Employee Survey: 6 Tips for the Perfect Survey

The Results of an Employee Survey Can Be Used to Increase Employee Engagement

Consequently, they can also serve to optimize productivity within the company. For employee surveys to provide helpful insights, they must be professionally set up and conducted. Ideally, they should also be anonymous, as employees often do not respond honestly otherwise. Through the Workbase employee platform, companies can easily create these surveys.

Your Benefits from an Employee Survey:

• You can use the feedback from your employees to improve processes within the company.
• You can identify the strengths of your company from the employees’ perspective and find out what needs improvement.
• You can give employees the feeling of being involved and thus an important part of the company.
• You promote communication among your employees.

What Are Employee Surveys?

Employee surveys are often conducted regularly across the entire workforce and can include questions about satisfaction with various aspects of working in the company. As part of continuous feedback management, they help the HR department assess and improve employee engagement.

They can also be short surveys like “Do you know someone who could also work with us?” to acquire potential new employees. There are various possibilities. At Workbase, we have some proven survey templates that can be sent to all employees with just one click.

Making Your Employee Survey a Success

For your employee survey to be a full success, two parameters are crucial. Firstly, the percentage of participants in relation to the total team size plays a role. Secondly, the quality and usability of the answers are important.

To motivate the workforce to regularly participate in employee surveys and ensure high-quality responses, various methods can be employed:

• Digital Tools: Use the employee platform to conduct surveys particularly quickly and efficiently. Employees are notified of a new survey, which appears at the top of the newsfeed and remains there until the survey is completed.
• Good Communication: Explain why employees should participate in the survey.
• Anonymous Surveys: It is important that many surveys guarantee and communicate complete anonymity of responses. Workbase employee surveys ensure this with one click.
• Simple Process: Employee surveys should be easily accessible and understandable.
• Proper Evaluation: Even the best answers from your employees are useless if they are not adequately evaluated and utilized.

Creating the Perfect Employee Survey - 6 Key Tips

Digital tools like the Workbase employee platform allow you to create an employee survey with just a few clicks. However, you should also know how an optimal employee survey should look to derive concrete results from it.

Tip 1: Open or Closed Questions?

Before creating a survey, you should be clear about what insights you want to gain from it. The choice of questions plays a very important role in this.

An open question allows your employees to write their answers comprehensively. An example might be: “How do you personally perceive the mood in the company?”

A closed question specifies the answer options and their number: “Would you take the bus instead of the car to work? Yes / No / Maybe.”

Closed questions are generally better for surveys as they are easier and quicker to evaluate. The employee survey itself is also much faster and more enjoyable for the employee. The disadvantage, however, is that the “personal touch” is missing, and some aspects might not be covered in the survey.

Tip 2: Never Impose a Valuation

You must never dictate how your employees should answer a question in the survey. For example: “We think the food in the canteen is very good. How delicious do you find it?”

Such a question influences employees before they decide. The answer is not representative as it does not reflect their free opinion. Depending on the survey’s design, they might not even have the option to say they don’t like the canteen food.

It is better to phrase the question neutrally: “Do you like the food in the canteen?” Employees can freely and openly respond without being pushed towards an answer.

Tip 3: Handle Negative Answers

As an employer, when asking questions, you must also allow space for negative answers. This is particularly important for closed questions, as your employees cannot describe their personal experience.

Your employee survey should not only include answers like “excellent / very good / good” to the question “How do you find the collaboration with your colleagues?” but also options like “average / poor / terrible.” Only then will you get meaningful results.

Although this sounds logical and is somewhat exaggerated here, this mistake is still often made in practice.

Tip 4: Avoid Double-Barreled Questions

Nothing is worse than confusing your employees with the first question. This will result in poor responses to your employee survey.

An example of what not to do is double-barreled questions. It gets particularly awkward if the double-barreled question addresses two or more unrelated topics: “How do you like your office, what do you think of the company car, and when should the Christmas party be held this year?”

It is better to divide such questions into three separate ones. When designing your employee survey, you should also organize the questions by topics. A question about the company car might fit better with one about the parking situation rather than the office.

Tip 5: Develop Creative Surveys

You might know the feeling when you read the same words over and over again in every sentence. It gets tiring, right?

The same effect occurs with your employees if they repeatedly face the same questions in your employee survey: “How do you get along with your colleagues? How do you rate your office equipment? How do you like the coffee?”

Be creative, ask the questions differently, and use synonyms.

Tip 6: Systematically Evaluate Results

The best employee survey is useless if it is not properly evaluated. Workbase offers an integrated evaluation tool where multiple interesting data points can be viewed for each survey. Other tools also offer limited evaluation functions - use them!

Especially when employees’ wishes and criticisms are quickly implemented, this is particularly well received and encourages them to take the time for future surveys.

Benefits of Regular Employee Surveys:

• Retain Your Employees: Instead of constantly searching for new ones, keep your team intact.
• Improve Well-Being: A simple yet effective way to do something for the workforce.
• Increase Appreciation: For better cooperation within your company.

Survey Results: Useful for Employees and Customers

Employee surveys can help you identify many problems and deficiencies within the company. Improving employee morale can also enhance the onboarding of new employees. New hires will appreciate not facing issues that have already been addressed following your employee survey.

Better communication within the company not only helps your employees but also positively impacts customer satisfaction. Motivated employees are not only cheerful with each other but also friendly to your customers. Your clients will appreciate it.

Through the Workbase employee platform, you are always on the safe side when seeking precise answers to existing issues within the internal culture. The employee survey is just one of the many functions that Workbase offers you.

Conclusion

If you want well-trained employees who are loyal to your company, use a survey to find out what they think about your company or feel they are not sufficiently trained.

Are you looking for a clear basis to justify decisions in your company? In this case, you can add specific questions that are geared precisely to your goal.

Your employees are leaving your company and you don’t know exactly why - use a survey to find out.

Employees come to you and stay with your company because of your values. But which values are these? An employee survey will give you an insight into this so that you can shine with your values when recruiting.

Employee surveys are a powerful tool for increasing satisfaction in your company and thus boosting productivity and performance.

However, simply conducting an employee survey is not enough to actually achieve a positive effect. Rather, the way in which the survey is conducted is crucial.

The Workbase employee platform offers the ideal solution with many templates for professional employee surveys. If you are interested in our versatile and flexible software solution, don’t hesitate and try Workbase.