By Howard Deutsch
Whether your business is small or mid-sized, or a Fortune 500 company, you can significantly increase performance, profit, sustainability and competitiveness by closely listening to your employees. Conducting an online employee survey / online employee engagement survey is a highly effective and low cost way to gather information, insight and suggestions from employees, no matter what your field of business is.
Online employee attitude surveys and online employee climate surveys can be customized to meet your company’s special requirements, enabling you to include questions about issues of particular concern. Comprehensive, well designed employee surveys typically include questions in each of the following categories:
1. Having the needed resources to do the job effectively
2. Communications between and within organizational units, and from senior management
3. Collaboration and teamwork
4. Corporate culture
5. Innovation and ingenuity
6. Employee engagement and empowerment
7. Process effectiveness
8. Commitment to customers, quality and customer satisfaction
9. Your manager’s effectiveness
10. Feedback about senior leaders
11. Compensation, employee benefits, reward and recognition
12. Performance measurement and feedback
13. Work environment
14. Training and development, opportunities for advancement
15. Commitment to your company
16. Other topics important to your company
Businesses realize significant bottom-line benefits and a very strong payback when action is taken based on employee survey findings. Significant gains in employee satisfaction, engagement, performance and retention boost productivity, quality, customer service and satisfaction. Hidden problems, opportunities and solutions are identified. By focusing on the departments, branches, stores and locations receiving the lowest ratings in employee engagement surveys, companies can strengthen the least effective managers and the performance of the organizational units placing a strong drag on profit.
Online employee engagement surveys identify what needs to be done to strengthen internal communications, leadership effectiveness, company culture and business processes. Your employees know what is keeping them from being more effective in performing their jobs, and what your customers are telling them about your products, services, sales and service environment. Your customers also tell them about your competitors and how your company compares with them. An employee engagement survey enables your company to translate this knowledge and experience into action and bottom-line results.
Some of the other benefits your company can realize from employee surveys include strengthening your culture of collaboration and change, enhancing your company’s employer of choice reputation, avoiding costly employee abuse law suits and facilitating innovation and entrepreneurship.
To realize a high participation rate in an employee attitude survey, it is best to keep responses anonymous. When employees feel confident that their responses will not be traced back to them, they provide honest feedback including useful information and insight needed for making important changes.
There are several things companies need to do to get the greatest possible results from an employee attitude survey. This includes doing a thorough and effective job of analyzing the findings, communicating key aspects of the results with all employees, creating implementation plans and getting everyone involved in making needed changes. It is also useful to conduct the surveys annually to measure progress and trends, and to identify new challenges and opportunities that continuously pop up in our fast changing, highly competitive world.
