Running employee surveys multiple times each year is an invaluable way to collect information you can use to better your growing business. Not only is your team a great resource for helping you understand what is and isn’t working inside your organization, asking employees to share their thoughts and insights shows that you value their input.
Here are 3 big benefits of using employee surveys to improve your business—and how to go about it when you do.
3 Key employee survey benefits
- Improves attraction and retention. In one of the tightest labour markets in recent history, many Canadian companies are having a hard time finding and keeping workers. With almost one in four (24%) hiring decision-makers reporting an increase in employee turnover, surveys are essential for uncovering what’s important to existing and prospective talent alike.
- Improves efficiency. When your aim is to improve the way something works, it only makes sense to listen to the people who use it every day. Surveys aren’t just effective for gathering employee feedback on how you might streamline internal business processes to save time, increasing workflow efficiency can lead to a reduction in costs.
- Improves the customer experience. Using surveys to discover and deliver on employee needs can result in a better customer experience and higher sales revenue in turn. By enhancing your team’s attitude and performance, you’ll encourage more clients to become repeat buyers—and more customers to review and recommend your business. According to Salesforce research, in fact, customer experience quality has a direct impact on business success potential, with 80% of customers saying the experiences provided by a company are as important as its products and services.
How to make the most of employee feedback
Try a mix of open and anonymous surveys.
While anonymous surveys are great for giving employees an opportunity to be upfront and honest, they also tend to foster an emphasis on what’s wrong, while yielding fewer suggestions for making things right.
Open surveys, on the other hand, ensure respondents own their feedback, encouraging employees to:
- Focus on what’s positive
- Put extra thought into the comments they make
- Provide context that can lead to more actionable feedback
You might want to try both types of surveys to see which proves more useful for enriching the various aspects of your business.
Share survey results with your team.
It’s important to share and discuss team member feedback—especially when it involves how employees view your company culture and their suggestions for changing (or preserving) the way your growing business is managed.
Remember: While a healthy culture can benefit your company in many ways—some of which will inevitably impact your bottom line—work culture issues like lack of honesty, integrity, and trust are a top reason why people leave jobs.
Act on valid employee suggestions.
Make sure you have a plan for putting actionable suggestions to work. You can make longer-term projects more manageable by first breaking them down into monthly, or even quarterly priorities, and then sharing out tasks among team members where it makes sense.
To keep everyone in the loop, meanwhile:
- Identify the specific goals you’re working to reach
- Broadcast your progress weekly or monthly in terms of tasks completed or milestones achieved
- Update employees regularly on what remains to be done (and by when) to help instill and maintain accountability
When done right, employee surveys are an excellent tool for performing regular pulse-checks on your business and staff. Not only can you use them to measure and boost employee engagement, the feedback they yield will ultimately allow you to make both short- and long-term business improvements that will help you reach more of your goals.
