Losing a key employee in your business can be challenging. It can disrupt business activities and reduce the quality and level of productivity you have. Therefore, every effort must be taken to keep your star workers in your organization.
Employees rarely leave their company. They normally leave because of something in their environment or how they are treated. For instance, many employees will leave because of inadequate leadership or a poor work-life balance. Very few employees will leave solely based on their pay.
So, finding out why employees are unhappy, or what their concerns are, should be a priority for your leadership team. You can sit down and speak to your team members, but there can be barriers to this. Employees are sometimes not honest when asked directly.
Therefore, you need to consider other ways to get honest answers from your staff to find out what is troubling them. Once you’ve found their concerns, you can work on projects to improve things.
>> Create your Online Poll with Drag’n Survey, click here
Surveys Help To Get True Information From Employees
There are many tools that can be used to get informations from employees about their concerns. However, surveys are by far the most effective. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, you can make surveys confidential, this layer of anonymity relaxes respondents to provide answers they wouldn’t necessarily give to managers in person.
The anonymity factor, therefore, allows you to really check the pulse of your employee’s satisfaction and gives you insights to what is going on when you’re not looking. Of course there is a danger here. Some business leaders don’t want to hear about these aspects of their business. By offering your employees to announce them, you’re risking seeing responses you don’t want to.
So, the simple solution here is to make sure you’re only asking about areas of the business you’re willing to listen about.
However, by conducting surveys you can actually improve employee happiness. Regular pulse checking has found to motivate employees as they feel their opinions are listened to and matter to management. This good-feeling can help improve output quality, productivity levels and even customer satisfaction levels.
Therefore, it is always important to think of a survey as a way to improve overall business performance.
How To Turn Survey Data Into Meaningful Actions
Of course, the key is what you do with your survey data. If you continuously check the pulse of your employees, find areas that make them unhappy and then do nothing, you’ll lose their goodwill. Therefore, you’ve got to use the data presented to you by employees and take action. This is where the real employee satisfaction can start.
The first thing you need to do is to look over the answers supplied by respondents and determine trends. Some departments in your organization might have differing opinions, so be sure to check across the organization as well as within each department.
Once you’ve noticed trends you can start looking at ways you can respond to those common concerns. At the same time, you need to put together some communication materials to acknowledge the fact that there is significant concern over certain areas.
This can be done in an email. In the communications note, you can also offer the chance of a workshop employees can attend to discuss the problem more openly and to present ways that they think the matter can be dealt with.
With this additional information you can create an action plan and then communicate this out to employees again. The idea of this process is that you are showing acknowledgment of concerns many employees have and displaying the ways that you intend to address those.
What About Concerns Only A Few Have Raised?
There may have been some answers in your survey responses that correlate, but in a very small segment of your employee population. The low number of people giving the same answer might therefore not be viable to address. That doesn’t mean that you haven’t heard them.
To stop people thinking that you haven’t taken their concerns seriously, you have to show action on other fronts. So, when there is a big trend (whether globally or in a department) you should communicate about it and your project.
When there is only a small proportion of respondents with an issue, you can acknowledge it, but state that there is little business viability to make a change because there is little support for this. This shows that you are acknowledging some (or one) person is experiencing this, but giving a reason why you aren’t taking action at the moment.
You can even add that you’ll monitor the situation closely to see if it becomes a bigger problem in the future. This should satisfy the majority of people who have concerns that aren’t shared by many of their peers.
Conclusion
Employee surveys are one of the best ways to collect information about the concerns your staff have. Once you’ve collected the information, you can then take action to improve employee satisfaction that will have a knock-on effect across your business.
More about surveys:
How Surveys Enhance 360 Degree Feedback, click here
The Role Of Surveys In Creating Benchmarks, click here
10 Tricks For Using Surveys In Business Projects, click here
The Science Behind The Survey, click here
It’s Easy To Engage Your Target Market With Quizzes, click here