Why are Employee Surveys an invaluable tool for HR Practices?
Do you really know what your employees are thinking? What is their overall job satisfaction? How do they experience the company culture? Is there a sense of inclusivity and belonging? Is training effective and valued? What are their opinions of their manager and senior leadership?
Employee surveys are an HR practitioner’s greatest tool when it comes to gathering employee feedback at scale, uncovering important trends in employee sentiment across your organization, and understanding what motivates your employees most. Surveys also proactively identify what is and isn’t working for employees and allow HR to make changes, as well as track the progress of those changes.
Surveys are equally invaluable for employees. They give them a platform to share feedback, encourage them to reflect on their own experiences and change their behaviors, and empower employees to be change agents and have a stake in the outcomes. Most of all, surveys convey to employees that their voice is valued.
Types of Employee Surveys
The “listening strategy” that one takes can come in many different forms – candidate experience, onboarding, employee satisfaction, pulse, onboarding, workplace culture, exit, diversity and inclusion, training, annual, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) employee surveys; each is designed to measure different aspects of employee engagement, satisfaction, and commitment as described below.
- Candidate Experience: Provides insights into what’s driving candidates to your company and how your current processes, brand, and culture are perceived.
- Onboarding: New employees share their initial experience and integration into the company.
- Employee Satisfaction: Measures general happiness and contentment with the job, company culture, work environment, and relationships with management.
- Pulse: Typically consists of a few questions and occurs quarterly so you understand employee views and the impact of new programs and initiatives.
- Workplace Culture: Examines employee perceptions of the company culture, values, and overall work environment.
- DEI-B: Assesses employee perspectives on equity, inclusivity, and belonging in the workplace.
- Training: Evaluate the effectiveness of training programs and employee satisfaction with training content and delivery. This can be done at the end of training programs or as stand-alone assessments.
- Annual: A comprehensive review of employee engagement across various aspects of the job, company, and management effectiveness.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Asks how likely employees are to recommend the company to others.
- Manager: Skip level, roundtable, and “ask- me-anything sessions.
- Exit: Departing employees share reasons for leaving, giving insight into areas of improvement.
Best Practices in Creating Your Survey
- Safeguarding Confidentiality: Ensuring the data is confidential is critical in both collecting, analyzing, and sharing the data – employees feeling their responses can be tracked back to them is a common concern, regardless of how many times you assure them it cannot.
- Length of Survey: The number of questions should be appropriate for the type of survey being conducted. “Most experts agree that including too many items, and including items that are confusing or repetitious, can wreck a survey. Instead, survey questions should be simple and short, using terminology familiar to all employees” (SHRM, Managing Employee Surveys). Candidate, onboarding, exit, DEI-B, training, and pulse surveys should take less than 10 minutes to complete and have no more than 10 questions. “A general annual employee survey may be longer but no more than 75 questions and take no longer than 20 to 30 minutes to complete. If the survey is too long, the response rate will likely be very low” (SHRM, Managing Employee Surveys).
- Survey Questions: All questions should be relatable to the company and can be actionable, if necessary. Asking questions that are good to know or meant to remind employees how great the company is, are not of value. In addition, being mindful of how we ask a question is equally important. “Surveys should be sprinkled with negative statements. If a survey is filled with positive statements such as “My boss is considerate” or “My team is helpful,” the results may be unrealistically rosy.” (SHRM, Managing Employee Surveys).
- Survey Responses: Limit the survey responses to 3 or 5 response choices ranging from strongly agree and strongly disagree. Instead of neutral, consider adding a category of “have not experienced” or “do not know.” The neutral category is an “easy out” response and does not give you any meaningful data to work with post-survey. Along the same lines, giving employees the option to provide comments for each question to offer context or explanation for their rating is ideal to get the most from the survey.
