Many companies will send out surveys but do not know how helpful surveys can actually be. As a result, they will use surveys as a routine instead of using them to improve their user’s experience and boost their overall performance. After all, you can’t say that every survey is the same or created equal.
Employee feedback surveys help you identify the issues your employees may be going through that you are not aware of, and to say the least, they will find issues faster than you do! So, it is pretty important to use them to ensure employee engagement is at maximum level, or else you’ll never have a good team.
Let’s not wait any further because, in this article, we will find out the most important things you should include in your employee feedback survey.
Let’s dive right in!
The 5 important things to include in an employee feedback survey
Define your purpose
Employee feedback surveys are essential to conduct if you want to improve business productivity and gather information regarding what your employees think about your company in general. It’s similar to when you complete a customer survey, but it’s for your employees instead this time.
Employees are a priority, and you need them more than anything else in your business. If your employees are engaged, your customers will most likely be engaged too.
So, before you set up your survey, you need to define your purpose of what you want to achieve after you get your employee feedback survey. Overall, this is what you will get when you improve your employee surveys:
- Employees will perform up to 5x better when they are being heard
- Employees will feel more integrated with the company and have more accountability
- Leadership, internal communication, and teamwork will be at a higher level
- Opportunity to spot issues within your employees
Identify where you currently are and create a report
Before asking any questions in your survey, you must know what level of employee engagement you have in your business.
For instance, you can consider asking the following questions:
- From 1-10, how engaged do you think you are?
- What’s one thing you would change about your job?
- If another employer offered you a higher salary, would you consider relocating?
These questions are some preliminary data you can consider using. However, they provide a general summary of your employees, how they think, and their current level of engagement.
Moreover, with this preliminary data, you can get report inspiration and create them with free customizable templates without possessing any design skills. Reports will give you adequate knowledge about your employees to further set up surveys.
Include an employee assistance program survey
An employee assistance program is a service that allows you to identify any issues affecting employee well-being, mental health, or performance at the workplace. Usually, an EAP typically includes short-term counseling or an assessment. However, it can also be a survey that involves the same set of questions you would find in an employee assistance program.
For example, Perkbox’s employee assistance program identifies employee issues through the following topics:
- Mental health issues: Depression, anxiety, or any other issues that are related to mental health
- Work issues: stress, burnout, or a change in the workplace
- Drugs: includes employees who might have any drug addictions or have family members included in these paths
- Financial advice: help with creating budgets and more
- Legal advice: marriage counseling, support, advice, and more
Moreover, employee assistance program surveys are similar. For instance, a commonly used one is Survey Monkey’s EAP survey, where there are a set of questions that ask how an EAP helped employees identify their problems. Different questions allow you to scale them from ‘Strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree.’ Here are a few examples of the questions asked that require you to rate them on a scale in the survey that you can consider using as well:
- I was absent at work
- EAP helped me with my issues
- My job performance improved after I used EAP
- My counselor was helpful
- I was not very satisfied with my life overall
Ask the right questions
The better questions you ask, the better results you will get. First, however, what are the right questions to ask?
Every company may have a different perspective on the right or wrong questions you should be asking. That is because they operate in various industries and have other questions to ask.
However, to not complicate anything, here are some tips you can use to include the right questions for your employee feedback survey:
- Keep your questions short: Avoid asking long questions. They will require more time to complete and may even complicate your employees. Moreover, don’t ask too many questions either. Surveys are best served when they are short and straightforward.
- Avoid asking multiple questions in one: what happens when you do this? You might only get employees confused and get a less reliable answer.
- Don’t ask difficult questions: some difficult questions may include asking your employees what they think about their managers. But, of course, they’ll leave a good response almost all of the time, so avoid asking these questions at all costs.
A few examples of good questions you can ask
To further help you identify the right questions you can ask in an employee engagement survey, we did some careful research and came up with the following.
What are your goals? List the most important ones
It helps identify if your employees are dreaming big or not. Do they have big goals or not? This dramatically determines their level of motivation and where they see themselves at your company.
Have you been looking for another job in the past months?
Now, this question might seem quite sketchy since a few employees won’t tell you whether they are looking for another job or not. However, this will depend on how transparent you have been with your employees. Thus, if you have been, they will be honest about how they feel about your job and if they want to look for another one.
Have you accomplished any career goals at this job
This helps you identify if your employees have gone the extra inch and achieved anything at your business. Additionally, it’ll help you figure out whether they are engaged in the workplace or not. If they have achieved anything, it indicates that they see themselves in the right place.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how engaged are you daily?
If your employees come to the workplace bored and ignore what they are doing, you might lose them quicker than you think. So, consider this question one of the most important ones and know that this will answer what kind of engagement your employees have at your workplace.
How likely are you to leave this business if it offered you a 10% salary increase?
This question says it all. If employees don’t find themselves happy at your business, no salary increase will be enough to make them stay. However, let’s not forget that salaries are also a significant factor in employees leaving. So, if you get many good answers to this question, then salaries are the key factor to why they might think of leaving.
Additionally, salaries are a direct reason why employees are engaged and would like to stay, so if you aren’t paying your employees enough, they’ll not want to stick around.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how much have we recognized your work as a company?
Employee recognition plays a vital role in keeping your employees happy. In fact, according to toa report, 91% of employees claimed that employee recognition is a strong culture that makes them want to work for someone. Additionally, organizations that are successful in employee recognition are 3x more likely to increase employee retention.
Conclusion
Well, that’s all for this article. These are the five things that we think are important to include in your employee feedback surveys. Employees are the backbone of our business, and if they aren’t satisfied, you might be losing them sooner than you think. Moreover, not only will that damage your brand’s reputation, but it’ll also reduce the overall performance of your business.
Hence, you need to undertake the proper steps and carefully take action after receiving the survey results. Associate yourself with your employees, and if they aren’t happy, you shouldn’t be satisfied either. Additionally, your primary focus should be to enhance overall business performance and what better way to do it than this?
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