Employee Surveys: 5 questions to ask before you start

All organizations should survey their employees on a regular basis. Your organization may have already embedded research into its employee experience, or it may be new to the process, either way, there are several things you should consider before starting the journey.  We have compiled a list of five key questions to ask that will help to ensure your employee survey runs smoothly and results in actionable data.

1.    Why conduct an employee survey?

There are two overarching objectives for conducting an employee survey:

1. To obtain data that will help your organization drive improvement through increasing employees’ engagement and satisfaction with the employee experience.
2. To provide an opportunity for your employees to have their say and let their voice be heard.

These objectives are intrinsically linked. Employee voice is a key driver of engagement, but both objectives should be considered in the decision to conduct employee research to ensure it is a two-way exercise with the needs of stakeholders on both sides considered.

Employee surveys should never be conducted as a tick-box exercise, a transaction an organization feels obliged to make. Viewing employee research as transformational is more constructive and gets the exercise off to a far more positive start.

A comprehensive assessment of the employee experience is generally recommended as a starting point for an employee survey: research that asks employees for their views on how the organization interacts with them at key touch points. These touch points include relationships with their team and manager, the job itself, training and development and how the organization communicates its vision and values. Although employee surveys can be used to probe more specific questions about initiatives or departments, having a benchmark measure across the whole experience is a great first step.

2.    Who do we survey?

An employee survey can either be conducted as a census (all employees are invited to take part) or a sample (invites are sent to a selection of employees). Both options can be useful, but a census is a great place to start and to schedule annually, or at the very least biennially.

A census survey can seem daunting, particularly if your organization is very large or spread over multiple sites, but in many ways a census is easier than a sample survey: communications can be delivered to everyone and a representative sample does not have to be designed.

To make the survey results engaging for managers as well as actionable, you will want to be able to analyse your data at divisional level, departmental level and, where numbers allow, team level. To do this, build in time to map your organizational structure so employees can indicate where they work.

Sample surveys can be useful for pulse surveys (short surveys which take a ‘pulse check’ of how things are going between census surveys), or for a specific piece of research that is only relevant for a subset of the organization.

3.    When do we survey?

There isn’t a perfect time to survey employees. If you plan an annual survey, it is best to stick to the same time each year: it becomes a regular event in the company calendar and helps you plan the build-up, analysis and reporting effectively.

Consider times of the year when there is less pressure on staff, so avoid holiday periods if you are a retailer or the end of the financial year if you are an accountancy firm, for example. Holiday periods are generally best avoided in order to allow as many employees to participate as possible, however providing a three-week window for employees to respond to the survey is good practice to catch those taking a two-week vacation.

Some organisations shy away from surveying during periods of change but gathering feedback at such times is just as important, probably more so.

4.    How do we survey?

Most organisations use an online survey for employee research because it is quick and cost effective to develop, distribute and analyse.  A link to the survey is usually emailed to employees, but the survey can also be accessed from a webpage, a QR code, SMS, or even installed on EPOS technology. If there isn’t an electronic option that suits your needs, more traditional methods such as paper or telephone surveys could be considered. For small organisations, or to investigate very specific issues, focus groups could be an option.

A good response rate is essential to ensure the research is representative and robust. Response rate is calculated by dividing the number of people who responded to your survey by the total number of people invited to take part and multiplying by 100. Response rates vary hugely by organization. Achieving 100% response is not essential, what is more important is that you get a representative response across the organization – enough people from all your key teams, departments and demographic groups to give you data that doesn’t compromise anonymity and which gives you an accurate picture of how different teams are feeling.

A communication campaign to accompany the survey launch is a good way of raising awareness and encouraging responses. So too is a timeline indicating when and how employees will receive the results and a plan for when actions will be taken.

A further barrier to achieving a high response rate is trust. If employees do not feel they can rely on their employer to keep their responses confidential they may choose not to respond, or not to respond honestly. Employee surveys should always be carried out anonymously unless employees give their specific permission for their data to be identifiable. Whereas there is nothing stopping organisations from carrying out employee surveys themselves in-house, many choose to outsource it to ensure an unbiased and confidential process, and to free up time and resource in-house.

5.    What do we ask?

What is asked depends largely on why you are surveying and who you are reaching out to. For a standard census survey, organisations typically ask questions relating to key aspects of the employee experience, i.e.,

• the job
• internal communications
• learning and development
• manager and team relationships
• leadership, vision and values
• equality, diversity and inclusion
• reward and recognition
• health, wellbeing and safety
• customer focus.

It is usual to include a set of questions to assess employees’ connection to the organization overall. These are often referred to as employee engagement questions and seek to understand whether

• employees would recommend their organization as a great place to work
• employees are loyal to their organization
• employees are committed to helping the organization reach its goals
• employees are satisfied overall with their employer.

Employee engagement questions can help to understand, not only how people feel about their employee experience, but how much value they bring to the organization.

Best practice employee surveys ask respondents to rate their agreement to a series of statements about each topic on a five-point scale: strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree. This allows for a nuanced response and gathers data in a format that enables further statistical analysis to be carried out to understand priority areas for.

Employee surveys are a valuable tool that provides an outlet for employees to share their views and voice their concerns and, through doing so, delivers essential insight to employers. Understanding how employees feel and what encourages, or prevents them, from giving their all at work is a foundation from which strong and resilient organizations are built.

If you would like to find out more about how we can help you get the most out of your employee survey, get in touch with our team