- Response Rates: Overall, participation rates tell you a lot about the level of employee engagement. A 100% response rate may sound ideal, but it is not realistic. What is a good response rate? For companies <50 you typically can expect an 80-90% response rate but the larger the company the rates drop. If you are getting lower response rates, ask yourself: Did you allow enough time for the survey to be completed? Did you translate the survey into a local language? Are your leaders ambassadors to the process and encouraging participation? Did you respond to past survey results timely and clearly?
During the survey collection period, be sure to continue communicating with your employees by clarifying instructions, reinforcing the confidentiality of their responses, reminders of when the survey closes, and leadership messaging encouraging employee participation.
Post Survey – What to do Next
The data collected and shared by your employees is a treasure trove if used correctly. First and foremost, thank employees for their participation and, if known, provide them with a timeline of when you can share a high-level overview of the results. Timely feedback of the survey results with details including both the good and the areas of improvement needed. Effectively communicating an action plan, and reinforcing the value of their participation, is essential to employees understanding how they fit into larger company strategies.
Sharing the details of the survey can be done in a few different ways, depending on the company culture. It’s best to use several approaches to ensure you’re reaching all employees at all levels. Developing a plan as to who will share what and when must be decided as part of the overall communication plan.
Reviewing the survey’s responses with managers is critical to the success of making and sustaining change. Provide guidance on how to read the data points so leadership at all levels takes ownership of the results and commits to the necessary actions to address areas for improvement. Disseminating results should begin broadly and be driven down in the company as follows:
- Town Hall Meeting: Start broadly, with open, honest feedback about the areas that need improvement and what will change. Senior leadership sharing the results and making commitments for change is powerful. Employees want to see that their leadership team is on board and ready to act upon their feedback.
- Engage Managers: Take it to the next level and encourage managers to share results at staff and 1-1 meetings. Survey results can be influenced by the relationship between the employee and manager – sharing the data in a meeting setting may reconnect the manager with their team, thus improving the workplace environment.
- Focus Groups: Host small groups where you can review the results with the group it affects most. “It is important that the questions asked target a few specific topics. Rehashing the entire survey will not produce useful results and may communicate a lack of confidence in the original survey” (SHRM, Managing Employee Surveys). If employees are having different experiences, try to uncover why. While differences by geographies, business lines, or departments might make sense, it’s worthwhile to dig deeper to understand.
- Communicate, Communicate, Communicate! Be sure that you have a mechanism for tracking the progress being made. Sharing updates on all the changes being made is essential to employees’ continued engagement. Providing updates on small changes and actions following a survey shows your employees that you’re willing to take immediate action, even if larger improvements require more time to implement.
Employees will invest the time to participate in a survey if they see a return on their investment. They want to hear the results of the survey, regardless of how positive or negative the feedback might be and they want to know whether there will be timely action taken. If no action is taken by the company, ongoing participation in future surveys will decline and feedback will be lost. This is one of the most important aspects of employee engagement surveys that must not be overlooked.
Conclusion:
Creating the survey, interpreting the results, developing the communication plan, and managing the change can be time-consuming and require monitoring progress and pivoting where necessary. This work requires an experienced HR leader or advisor with deep capabilities to support your needs.
Danforth Advisors can help with highly experienced and skilled life sciences HR professionals with deep capabilities to support your needs. We offer interim, fractional, and project-based service delivery models to suit scale without adding fixed costs. We provide best-in-class leadership, strategy, and operations with strong collaboration with compensation and benefits partners and providers.
Let us partner with you to understand your employees, uncover important trends in employee sentiment, and develop plans to make changes to further increase employee engagement.
About the Author: Darren DeRosa is a Sr HR Advisor at Danforth Advisors and a seasoned HR executive experienced in working with Fortune 500 companies and PE firms. His global experience spans all core areas of HR, with expertise in shaping and building a high-performing, highly engaged culture.
Read the first article in the series: “ How to Align with Employees on Their Benefits Needs.”
Please look for our next article focused on Performance Management.