Employees are the ‘backbone’ of an organization. If you don’t consider your employees’ views and opinions, you may not be able to assess their satisfaction level in your organization. An employee survey comes in handy here. It helps collect employees’ viewpoints speedily and easily.

Many plugins like the SugarCRM survey module and several others can help create employee surveys fast and effectively.

General Tips on Creating Effective Employee Surveys

• Keep Surveys Short and Relevant

Surveys must be short and concise. Long surveys can sometimes distract the audience and reduce completion rates. So, ensure to keep the surveys short in length. Further, your questions should always be easily understandable and to-the-point.

Also, keep the flow of questions logical to ensure the transition of one to the other smoothly and disconnectedly. The questions shouldn’t be randomly placed or out-of-the-context.

You can use a good-quality SugarCRM customer survey plugin or any other such plugin equipped with next-gen survey features like Skip Logic, Data Piping, Survey Automation, etc.

• Maintain Anonymity

Assuring employees of anonymity and confidentiality is essential. The reason is that this assurance would help you garner the ‘real’ feedback. When employees know that their feedback would stay secure, strictly confidential, and restricted only to the concerned personnel, they would feel ‘free’ to express their genuine uninfluenced opinions. Eventually, the collected feedback will help get the ‘real’ picture of employees’ viewpoints instead of ‘moderated’ responses.

• Share the Survey Results

Be they positive or negative; survey results should be conveyed to employees. Share your surveys’ results via email or publicly announce them to make employees feel ‘heard’ and ‘cared’ for by the organization.

Also, announce your action plan to address employees’ concerns and welcome their suggestions to assure them you would bring the changes required.

Benefits of Employee Surveys

• Employees Feel Empowered

An employee survey enables employees to express their views, concerns, or grievances, making them feel empowered. When customers feel that they can freely express their opinions, it assures them that their voices are heard and contributes to building a conducive working environment for all employees.

• Easy Communication between Various Hierarchical Levels

Opinion surveys help facilitate communication between a team leader and team members. This saves the time required in meeting every team member in person and employees can easily convey their ‘views’ to the top management via surveys.

• Help Foresee Employees’ Behavior

Foreseeing employees’ behaviour and actions can be valuable. Including employee engagement surveys in the work, culture can help gauge the employees’ general behaviour and predict their commitment level for the organization.

Especially an HR manager can help estimate employees’ engagement levels to form or modify HR policies intended to increase the employees’ satisfaction level and retain them.

• Help Detect Unreported Issues

Several issues stay unheard, unspoken, or unreported - especially in a big organization. If not reported or noticed for long, these issues build up to hamper employees’ productivity. An employee survey helps bring out these unreported issues.

This helps the management take the required actions and resolve the issues before they get aggravated further to harm the organization.

• Help Set Benchmarks for Employees’ Satisfaction

Asking the same type(s) of questions over several issues can help gauge whether the employees’ satisfaction levels are rising or going down over time by noting down responses and comparing them with previous surveys’ results every time.

This way, the management can gauge the success level and performance of HR policies. Accordingly, they can set benchmarks for employees’ satisfaction and make efforts to achieve them in stipulated time.

Conclusion

An employee survey is a tool to collect employees’ feedback and plan the best strategies to address employees’ issues accordingly. A good-quality survey plugin like the SugarCRM survey plugin can help you with that and make employee surveys productive.