Why you should use company surveys

Getting direct feedback from employees helps you gauge their current feelings about various work topics, so you can decide how to change going forward. Some reasons you should consider using company surveys include:

• Learning what you’re doing well
• Finding areas of improvement
• Letting employees know you want their feedback
• Giving your employees a voice on issues they care about
• Looking for patterns in how employees feel
• Comparing opinions from different groups or types of employees
• Tracking how opinions change over time
• Encouraging more communication and feedback from employees outside of surveys
• Guiding your company improvements to keep employees happier and more engaged

It’s difficult to talk one-on-one with all employees regularly. When those conversations happen, they can give you valuable feedback, but you don’t get the concrete data you would from a survey. It’s easier to collect data consistently when you use structured surveys, so you can see if opinions change over time.

Types of employee surveys

Company surveys can focus on various things, providing you with your employees’ perspectives on topics that are important to you. You can conduct multiple types of employee surveys throughout the year based on what you want to measure. Some common survey options include:

• Onboarding: Having a successful onboarding process can help new employees assimilate into the company better and get up to full production faster. Once your new staff members get through the onboarding process, conduct a survey to evaluate how well you did. This gives you data that can help you improve onboarding for future employees.
• Training: Similarly, you can evaluate how well you did on a training opportunity. Create a short survey related to the training to determine how effective it was and how employees felt about it. You can use the responses to adjust and improve future training.
• Employee engagement: A survey of employee engagement helps you evaluate how your staff feels about your company, their work and their colleagues. High employee engagement can help improve retention and increase productivity.
• Employee satisfaction: A similar option is to check on employee satisfaction to determine how content your employees are with their roles and the overall job environment.
• Company culture: Your company culture can affect employee attitudes and work habits. A positive culture encourages them to be productive and work well with their peers. Evaluating how they feel about the company culture can help you identify ways to improve it.
• Benefits: You might want feedback on the perks and benefits you offer your employees. The survey can help you spend your benefits budget on the things your employees want the most.
• Pulse surveys: Short pulse surveys take only a few minutes to complete and focus on a specific topic that you want to track. You do the pulse surveys multiple times throughout the year to track how employees’ opinions change on the issue.
• Annual reviews: Employee performance reviews look at different aspects of an employee’s performance. These surveys are often completed by supervisors, but companies often use self-evaluation surveys as well to see how the employee feels about their work. You can also have employees take surveys to evaluate how managers are doing.
• 360 survey: A 360 performance review looks at an employee’s performance from different perspectives with multiple people completing an evaluation or survey. This includes the employee being evaluated, team members and managers. These surveys cover different aspects of the employee’s performance.
• Exit surveys: Even the best companies sometimes lose employees to other opportunities, retirement or for other reasons. Doing an exit survey can give you insight into why your employees leave and what you can do to reduce employee turnover.

Deciding which type of survey to use

The type of survey you choose depends largely on your current situation and what you want to know. In some cases, you might recognize that you have a problem in your ranks, such as a lack of inclusion in the company culture. You can tailor your survey to deep dive into that issue to help you correct it. Other surveys, such as performance and exit surveys, are standard, even if you don’t have major issues.

Developing your surveys

Employee surveys sound easy to do, but creating the documents requires careful planning. The questions need to reflect the information you want. Consider these details to create internal surveys.

