Employee Survey Benefits
Today, employee surveys are no longer limited to employee attitudes. They also capture data on employee satisfaction, company feedback, and more.
Below we cover some of the current major uses and benefits of employee surveys. Including how to use them, and what they can do for your company.
Major survey types
No two surveys are exactly the same. They differ based on company size, culture, and survey objectives. However, there are some reoccurring survey types that continue to pop up across industries.
- Climate surveys –surveys structured around key indicators of employee engagement. This includes (but is not limited to) job satisfaction, leadership, and rewards.
- 360-degree feedback surveys –used to assess the performance of an employee by considering various perspectives from key stakeholders in their work.
- Employee onboarding surveys –also known as new hire surveys. These are surveys measuring the experience of new employees.
- Capability assessment tools –surveys which provide insight into individual capabilities. These surveys help inform position descriptions, learning, and development activities.
Survey Benefits
We’ve already briefly covered some of the benefits of online surveys. Now we are going to focus on the benefits of the most common survey type which is employee engagement surveys (climate surveys).
1. Measure levels of satisfaction
Low job satisfaction puts your business at risk. Employee disengagement, absenteeism, and high turnover are all linked to low job satisfaction levels. In addition, Gallup has estimated that disengaged employees cost U.S. companies $450 to $550 billion in lost productivity per year. On top of that, Work Institute has approximated that the average employee exit costs 33% of that employee’s annual salary.
An employee survey helps your business to get ahead of these costs. To detect where and why poor job satisfaction is occurring and fix it quickly. Data on job satisfaction also works as a metric to track yearly improvement and measure the outcome of company initiatives.
2. Understand key improvement areas
An employee survey helps identify core areas important to employees. It also measures the level of satisfaction in these areas. By doing so, it allows your company to directly target those areas that employees feel are underperforming.
Areas that are of high importance and low satisfaction become priority for management and human resources teams. This stops your HR team from fixating on the wrong issues, and spending valuable resources improving company areas that are not significant.
3. Identify the drivers of employee satisfaction
Sometimes employees may say one thing but mean another. An employee survey can cut through this clutter by combining different parts of the survey data to draw meaningful insights.
For example, employees may say they do not care about their salary. Yet, the survey reveals a correlation between high job satisfaction and higher salaries.
4. Segment by cohort
In addition to overall results, response segmentation allows employee survey data to be shown by cohort.
This provides your organisation with the opportunity to create separate training items and unique follow-up tasks.
5. Identify good management
An employee survey can break down results by the management team. This way the survey can identify which managers are doing well, and which are underperforming, from the perspective of their subordinates.
This data has the potential to provide your organisation with unique manager-specific follow-up criteria for HR.
6. Improve communication
Employee surveys open up a new line of communication. The anonymity offered in an employee survey helps employees to be honest in their feedback and responses. Bridging the gap between employees and upper management.
7. Show you care
An employee survey is a way for your business to reach out and show that you’re listening. Employees can be rest assured that their voices are valued thanks to this proactive approach.
8. A representative view
Other employee feedback outlets such as meeting directly with management, or an employee comment box, provides bias. You are likely to only hear from the employees with major issues with the company. Meanwhile those with smaller issues, or who are naturally unconfrontational, will remain unheard.
An employee survey puts a stop to this bias by allowing you to collect the voice of employees company wide.
9. Feature results in recruitment
Data on high-scoring criteria within the company be used in recruitment campaigns and marketing.
Show off to potential employees how great the company is, and what employees are currently loving about your business.
Want to make sure you’re getting all the benefits?
A CiVS employee survey is designed to help capture as much data as possible and hand it back to you in its best easy-to-read form. Making the most out of all the employee survey benefits available. We’ve got all the data handled, so that you can focus on using the provided insights to better your company and employees.
Interested in learning more? contact the CiVS team at info@civs.com.au or give us a call at (08) 6314 0580.