Your employees are one of your most valuable assets; it’s important to treat them as such. Research suggests that overall employee satisfaction is only 45%. To combat this, your organization needs to understand what motivates your employees and what keeps them satisfied. Many factors shape an employee’s experience with your company, so learning to recognize how employees react to these influences is beneficial to improving employee satisfaction and productivity.
Employee experience surveys can be helpful because they give human resources and management a deeper look into how the overall employee experience influences retention rates, employee engagement, and company performance.
What is an Employee Experience Survey?
An employee experience survey is a tool used to measure an employee’s satisfaction and motivation with their job and their company. When the employee feedback is synthesized and aggregated into useful insights, organizations can form an actionable plan and make necessary changes to improve the employee experience.
Employee Opinion and Satisfaction Surveys – These surveys measure the views and perceptions that employees have about the organization, management, and their departments.
Employee Culture Surveys – These surveys can be used to assess whether the employee’s point of view aligns with the organization or its departments.
Employee Engagement Surveys – Engagement surveys are used to measure an employee’s motivation, commitment, and/or passion for their job and the company.
Some companies use employee experience surveys when an employee leaves the company, essentially as a form of an exit survey. Other companies may decide to initiate an employee experience survey as a one-time project, while others use regularly scheduled employee experience surveys.
If your company is interested in doing regular surveys, you should consider doing full-length, in-depth employee experience surveys annually. This is a practical way to get regular feedback without becoming tedious. You can also execute shorter surveys in the interim, perhaps every month or every six weeks. Known as pulse surveys, these short, frequent surveys can help you identify issues early on, or focus on and monitor specific areas for progress.
The Importance of Employee Experience
The employee experience is everything that an employee encounters, experiences, and feels from the first encounter with your company to the last. From interviews to onboarding and training, to daily work experience, to management oversight and employee recognition, to the time they exit the company, everything that affects an employee’s experience is important to understand, so that you can determine how it affects your company.
Employee experience matters because happy people have better brain function, and this is going to be better for their overall productivity and success in the workplace. Poor employee satisfaction can lead to many potential negative outcomes:
- Unsatisfied workers are unlikely to give their best effort or be fully productive.
- Unhappy or unsatisfied employees can lead to negative or toxic work environments.
- Unsatisfied employees can tarnish your company’s reputation, even if unintentionally.
- Retention rates will suffer from unsatisfied workers quitting, and/or from the toxic work environment they create.
An unsatisfied workforce will be obvious to potential hires and will deter talented individuals from coming aboard.
Many employees are leaving their jobs without even having new employment lined up, so improving the employee experience can protect against the great resignation and help you retain quality employees, boost employee morale, and improve productivity. While there are other initiatives you can do to improve the employee experience, the employee experience survey allows you to pinpoint the specific areas that need the most focus.
What to Include in Your Employee Experience Survey
It is imperative to design the survey in a way that gives you measurable results, so there are many things to consider when designing an employee experience survey. What do you want to know? What do you intend to do with the information once you have it? What goals do you have for your company? You need to create the survey with obtainable results in mind, but you also need to consider your employees. You want them to know that you respect their time, that their input is valued, and that they will see results through meaningful changes within the company.
Employee Engagement Survey Best Practices
To get the best results, you need to give your employees a survey that they are willing to complete, and that can be analyzed accurately so that you can implement a realistic action plan based on the results.
- Keep the survey short – respect your employees’ time if you want them to complete it.
- Start with easy questions – you want them to feel successful and willing to continue the survey.
- End with easy questions – let them end on a positive note, not feeling bogged down by their responses.
- Make sure each question only has one focus – your results will be muddled if you cannot analyze their answers correctly.
- Avoid technical jargon – most of the company has other specialties and may not be familiar with the terminology associated with human resources.
- Offer anonymity – a completely anonymous survey may yield more honest answers if employees are not worried about judgment; remember that even requesting demographic information such as age, gender, or race, could make employees feel targeted.
Employee Experience Survey Sample Questions
You should choose questions that will give you measurable data. Remember, these are sample questions, and you should customize them or use them as a starting point for creating questions that will reflect your company.
- Is employee engagement important at your company?
- Do you feel the company is open to change?
- What one thing could management change that would improve the employee experience?
- Do you feel valued by your company?
- Is your role in the organization clear to you?
- Do you feel your talents and skills are being utilized to their fullest potential?
- Are you satisfied with your role and responsibilities?
- Are you provided with appropriate training when any new system, procedure, or software is introduced?
- Do you receive constructive feedback from management?
- Does management value your feedback?
- Do you feel management is invested in the success of their team/department?
- Do you feel management keeps employees informed about company news and events?
- Is work distributed evenly across your team/department?
- Do you feel the organization supports a healthy work-life balance?
- Are you satisfied with the physical environment of your workplace?
- Are you proud to work for this organization?
- Do you never/rarely/occasionally/often think about looking for another job?
- Do you see yourself working for this organization in two years?
- Does the company provide adequate opportunities for promotion or growth?
- Do you receive appropriate recognition when you do your job well?
- Do you feel connected to your coworkers?
- Is there a strong sense of teamwork in the organization?
- Do you feel the company is inclusive/fair to all employees?
- Describe your experience with this company in three words.
- How happy are you at work?
You will likely want your survey to collect a range of response types, while still keeping a few things in mind. Closed questions like Yes/No, multiple-choice, or scale questions with a finite number of answers (i.e. rating something on a scale of 1-5) can be analyzed more concretely, and make trending analysis easier when your company conducts ongoing surveys.
Fill in the blank or open-ended questions, however, allow employees to voice their thoughts, feelings, and opinions more clearly. Too many open-ended questions could make the survey take longer and may result in abandonment, but a few questions of this type can help employees recognize that they have a voice within the company.
How to Use an Employee Experience Survey
It is important to use the employee experience survey results to improve the employee experience and the overall culture of your workplace. Make sure your questions reflect areas where you are prepared to take action. If you are not prepared or willing to develop an action plan that will yield improved results for employees in specific areas, do not ask related questions. Not taking action in specific areas of concern can make employees feel like they waste their time on surveys, or that management doesn’t take them seriously or care about their opinions.
Taking results seriously shows your employees that you value their opinions. Acting on employee feedback also signals to your employees that you value them as employees and want to improve their overall workplace happiness and satisfaction.
Depending on your employee experience survey metric results, you may decide to focus on overall employee satisfaction, workplace morale, employee engagement levels, or employee productivity. Whether you choose to make small changes in multiple areas or overhaul policies to improve the employee experience, it’s important to let your employees know they were heard.
Boost Your Employee Experience with Refresh
Employee experience surveys are just one component of changing the overall employee experience, and you need the right tools to get the right results. Whether you need to create polls and employee experience surveys, improve your onboarding process, better manage communication between teams, or improve employee recognition efforts, Refresh lets you approach human resources with an all-in-one platform. Refresh is designed to give employees a better experience, while also making human resources more streamlined and productive. Contact us today for more information or to schedule a demo and see Refresh in action.