The best way to learn what your employees are thinking is to ask! Employee surveys are a great tool for gauging satisfaction, identifying potential improvements and, ultimately, implementing changes that benefit your company overall. We break down the steps for creating a useful employee survey and for gathering insightful information from your results. 

Ask the right questions

When creating a survey, determining what questions you’ll ask is the first and, arguably, most important, step. Before you develop your questions, ask yourself what you’re hoping to gain from the survey. For example, if you’ve recently changed your benefits package, including a question about it can help you determine what your employees value most and if they’re satisfied with the new offering. 

Once you determine what you want to know, you can choose the overall theme of your survey and develop your questions. The best information you can gather from your employees comes from an all-encompassing survey. You can gauge sentiment and compile ideas to make processes run more smoothly and more!

Gather answers

Now that you’ve determined your questions, it’s time to distribute. Before sharing with your staff, it’s important to prepare them. Give them a heads-up a week in advance to be on the lookout for your email, and send another reminder either the day before or the morning of distribution. Alerting staff ahead of time allows them to gather their thoughts and compile answers, potentially granting you deeper insight than a blind distribution. Also, let them know if responses are anonymous. Anonymity can make employees more comfortable sharing their genuine thoughts, but depending on the content of your survey, it may not be necessary. If you decide to make your survey anonymous, be sure you’re prepared to receive unfiltered feedback, which can be helpful but, at times, blunt. To further prepare your staff, you could also share questions (or a select few) beforehand, so employees have time to develop more in-depth answers. Close out your email with a deadline, too, so staff know the date by which they need to complete it.

Review data

Your job isn’t done at distribution! In fact, it’s just the beginning. As surveys start rolling in, compile your answers. If your survey is anonymous, you won’t be able to see exactly who submitted, but you can monitor the number of responses. This will help you determine the frequency of follow-ups or if they’re even necessary.

Once you’ve reached your deadline and received all responses, you can start reviewing and compiling your data. Depending on which service you use, you may be able to review a summary of your results and individual responses. We recommend taking a look at both – using the overall summary as a high-level overview and diving deeper with individual responses. 

We recommend developing a report of your findings for easy viewing and data sourcing, especially if you’re considering making this an annual occurrence. Having records of your results lets you track improvements and locate specific insights. Plus, if you plan to share your findings, having them in an easy-to-read format makes them more comprehensive for reviewers.

Implement changes

Once you have your results and have presented your findings, you’re done, right? Wrong! Now is the time to take action. Your survey results are the roadmap to future changes and improvements. For example, if someone shared they don’t like the scent of hand soap stocked in the bathroom, that’s a quick fix the next time it needs to be refilled! Consider making a list of immediate and long-term action items. From there, if you choose, you can develop an implementation plan. Some suggestions could take a while; others you may choose to forego. But, ultimately, your employees will appreciate that you took the time to listen to their concerns. Knowing you heard them and acted on their suggestions or feedback will make your employees feel important and valued – as all employees should!

Interested in implementing your own employee survey? We can help!