An Employee satisfaction survey provides valuable information about your team and their business perception. Depending on the questions asked, you can also gather insight on how to improve processes and in turn provide a better buying and customer support experience.
In this blog, we describe the 5 key steps to conduct a successful employee satisfaction survey.
How to conduct an Employee Satisfaction Survey?
At Arema Connect we perform yearly employee satisfaction surveys for our team, but also provide this service to other companies. They decide to partner with us in order to ensure results transparency and additionally provide support to their in-house team.
1. Understand the Employee Satisfaction Survey Requirements
All surveys are not the same. They share some commonalities; however, you need to design them, implement them and analyse its results in line with your requirements. Deciding on your survey parameters at an early stage will help you to save time and money in the long run. Key elements include:
- What type of feedback are you gathering?
- What is your budget?
- How many employees do you have?
- Do you want to gather quantitative or qualitative information?
- How are you planning to collect the information?
- Do you have the resources in-house to meet these requirements?
2. Create Questionnaire
An employee satisfaction survey usually mixes quantitative and qualitative questions. The idea is to obtain a transversal overview of your employees’ opinion related to different business areas. This can include training, your management team, physical space and feedback about their daily job. Examples of questions are:
- Do you like your job, neither like nor dislike it, or dislike it?
- On the scale listed below please tick the appropriate box, how do you feel in relation to your job?
- What do you think is impacting on you (if anything) from reaching your maximum potential at work?
- Are you supervised too much at work, supervised too little, or supervised about the right amount?
- How realistic are the expectations of the management team?
- Suggestions to improve training
Your questionnaire can also include information related to their expectations and perception of your business. For instance, you could ask:
- How likely is it that you would recommend our company as an employer to a friend or colleague?
- How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a potential client?
- Is there anything that you would like to change in your job?
- How long do you think you will expect to be working with us?
You should find the right balance between open and closed questions, and present them using a nice looking approach. For example, you can use Multiple choices, Star rating or Text boxes.
There are multiple survey software solutions that will help you to design a suitable questionnaire and provide you with suggestions. Software that we use include SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo or Typeform.
3. Collect the Employee Satisfaction Results
Once the survey is created, you should decide what’s the best approach to collect the employee satisfaction feedback. There are multiple channels that you could use but its selection will impact on: budget, time, and the quality of the answers.
- E-mail surveys: If your employees have access to a computer during their working hours, you could send the survey to their e-mail address. This will have a lower cost and data collection can be quicker as multiple people can answer the survey at the same time. It also saves you inputting time as all information will be already stored electronically.
- Phone surveys: Using an autodialer, all your employees can be called and feedback inputted by the market research team. If your questionnaire has a large number of open questions which request in detail explanations, it will allow you to capture richer insight. While this is more time consuming, quality of the information is positively impacted. To ensure the success using this approach, you should guarantee information anonymity and therefore, the survey shouldn’t be performed by someone in your team.
- Postal surveys: You can use paper-based surveys and then assign the inputting task to an administrative person. While time-consuming and it can be prompted for some data inaccuracy, it is a cost-effective manner to gather feedback.
- Face to face surveys: Similar to phone surveys; however, the cost of this approach is higher. It does require a physical space and a dedicated person to conduct one to one interviews.
The selection of one or another method should be driven by your survey type and your objectives; however, you should keep in mind your budget and timeframe for completion.
4. Analyse the Data Gathered
Data analysis is a key step in the process. All surveys should be analysed question by question and findings put within context. You can use basic statistic analysis for quantitative questions; and then use some more advanced techniques to see correlations between questions. For example, does the employees’ satisfaction score have a correlation with the training provided? or maybe with the level of supervision received?
Qualitative open-ended questions require a more in-depth and time-consuming approach to data analysis. Content analysis will require to categorise the data finding trends in the content. Despite is not that straightforward, it will provide you with a richer insight into your employees’ satisfaction level and how to improve it.
5. Act upon the results and findings
Finally, with all the information analysed it is paramount that the management team takes on board the feedback and designs an action plan. The success of future employee satisfaction surveys will be impacted by how you communicate with your team that they have been heard and their feedback is taken into account during the decision making process.
As an example, give a look to our own employee satisfaction survey results.
