Conducting a company survey can give higher-ups vital information about the current mindset of its employees. This information can help reduce turnover and raise retention rates across your entire company. Learning to create, distribute, track, and follow up on company surveys is extremely important—without it the information gathered is useless. Having trouble knowing where to start with your new company survey? Here are a few suggestions.
Before you start to ask questions, you’ll want to have a general focus and an overall goal for the survey. Break the survey up into specific categories that highlight the most important aspects of your business. These categories can include company culture, workload, supervisory practices and fairness, interactions with co-workers, and rate of pay.
Think of legitimate survey questions.
Craft your questions carefully. You’ll want to make the survey as specific as possible. If your questions are too broad you’ll get responses and information that isn’t necessarily useful. Be sure to stay away from any biases when creating the questions and be careful that you are not targeting certain demographics because if you do the results will be inaccurate.
It’s best to have an outside department, one that isn’t affected by the actual survey, tally the results. This helps avoid having any of the results skewed to match their expectations or to make themselves look good. If employees are happy, that means the supervisors are doing their jobs–and vice versa. Never put someone directly affected in charge of this process.
Having a one-time survey doesn’t provide your company with the necessary data to really see how well a department is performing. Create an initial survey and then give the same survey year after year, or more often if appropriate, to see how the company culture is performing. One of the best examples of this is CarMax’s employee survey because it shows how employees feel about their department, inter-departmental communications, and the overall aspect of the store. This information is critical to help determine the best course of action when you go about fixing the shortfalls in the company.
Gathering information through a company survey is beneficial only if corporate leaders act upon the information they receive. Whether this comes in the form of implementing new programs or providing resources to employees, you can use survey results to direct efforts to strengthen the weak spots in your company culture.
When it comes to performance reviews, even the most experienced managers can use some tips. Our ten best practices define the job description and career path for each member of your staff. Then, your review process becomes a part of your management strategy of holding each staff member accountable while motivating them to achieve more.
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3 Comments
Engagement is one of the most important qualities of a good employee retention number. If you manage to keep employee engagement high, you are sure to have a loyal team, with people that give their best to get the job done and don’t think about leaving.
Measuring engagement and taking the necessary steps to increase it if it’s getting low should be constantly on the mind of the HR.
Smaller companies have an easier time to measure employee engagement. With the possibility to know everybody that works for you, you can take the pulse of their engagement during everyday activities, and notice when something is up.
In corporate environment it’s harder to do, as people turn up as just numbers for most of the management, and just that can be a reason for low engagement.
Starting within a start-up and then moving to the corporate environment, I can easily see how engagement can affect productivity and, most of all, retention numbers. When everybody in the company is working in the same office, with enough transparency to see the direction the company is going, the engagement is sky high. But now, ever since I work in corporate HR, it gets harder and harder for me to be able to do that. I need to devise strategies and surveys to measure it and try to enhance it when i’m not happy with the results. And I’m almost never happy with them, mostly because there is no family feeling within the company. People find it a lot easier to leave if they think of work as just work, and of colleagues as nothing more than colleagues. That is my biggest challenge. Turning the corporate environment into something with a genuine feeling of family where everybody belongs together.