often, the reports from web based surveys are made available to survey administrators in real time.

If desired, the data from web based surveys can be easily imported into outside data analysis programs.

Using a web based, customized employee satisfaction survey is a great, cost effective tool for better understanding the feelings, attitudes, behaviors, and motivations of your organization’s workforce. A well designed survey will identify the organizational issues and concerns affecting staff members, as well as give an indication to the level of employee engagement present within your organization. Armed with this powerful information, your organization is now able to address any discovered issues to maximize the motivation and productivity of your employees.