The value of an employee survey

In an era of job uncertainty, conducting an employee engagement survey can be a silver bullet for your business. Employers of any size will benefit from surveying employees, but they can be particularly useful for small companies who may find themselves at that growth point where they have moved beyond the ability to know (in theory) what concerns their employees, and what they care about.

At my prior company, we started doing our annual employee survey when we had about 30 employees, and we continued the survey each year as the company grew. The feedback we received was invaluable, and it provided us with much needed insight into the minds and motivations of our employees.

I believe that with employee surveys, there is no “one size fits all” approach. There are plenty of generic surveys available online that you could quickly implement, but the results you get from a survey will only be as good as what you put into it. If you really want to reach into the minds of your employees, you need to create a thoughtful, customized survey that will address very specific issues that are important to your company.

When creating a survey, here are a few tips:

1. Keep it anonymous. If you want employees to be brutally honest (and you should), then give them the freedom to speak their minds without the fear of retribution.
   
2. Keep it simple, and manage the length. Ideally, employees should be able to complete the survey in 30 minutes or less. That is ample time to collect quality feedback, and employees won’t feel the time commitment is unreasonable. If possible, allow them to take the survey on company time.
   
3. Have a diverse team of employees craft the questions. By having people at different levels within the organization weigh in on the content, you will cover more of what the relevant issues are, and probably get better participation too. 
   
4. Ask a baseline of questions that you can use year-over-year. This will allow you to track trends as you continue to conduct the survey down the road. 
   
5. Provide a reward or incentive for employees to complete the survey. If it’s anonymous, offer an incentive to the company as a whole if you get 100% participation (maybe a nice lunch, or a drawing for a coveted gift).
   
6. Be prepared for negative feedback. Even the most glowing survey results are likely to have a few zingers in them, so keep a thick skin, remember why you are conducting the survey, and don’t take the feedback personally.
   
7. Be transparent and timely with the results. Don’t hide results from employees. All quantitative feedback should be provided, and open-ended comments should be provided in aggregate to cover the common threads. The sooner the better too – you should be ready to give employees high-level results within a month of completion along with a game plan for how you will implement changes moving forward.
   
8. Use the feedback to make changes that will benefit the employees and better the company. This is far and away the most important of all. Why conduct the survey if you are not prepared to respond to it? If employees don’t feel that their feedback is useful and valued, they are likely to stop responding to future surveys.

Conducting a survey doesn’t have to cost a fortune. The price point is really up to the methods you choose for creating and administering the survey. Savvy companies can take the “do it yourself” approach using a tool like SurveyMonkey, or they can hire a professional consultant to help them craft and administer the survey (which will likely result in time & money saved for the overall effort).

If you take the time to create a thoughtful survey that doesn’t shy away from addressing tough issues, your company will realize a much greater return on investment than you might expect.