Employee Satisfaction Surveys – Step by Step Guide

The benefit of deploying an employee survey on an annual basis has for a long time been widely accepted but many organizations are reluctant to conduct them due to the amount of effort that is required.

Many organizations who have bit the bullet and conducted their own internal employee satisfaction surveys have often relied on word-processors to allow them to design and compile a survey, then gone through the effort of printing and distributing the survey and spent time chasing and collecting the completed surveys and then even more time transferring the survey response information into a meaningful management report.

Fortunately with the introduction of the Internet and hosted survey websites what was once a time consuming, resource hungry, long winded and cumbersome process is now slick, quick and easy.

This document provides a step by step guide to help implement a survey that will bring considerable benefits to any organization.

Step 1 – Identifying the Need

The reasons an organization might need a survey are as wide and they are long. Listed here are a few of the common reason why employee satisfaction surveys are conducted.

Event Driven

If your organization is about to embark, or is going through, a process reengineering program a series of employee surveys can assist in managing the change program, measure the effectiveness of the change, help to deliver a ‘message’ and gather valuable feedback throughout the change cycle.

For organizations that are experiencing rapid growth employee surveys can monitor internal communications and management structures to ensure that employees are aware of their reporting and management responsibilities.

Where an organization is suffering from poor moral brought on by either internal or external influences an employee survey can be used to identify the specific concerns of employees so those concerns can be properly addressed.

An employee survey can help an organization identify the underlying cause of employee unrest that may results in an increase of staff turnover and through the survey findings help find solutions.

Periodically

As part of a periodic assessment, surveys will assist an organization in regularly reviewing their employees and monitoring an individual’s job satisfaction, training and career development.

Employee surveys also offer senior management the opportunity to look at the soft underbelly of their organization to confirm that their ‘top down’ view of the organization matches the reality and ‘bottom up’ perspective.

Employee surveys will help an organization establish good employee/employer communication that will in turn bring direct and indirect benefits.

Step 2 – Management Buy-In

It is always desirable and sometimes essential to have management support for a survey but where a management team might have grown complacent and detached from their employees the survey results may be all that is required to get them to positively reengage with the business and employees.

Some senior management teams will recognize and drive the need for employee surveys, while other management teams may need to be convinced of the direct and indirect benefits an employee survey will bring.

The level of management commitment to an employee survey will have some bearing on the nature of the survey and to some extent will help determine what questions are to be asked and the manner they are asked.

A management that is supportive of the initiative may have specific areas of concern that they require feedback on or they may give the go ahead simply because they have no reason to think that the level of employee satisfaction throughout the organization is anything other than high.

Step 3 – Designing the Survey

Designing a good survey will take some time and effort but by following the basics of survey design and concentrating on the ‘need to know’ questions and removing the ‘nice to know’ a survey will rapidly take shape.

Determining the exact questions that should be asked will be entirely dependent on the individual organization, its structure and the previously identified primary need and objectives of the employee survey.

When considering what questions to ask consideration should be given to how the results are to be analyzed. For example there is nearly always a wish to ask for individual comments but these free text answers can be very time consuming and cumbersome to analyze and should therefore be used very sparingly.

Online surveys make it practical to conduct multiple smaller surveys than one very long survey and avoid the higher the drop out rate that are associate with longer surveys.

Step 4 – Checking And Testing

Grammar, Spelling And Clarity

Before publishing the survey make a careful check for spelling and typing mistakes and incorrect grammar. If available it is always recommended that you have a colleague who has not been involved in the survey design to proof read the survey with clean eyes, if no colleague is available try to take a break before checking through the survey again.

Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say

When checking the survey consider the survey from the respondent’s viewpoint, you may know what you mean by each question but will the employee?

Allow The Employee To Answer Truthfully

Where the employee will be required to choose from a number of available responses, closed questions, have you allowed the employee to answer accurately? Make good use of answer response options like ‘No Comment’, ‘Not Applicable’ or ‘Don’t know’ where you have made the question mandatory but the employee may not be able or wish to answer.

Give consideration to allowing the employee to include an ‘Other’ answer but be mindful that ‘Other’ answers add to the complexity when analyzing the survey results.

Don’t Insist on a Response to Questions that may not have one

Check that for questions that have been made mandatory that you definitely do require an answer, for example open questions that ask for additional comments should not be mandatory unless you really do require the respondent to write a comment.

Check that the Data can be Analyzed

Make another check of the survey but this time examine how the results of the survey will be analyzed. Consider how you are likely to want to analyze the survey data, have you asked the right questions to be able to perform detailed analysis? For example if you wanted to view the detailed response data from the perspective of the different genders, or maybe departments, check you have asked the employee to indicate their own gender and/or department.

Don’t Ask More Questions than you Need to

Consider all the questions in the survey and ensure that they are all ‘need to know’ questions.

Test The Link And Try Completing The Survey

Publish the survey and then send the survey’s link to colleagues who will be able to help you test the survey. By completing the survey yourself you will get a feel for the survey from a respondent’s point of view. From your own and others feedback stop and make adjustments to the survey as required.

Continue to repeat this process until you are happy with the survey.

Check The Data

Take time to view the online summary results of the test data and confirm that the data is being collected in a manner that can be properly analyzed and that will give meaningful results.

Step 5 – Deploying and Promoting the Survey

Where all or the majority of employees have access to the internet or company intranet deploying the online survey is as easy as ABC, either via email or by establishing a link to the survey from your own website or Intranet.

If there are employees that do not have direct access to the Internet there may be a number of alternatives that can be used such as issuing the survey in printed form, providing access through a shared terminal or giving them an incentive to complete the survey at home.

Step 6 – Monitoring The Survey

While the survey is in progress you will be able to view the summary results online and also monitor in real-time the number of surveys that have been both started and completed.

If after a few days the number of completed surveys falls short of the expected target it is advisable to send periodic reminders to employees asking them to complete the survey.

Step 7 – Analyzing the Results

There are no hard and fast rules for analyzing the data. Much will depend on the specific survey, the questions that are asked and the number of responses that are received.

On the proviso that the right questions have been asked a number of ‘headline’ results will often stand out when the survey data is first analyzed that can provide you with an overview and an assessment of the general mood of the organization.

Where the results give areas of concern a more detailed analysis may be advisable. For example if employees were asked if they felt the organization provided equal opportunities to both genders it would be useful to have a gender split and if say 25% gave a negative response the ability to drill down further to see what the gender split was of the 25% that answered negatively. Was the negative view shared by employees of both genders, consistent throughout the organization, or was it restricted to a particular gender and/or a particular department?

Step 8 – Further Action

The most important step is more likely to be the last. The results of an employee survey will either confirm that the perfect organization really does exist or, and more likely, it will by the individual and common concerns that are raised identify the areas that are less than perfect.

It may prove necessary to conduct further, more detailed surveys, to target specific areas. For example the results of a survey may reveal that employees working in a particular department are unhappy, but the reasons for their dissatisfaction may not be clear. A highly focused follow-up survey may help reveal the root causes.

When employee surveys are run on a regular basis an organization that has a track record of addressing the issues highlighted by surveys will see their efforts rewarded in the results of subsequent surveys. Almost all organizations have some problems and it helps an organization’s moral to see that a channel is available that will allow problems to be highlighted, addressed and resolved.

Summary

It is hoped that these guidelines will help an organization conduct successful employee satisfaction surveys, they are however, only a guide.

By utilizing existing technology and conducting surveys online you are now able to monitor the heart beat of an organization, quickly, easily and at minimal cost.

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