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Good morning, everyone. Friday, January 22 2021. My name is Clint Indrele Managing Director of On Demand HR. Every week at 10 o’clock, we have HR Fridays, which is a presentation on a different HR or industrial relations topic. Let us know any future topics of interest that you might be interested in. We’ll be glad to put together some material and present in these short 15 minute bite sized pieces of information for clients and refers, if you’re watching this video live, please ask any questions as we go through happy to answer them on the fly.

The whole purpose of HR Fridays each week is to provide businesses, other organizations, professional advisors and our associate members with advice, which is a true laay of the land, we try and stop the noise and the scare tactics you might hear from other advisors just to sell a service. And look, we’ve been in the Fair Work Commission many times we’ve dealt with the Fair Work Ombudsman many times we’ve done many workplace investigations. So we want to provide provide you with real perspective, not just theory. www.ondemandhr.com..au

Today’s topic is going to be employee satisfaction surveys. So we’re going to be covering this and it’s important to remember that in most industries right now, competition for employees remains very, very high. And you know, it’s vitally important that organizations are doing what they can to retain good talent in this current environment. And look, one of my thoughts is that in 2021, I think there’s going to be a lot of employers that remain very, very complacent. They say, Oh, well, yes, we’ve had COVID. Yes, we’ve had COVID. And, you know, we’re not going to do salary reviews, we’re not going to really worry about anything that measures how our employees are feeling about the organization, and so on. And I think that’s a pretty dangerous viewpoint to have, because looking at some of the recruitment trends we deal with in on demand recruitment campaigns, the recruitment market in particular remains very strong, and competition for people remains very strong. So I guess employee satisfaction surveys is understanding how employees view the organization, and what sort of things management should take into account when trying to retain their best talent. So let’s get started on that today’s presentation.

So why do you need an employee satisfaction survey, first of all, so I think there’s a few key points on this, first of all staff retention, to evaluate your management practices to give employees an opportunity to provide feedback, to demonstrate that you care about your employees, and you understand what they want to say, gives employees at all levels of the organization a voice, it gives them an opportunity to talk to the highest person in management, and an opportunity that they may not normally have. It provides a benchmark for measuring the effects of changes, and also allows you to anticipate potential future problems and challenges that the organization may have. So there’s some first thoughts on why you may need an employee satisfaction survey. And these are some of the core reasons why

Looking at considerations for your survey. So I guess first and foremost, confidentiality is important to getting honest answers, you want to give your employees confidence that, you know, the information they’re providing is going to be treated sensitively. At the very least. Look, we’ve heard of other employees, other companies that have used 360 degree surveys, but you know, what I found particularly with Small and Medium organizations, which is the bread and butter of On Demand HR’s clients is that they can be very cumbersome in implementing them, you can have one manager, and then you’re gonna have the superior review them. And then you’re gonna have all their, you know, their peers, review them, and then their direct reports, review them. And that takes a long time just to get feedback on one manager. An employee satisfaction survey may be better in getting an overall barometer of the organization and you know, how the employees may view the company.

In terms of other considerations for your survey, set a time frame for your responses. So make sure you turn those those responses around quickly, sell the benefits of the survey to the staff. It’s not just about the company, it’s about really communicating that this survey is there to help improve, you know, understanding of employees considerations and concerns, be prepared to send multiple emails and reminders and also consider the frequency of your survey. So you know, doing them too often is going to water down the significance. But doing them too irregularly is going to give you a loan survey and not really give you any any guard or any kind of yardstick for measuring any change. So important thing with employee satisfaction surveys to be able to measure change from now into the future and then you know, at reasonable intervals after that

Other considerations are that look effective communication and buy in is important. How the results are going to be released and who was responsible for interpreting the results and implementing the changes, keeping track of those results, and communicating success over time, in particular, if there’s improvement, and decide in advance how you’re going to interpret the results. So certainly, depending on how your questions are structured, will give you a reasonable flavor for how you want to interpret your results. But don’t necessarily go to a kind of ABC, you know, good, medium bad situation. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in the coming slides.

So I want to particularly reflect on just one of our questions from On Demand HR’s employee satisfaction survey that’s available to clients, questions six of 15, which of the following best reflects your manager? they’re in the trenches with me every day getting work done. They are there for me when I need them but are working hard behind the scenes on things which benefit the team as a whole. They seem uninterested and are unavailable when it comes to the day to day challenges of my role.

So two things about that question. First of all, the answers are reasonably, the answers are reasonably short. They’re not necessarily a good medium, bad, simple wording. So we should avoid black and white answers so that we can get more natural responses from our employees and so that the employees don’t feel compelled to answer in a particular way, just to not rock the boat, so to speak. So again, you’ll see that that structure, or the the essence of the answers is a little bit hidden in those responses to that particular question.

Give them an answer that they can most agree with. The answer the, obviously options may not fully reflect how they feel in the present circumstances in their work. And the other thing you might want to think about is just making sure that employees don’t get the feeling that they’re going to say something too bad or too negative on a particular question. And again, that’s another reason for why the questions you might want to structure them in this kind of disguised way. So that’s another consideration or about what sort of questions you should ask, keep the short answers to a minimum, it may make it feel like a test if you have too many questions or go along with it for too long. It’s important to allow employees some space to provide longer form feedback. And this is where you can find out some real challenges and real information about problems in your business, or keep your survey questions consistent over time, without being too obvious or too black and white.

The three things and three categories of questions that are needed in an employee satisfaction survey are first of all, your company and culture based questions, your management team based questions and questions about the employee’s role. So really trying to find the essence of those three things is very important to getting good employee satisfaction survey results, and being able to improve or review those things over time and see if there, there has been change in those three key measures, or three key areas or categories, if you like, and, and ultimately giving you the required amount of feedback to implement adjustments in whatever it may be, whether it’s your reward system of you know, employee remuneration and benefits, whether it’s your recognition processes within your business, or whether it’s making changes to your overall, you know, employee value proposition, and what employees are actually getting when they work for your company. What are the benefits? What are the what is the unique proposition or unique value in working for your organization, this flows into your recruitment piece as well. Being able to effectively communicate the value of your organization is very, very important.

And this, this leads to one of our other segments in the past about, you know, really having recruitment or branded recruitment campaigns as a better option to using agencies Because ultimately, agencies will always run private ads with very little information about your company. So I guess this employee satisfaction piece, the recruitment piece, the employee value proposition, these things are all linked, and obviously give you an understanding of where your organization is currently at what we’re doing well, what are good value pieces about the organization right now, where can we improve these things in the future?

So just a final wrap on employee satisfaction surveys for today’s so On Demand, HR has an employee satisfaction survey tool that is available now. It’s complimentary for all of our monthly fee clients. It will give you a set of about 15 questions that we’ll run through and measure your organization against key things. What we will certainly be doing towards the end of this year is starting to compare companies with other companies on a confidential basis. So that’ll be great information for organizations to measure. Well, how are we going against other like sized companies? What are we doing? Well, what are we doing? Not so well. And then obviously, there’s the opportunity to do these surveys, let’s say once every 12 months. So you can look at well, how did I do in January 2021? versus how did our company do in January 2022.

So if you got any further questions about employee satisfaction surveys, please put them in the comments below and we’ll answer them. You can also reach out to us at www.ondemandhr.com.au hope you have a wonderful long weekend. I know that many of you will be taking the four day weekend with Australia Day coming up. As I said, any final questions on this please let us know. It’s Clint Indrele Managing Director of On Demand HR. Good bye for now.