What's the best way to survey and improve your employees?

1 Why survey your employees?

Surveying your employees is not just a nice gesture, it's a strategic tool to gain insights into your workforce's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges. By asking your employees about their opinions, preferences, needs, and expectations, you can identify what motivates them, what frustrates them, what they want to learn, and how they want to grow. You can also assess how well they align with your organizational goals, values, and culture, and how engaged they are with their work and their colleagues. These insights can help you improve your workforce management by making data-driven decisions, designing effective policies and programs, and creating a positive work environment.

2 How to design your employee survey?

Before you launch your employee survey, you need to have a clear purpose, scope, and audience for it. You need to define what you want to learn from your employees, what topics you want to cover, and who you want to target. You also need to choose the type, format, and frequency of your survey, depending on your objectives and resources. For example, you can use different types of surveys, such as engagement surveys, satisfaction surveys, pulse surveys, or 360-degree feedback surveys, to measure different aspects of your workforce. You can also use different formats, such as online, paper, or phone surveys, to suit your preferences and capabilities. And you can vary the frequency of your surveys, from annual, quarterly, monthly, or weekly, to capture different levels of feedback.

3 How to write your survey questions?

The quality of your survey questions is critical for the quality of your survey results. To ensure honest and useful responses from your employees, you need to write clear, concise, relevant, and unbiased questions. Additionally, you should balance the number, type, and order of your questions to avoid overwhelming or confusing them. Here are some tips to write effective survey questions: use simple and specific language that your employees can understand and relate to; avoid leading, loaded, or double-barreled questions that can influence or distort their answers; employ a mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions to get both quantitative and qualitative data; use a consistent and appropriate scale for your closed-ended questions such as Likert scales, rating scales, or yes/no options; group your questions by theme and order them from general to specific or from easy to difficult.

5 How to analyze and report your survey results?

Once you collect your survey responses, you need to analyze and report them in an appropriate manner. To do this, you must use the right methods and tools to process, interpret, and visualize your data. Additionally, it is important to communicate your findings and recommendations to stakeholders, such as managers, leaders, or employees. Thus, to analyze and report survey results, you should clean and organize your data by removing errors, duplicates, or outliers. Then you must calculate and compare key metrics and indicators of your survey such as response rate, completion rate, average score, or net promoter score. After that, identify and explain the patterns, trends, gaps, or outliers in your data with the use of charts, graphs, tables, or dashboards. Furthermore, draw conclusions and recommendations from your data based on your survey objectives and expectations. Lastly, share and discuss your results and recommendations with stakeholders through reports, presentations or meetings.

6 How to act on your survey results?

The final and most important step of your employee survey is to act on your results. You should prioritize and plan your actions according to their urgency, importance, and feasibility. Involve and empower your employees in the implementation of these actions by seeking their ideas, opinions, or suggestions, or by assigning them roles or responsibilities. You should also keep your employees informed on the progress and outcomes of your actions through newsletters, emails, or meetings. Finally, you should repeat your survey regularly to measure the changes and improvements in your workforce and identify new areas of opportunity or challenge.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?