Use employee surveys to improve your organization

What is the purpose of employee surveys?

Organizations conduct employee surveys for many reasons, including to:

• improve the workplace culture
• boost productivity by asking how things can be done better
• hear about employees’ experiences with a new technology
• reduce turnover by ensuring employees are aligned with the company’s objectives

Whatever the reason, surveys need to be done with purpose, says Adam Nalepa, Senior Business Advisor with BDC Advisory Services. That’s because they’re just the first step in the process of continuous organizational improvement.

“If you ask for feedback, you have to act on it,” he says. “Whether it’s culture or compensation, these topics are broad and take time to address. That’s why it’s important to communicate to staff what you learned and provide a roadmap for how their feedback will be applied.”

What are the most common types of employee surveys?

There are many types of employee surveys, including:

Employee engagement surveys

This survey gives a sense of employees’ emotional commitment and connection to your organization. Typically conducted once a year, it can take anywhere from 15 minutes to one hour to complete. Questions you might ask include:

• How motivated are you to go above and beyond your required tasks?
• Do you feel a sense of belonging on your team?
• Do you believe you’re making a difference within the organization?

Employee satisfaction surveys

Also conducted annually and the same length as an engagement survey, this type of survey asks for feedback on topics that affect employees directly. Compensation and work/life balance are just some of the themes an employee satisfaction survey might explore.

Employee feedback surveys

This survey collects ideas and concerns about specific workplace issues, like implementing new processes or technologies. What’s working well? What could be improved? It provides the understanding needed to remove barriers or validate that everything is going as planned.

Some organizations combine engagement, satisfaction and feedback surveys into one broader annual employee survey.

Employee pulse surveys

Done quarterly or semi-annually, pulse surveys let you check in more frequently with employees on various topics. They can cover themes similar to the annual surveys but should take only five to seven minutes to complete. By surveying employees more often, you can track the “temperature” of your workforce. If you notice any negative changes, you can address them before they become serious issues.

If a topic is very important to your organization and represents your core values and beliefs, it should always be monitored as part of your regular pulse surveys. Other topics, such as whether a solution you implemented to solve a specific roadblock was a success or not, might need to be asked about for only a few surveys before moving on to something else.

Onboarding and exit surveys

These surveys help with employee retention. An onboarding survey is done 90 days after somebody is hired, asking about their initial experience and how things might be improved. An exit survey occurs when somebody gives their notice of resignation. It asks about their motivations for leaving and if you could have done anything to change their mind. Both surveys should include just three or four questions.

Employee 360 surveys

This survey asks for feedback on a specific employee to inform their personal and professional development. A few quick questions are sent to people linked to the individual, asking for feedback on that person’s performance, areas for improvement and so on.

How do I conduct an employee survey?

Follow these steps for a smooth survey process:

1. Make the business case

Why do you want to survey your workforce? How will you use the data? Answering these questions in advance ensures you’re not just going through the motions, says Nalepa. 

The business case will also help determine who should receive the survey: just one business unit or the entire company?

2. Create the questions

Ensure your questions are clear, concise and will provide the data your business case needs. To that end, Nalepa recommends asking employees to rate something on a scale from one to five (or 10), rather than giving them a blank space to write whatever comes to mind.

“With open-ended questions, people can find it difficult to articulate their thoughts,” he says. “Your goal is to make the survey as easy to fill out as possible. Scales also make it easier to compare the results later.”

Some types of surveys do benefit from open-ended questions, such as employee satisfaction surveys. For example, you might ask employees to rate on a scale how well their manager values their input, then follow up with an open-ended question asking them to briefly explain their rating.

3. Tell employees about the survey

It’s important to communicate to employees in advance not only that you will be doing a survey, but why.

“If people feel the survey will be a platform for their voices to be heard, and they have a sense of how it will benefit them and the organization, they’re more likely to complete it,” says Nalepa.

Whether sent as an email, displayed on your intranet or announced during a town hall, this initial communication is crucial to getting employee buy-in. Nalepa says you should aim to have your surveys completed by 75% of the people receiving them. Otherwise, you won’t collect enough data to make informed decisions.

4. Deploy the survey

Most companies use online tools like Microsoft Forms or SurveyMonkey. When evaluating online survey tools, look at:

• Cost: How much will you pay for something you might use once a year?
• Functionality: How many surveys can you send? How many questions can you include? How easily can you output the data into something you can present to employees?
• Security: Is the data stored in Canada? How does the service provider protect confidential information?

If your workforce isn’t very tech-savvy, you can always print out your surveys and have employees complete them manually.

Regardless of format, give people enough time to fill out the survey. Nalepa recommends five to 10 business days. You can even dedicate time during the workday so people don’t have to do the survey after-hours.

He also suggests conducting annual surveys at the same time every year. Try not to run a survey during the summer when people take vacations or, for jobs with seasonal peaks, when people are at maximum capacity. Also, avoid doing surveys right after bonuses or promotions are awarded, as those could influence what people say about the company.

5. Close the survey

After the survey is finished, give employees a timeline for how long it will take to review the data and provide results. It’s about keeping them in the loop and showing respect for their time.  

6. Analyze the results

Many online tools consolidate the data for you, creating graphs and charts so you can visually interpret the results and easily identify areas for improvement.

7. Act on the results

Communicate the survey findings to employees, then develop an in-depth plan outlining how you’ll address any statistically significant results.

“When surveys fail, it’s due to a lack of action,” says Nalepa. “If you’re collecting feedback but not actually doing anything with it, you could create a toxic environment where people will say, ‘I voiced my concerns but nothing happened.’ That’s the worst thing you can do with a survey.”

A follow-up feedback survey may be needed to ask employees how they’d like to see the issues addressed. 

Should employee surveys be anonymous or confidential?

It’s best to keep surveys anonymous. That’s because people are more willing to share their thoughts if they know their names won’t be included.

That said, companies might collect some personally identifiable information — what branch an employee is in, who their manager is, how many years of experience they have — to get more precise feedback. In these cases, when informing employees about the survey, tell them which software you’ll use and the measures in place to keep responses confidential.

To eliminate any potential for bias in how your surveys are designed, deployed and analyzed, you might consider using a third-party company. In this case, make sure they can ensure anonymity and are able to scrub any information that could link the feedback to any specific person.

Why are employee surveys important?

Regular feedback from employees can reveal interesting or unexpected insights into what your people think about your organization. But it’s not how you conduct an employee survey that matters. It’s what you do with the results. By turning the data into a concrete plan for addressing concerns, you can improve your workplace culture and employee experience.

Next step

Learn how to develop winning HR policies and procedures with BDC’s free guide: Hire and Retain the Best Employees