Recently we have seen an increase in requests for Employee Satisfaction Surveys. Today we will take you behind the scenes to some of the conversations we have with our clients to help you to determine if creating and rolling out employee satisfaction surveys will have a positive impact on your business.

The pros of employee satisfaction surveys include:

• A business’s greatest asset is its people, with recruitment becoming increasingly difficult, Satisfaction Surveys can be an important retention strategy to determine what they need and where they see the company going.
• You have the opportunity to uncover employee needs and wants.
• Employees feel they have been given an opportunity to be heard.
• Gives the opportunity for employees to air frustrations and grievances in a positive outlet.
• Show employees you value their input!

The cons of employee satisfaction surveys include:

• The survey can provide a snapshot of a moment that has already passed, putting companies in the position of reacting to the past rather than preparing for the future.
• Interpreting survey results can be difficult and could result in a focus on the wrong areas.
• When data is handled badly, the survey could increase mistrust.
• If employees don’t see the result or actions taken that they expected, the may become further disgruntled. You should ensure to at least acknowledge the feedback in some way or form.

Employee satisfaction surveys can b e carried out in two key formats, either written or verbal each with their own positives and negatives.

Written or digital surveys are often beneficial for organisations with a large number of employees as they are quick and efficient to roll out with many different online tools and templates available to help facilitate this.  An additional benefit of this format is that it allows for consistency in questioning across multiple survey implementations.  For this reason written or online surveys can be effective in measuring change or progress over time by asking the same questions multiple times and measuring changes in responses.

Generally however, written or online surveys tend to be much more impersonal as they do not permit follow up and clarification seeking questions depending on the responses which can only be done through interviews.  Despite being more time consuming and therefore more expensive, we have found this format particularly when carried out externally to offer far greater insights and opportunity for improvement.

On Demand HR as an external HR department provides a couple of key benefits to our members when we carry out employee satisfaction surveys on their behalf.  Firstly our experience in carrying out many surveys across a broad range of industries enables us to guide our members in not only selecting the right format for the survey but also designing effective questions to extract meaningful responses which can be used objectively to make strategic and positive business decisions.

Secondly, we have found through experience that being an external HR department tends to extract more truthful, detailed and therefore meaningful responses.  Employees experience a greater sense of sensitivity and security discussing grievances and challenges with an external party rather than their line managers which they need to engage with on a daily basis.

Finally, conducting these surveys since 2010 has provided On Demand HR with perspective in order to interpret these results in a manner that meaningful insights leading to positive change.  Too often we see businesses go through the motions of conducting employee satisfaction surveys and either misinterpreting the results or even worse not taking any action whatsoever.

So if your business is considering implementing employee satisfaction surveys and would like an experienced HR and Workplace Relations consultant to offer some advice and guidance the best way to reach out to us is by visiting our website at ondemandhr.com.au.

That’s all for today, we trust that you are all staying positive and looking forward to seeing you all in the next update.