1. Determine the type of survey you’re using. This decision depends on what you want to evaluate, such as employee satisfaction or opinions on a specific workplace issue.
2. Narrow the focus. Get specific with the topic you’re covering and what you want to know. Instead of a general employee survey, you might focus on how employees feel about the company culture or your training program. Specific surveys can be more effective.
3. Set specific goals. Determine why you’re conducting the survey and what specific information you want, and then customize the style and questions to achieve those objectives.
4. Decide on the length. You need enough questions to get useful information, but you also don’t want to make the survey so long that it takes hours to complete. The length can also depend on the type of survey. Pulse surveys are short with only a few questions, while annual reviews are longer and cover more ground.
5. Choose the question format. Questions can be multiple choice, short answer or a ranking scale, depending on the information you want. You can use a combination of formats if you want different types of data. For example, you could have employees rate their feelings on something and leave space for them to write comments.
6. Develop the questions. The questions you use need to focus on the specific issue you’re evaluating. Ensure they’re clearly written to avoid any confusion, and make it easy to understand how the ranking system works.
7. Collect demographics. Employee surveys are often anonymous to encourage people to share honestly. However, having some details can help you look for patterns or differences between groups. Some info you might collect includes position level, length of time at the company, department, employee status, education, race and age. Only ask for the demographics that make an impact or that you want to analyze.
8. Determine the frequency and scheduling. One-time surveys can get you general data, but repeating the surveys at specific intervals helps you monitor changes. If you’re using the data to improve the workplace, you can see if those efforts are helping by looking at the changes in responses with repeated surveys. Quarterly surveys are effective for many situations because they happen often enough to be meaningful without happening too often. Shorter surveys can be repeated more often without getting annoying.

Conducting company surveys

The easiest way to conduct employee surveys is by using an electronic platform. You can find a variety of platforms designed specifically for surveys that make it easier to create and distribute them. Employees can click the links and submit their results automatically, so you can get faster responses. However, offering a paper version can be beneficial for employees who don’t have easy access to the internet during work hours, such as field workers or delivery drivers.

You can’t force your employees to complete the surveys, but you can encourage them to participate. Communicate before, during and after the survey to help increase your participation rate. Explain why you’re conducting the survey and how you’ll use the information. You’ll also want to set a deadline for completing the survey—usually at least a week—and communicate the timeline to employees. Sending reminders as the deadline nears can encourage more people to complete it on time.

Using the data from employee surveys

To make your company surveys worthwhile, you need to put the data to use after you gather it. If employees don’t see any changes based on the surveys, they’ll realize they’re pointless to complete. Determine who will collect and analyze the data to ensure it’s handled properly.

You can look at data as a whole or break it down by department, job level, position or other categories. Looking at smaller groups can help you look for variations in the company. For example, one department might have much higher scores in employee satisfaction because that manager does an exceptional job at listening to their employees.

The survey responses help you identify issues and areas of improvement for your company. They can also help you start conversations with your employees to get more information. Additional information can help you make informed decisions on what kind of changes or improvements you need to make.

Sharing the responses with your employees can also be beneficial. It creates a sense of transparency and authenticity that makes the surveys feel more meaningful to participants. You can also get employees involved in follow-up teams or committees to work on improving the workplace based on the results.

Tips for using surveys

Creating surveys for your employees can be a major undertaking, but these tips can make it easier and more effective:

• Keep the questions neutral and unbiased: You can often create leading questions where employees feel like they need to answer a certain way without realizing it. Avoid using overly positive language in your questions. If you’re only asking people to rate how much they agree with a positive statement about your company, they might feel like they can’t say anything negative, and your results might make things look more positive than they really are.
• Maintain anonymity: Employee surveys are typically anonymous, so employees don’t worry about repercussions if they share negative opinions. Ensure you take steps to keep the data anonymous, such as using a third-party vendor for conducting the survey and collecting the data.
• Make surveys simple: Employees are more likely to complete a survey if it’s user-friendly with short, concise questions that are easy to understand.
• Involve leadership: Having your leadership team on board with surveys makes them more effective and makes it easier to follow up with action based on the feedback. You can also get your leadership team to promote the surveys with their employees to increase participation.
• Thank your employees: Include a thank you note at the end of the survey, or have an automatic thank you message pop up after the employee submits the survey. You can also send a company-wide email once the survey window closes to thank everyone who participated.

As you conduct surveys, evaluate how successful they are and make adjustments as needed to improve the effectiveness.