How surveys can keep your finger on the pulse of your business
We regularly emphasise the importance of communication on this blog.
You can read why we feel communication is so important.
Or check out our tips for communicating with your team.
And part of that communication process is just listening.
Of course, as a busy manager of a small business, you don’t always have the time to be available to your employees whenever they have something to say.
That’s why many organisations use surveys to keep abreast of how their employees are feeling.
This blog will look at some of the different ways you can use surveys to ensure employees feel heard, and give you some ideas for the questions you should be asking.
Why are employee surveys important?
Employees today are mobile and in demand. That means that their expectations of their employers have rightly risen. Keeping employees is no longer a given, but a task managers must put in work to achieve.
Listening to employees is a key part of that. 86% of employees don’t feel people are heard fairly at their organisation. Surveys give them the opportunity to make their voices heard. Just make sure you are prepared to act on their feedback!
Questions for pulse surveys
Short, quick, regular surveys are a great way to spot trends in your business and get real-time feedback on your employees, their productivity, new roll-outs, and more.
Some companies even make pulse surveys a part of their daily routine, taking the opportunity to ask one or two simple questions after each shift.
Questions for these surveys might include how employees are feeling, whether they’re well equipped for their role, or how productive they were.
Matching up this data to known incidents, busyness levels, or workplace conditions on a regular basis can help you to spot issues affecting your employees that you, or they, may not have even realised.
Longer term survey questions
There are some thing it doesn’t make sense to ask your employees every single day. Topics like wider job satisfaction, support, and career goals are unlikely to vary wildly on a day to day basis.
As such, these topics are well suited to regular but less frequent surveys, which you might conduct monthly or quarterly. The longer time period gives you leeway to ask employees for a bit more time and concentration on these—5 or 10 minutes a month isn’t asking much.
With more in-depth questions, it often makes sense to give employees the chance to put their responses on a scale instead of answering a simple yes or no.
For instance, you might ask them how much they agree with a statement like “I feel recognised for my work.” on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being “strongly disagree” and 10 being “strongly agree”.
This allows you to spot potential problems—like an employee’s responses trending downwards over time—before they become full-blown issues, like that employee leaving because they can’t see a future in your company!
What to ask employees in annual surveys
Annual surveys are the longest-term regularly used by companies, and as such, address the largest overarching themes. Compensation, management, and work-life balance are all common areas for these surveys to probe.
While spotting trends across the answers of individuals is harder here, since acting on trends across years can be tricky, you will be able to see signs of dissatisfaction (or satisfaction) across teams or departments.
Survey themes you can use
Surveys aren’t just about how regularly you ask them. You may want to use surveys to get feedback on specific areas of your business. In this case, it might not be something employees repeat regularly over months or years, but a short-term effort aimed at key topics.
Tool adoption is a common use case for this sort of survey. If you have invested in new software or hardware to make work easier for your employees, you want to be sure that you are getting your money’s worth and any issues are quickly dealt with.
In these cases, you might ask questions like “Have you used the new software?”, “Are you finding the new tool easy to use?” or “Is anything stopping you from using this tool to its full potential?”
Short-term surveys on themes like this can ensure you take act quickly so that employees feel listened to and investments don’t go to waste.
Thankfully, there’s virtually no learning curve when you choose to turbocharge your employee scheduling with a smart solution like Findmyshift. Our intuitive web-based tool is easy to use for managers and employees alike.
You can simply drag and drop shifts like you’re editing a spreadsheet, and everyone will always have access to the latest version of your rota.
That’s one less theme you’ll need to survey your employees about, freeing up time for you to ask the questions that will help you keep the whole team happy.