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VHRDATEmployee Surveys
VHRDATEmployee Surveys
Employees have the single greatest impact in customer service and significantly affect
quality and profitability. Understanding how employees feel about working in your
organization is critical to developing and retaining a high performance workforce.
Employee Surveys can be a very useful tool, if designed and utilized correctly. They can
also become an inconvenience and frustration for employees if they are not. Many
organizations do not maximize the potential benefits of the employee survey process
because they do not put the necessary thought into survey design. Often, a generic list
of questions are selected that seem to capture the themes that they want to know more
about, but in fact, they are not sufficiently calibrated to the organization’s objectives and
strategic plans for the results to truly be a useful measure or the basis for impactful
action-planning.
Survey design is the foundation for an effective feedback and action-planning program.
You need to first identify and think about things like your organizational objectives,
culture, strengths and challenges so that a survey can be designed that really gets at the
things that are important to the organization.
Participation is the key to any employee survey. Without strong participation, results will
be weak and may not truly or accurately represent the opinions of the majority of
employees. Communicate to employees the importance and significance of participating
in the survey; it is critical to employee acceptance of the program and participation.
Ensure managers create an environment where employees are able and encouraged to
take a few minutes out of their day to complete the survey.
It is important to maintain a high level of confidentiality when introducing the need for
survey feedback, implementing the survey, and gathering feedback from employees.
There will be an excellent participation rate if the employees know their ideas and
recommendations are kept confidential. Conversely, you cannot expect to receive
comments that are completely candid and honest if there is a potential of being identified
as having made them. Employees want to help make their environment better, but not at
the price of being disciplined for criticizing the company.
Types of Surveys
There are several ways to conduct surveys of your employees. It is critical that whatever
method is used, confidentiality is a primary consideration.
You now have the results of your survey – it is important to actually act upon the results:
Communicate
The first thing that you should do is to communicate the results to the employees. If you
don’t share the results with employees, even if results are not what you hoped for, they
will assume that results are bad and that you are hiding them.
Action Planning
Next, you will want to explore further what the survey responses actually mean through
discussions with individual and/or small groups of employees. It is most effective when
you can put together teams of employees. Depending on the size of your organization,
this may be a selection of employees from across the company, or if you have a larger
team, you can have managers lead full department/team meetings. The more
employees you can involve, the better.
Welcome
o Thank employees for attending
o Outline agenda
o Explain the purpose and objectives of the meeting
Review Results
o Discuss what employees feel about the overall results as well as
investigate further any very high and very low results
o Identify successes from the survey and others that employees might
suggest
o Try to rank by importance to the employees the areas that received lower
ratings
o What area do the employees feel that they want to focus on?
How to Effectively Action Plan
o Select no more than two or three areas for improvement as priorities to be
worked on first
o Select one or two strengths/successes that can be built upon
o Using the SMART Objectives (template available in Managing
Performance and Training & Development sections of this website)
approach, develop action steps to be taken by the company, manager
and employees to address the areas for improvement and build upon the
strengths/successes
Implementation and Follow-up
o Discuss how the action steps will be implemented, including getting
volunteers to stay involved and assist
o Discuss how using the SMART Objectives, you will monitor, track and
communicate progress
Summary and Next Steps
o Recap what was learned in the meeting
o Review what was agreed to and who is going to be responsible for what
o Establish a time for getting together again to follow-up on progress
Questions/Closing
o Congratulate the team on their participation and the results
In this section, you will find a list of questions, grouped into subject areas that you can
select from if you are building your own survey or use to help you if developing it with an
outside vendor.
Management
Do you feel that you have the opportunity to advance at <Company Name>?
Do you feel that employees are promoted based on performance?
Do you feel that you’ve had enough training to perform your job adequately?
If you had the opportunity to participate in additional training and
development courses, would this interest you?
Do you feel that training and development is a priority at <Company Name>?
Communication
Are you satisfied with the amount of information you receive from
Management about what's going on inside the Company?
Do you feel that Company meetings are frequent enough?
Were your expectations of this position close to what the position was
actually like?
Are you well informed about targets, work progress, and future plans?
Are there opportunities available for you to express your ideas?
Is there a good degree of communication between departments within
<Company Name>?
Work-Life Balance
Are you able to maintain a reasonable balance between work and personal
life?
In emergencies, does <Company Name> adequately accommodate your
personal needs?
Is the stress level in your job acceptable?
Is the amount of time you have to work each week reasonable?