Importance of Employee Satisfaction Survey: Top 9 Reasons Decoded

“It is true that work gives life its true meaning and makes it worthwhile. But when you are not appreciated by your leaders, are asked to work overtime, and the only thing you look forward to is the weekend – you might wonder if it’s really worth it?”

For employers, understanding how satisfied and engaged their employees are at the workplace has become paramount. 

In fact, research shows that higher employee satisfaction leads to a 40% increase in employee productivity, which increases customer satisfaction by 18%, and employee turnover drops by 18%.

But, how can your business be proactive and gauge employee sentiments? That’s where a simple employee satisfaction survey comes to your rescue.

This blog gives you a clear insight into an employee satisfaction survey and shows you how to create and share meaningful surveys in 8 minutes.

What Is an Employee Satisfaction Survey?

An employee satisfaction survey aims to understand how happy or unhappy your employees are at the workplace. For this, you need to gauge their perspectives on different aspects like HR policies, pay and perks, work-life balance, relationship with peers, and many more. 

 It is essential to gauge employee satisfaction on a regular and ongoing basis. Only then can you predict their attitude, behavior, productivity, and so on. Unsatisfied workers may not show up on time, tend to be less productive, and may become toxic in the long run. This can affect the morale of the entire workforce. Also, by collecting their opinions, you can send across a message that you value and care for them.

A survey conducted by Glassdoor highlights the crucial factors that matter the most for employee satisfaction in the US.

Image Source: Glassdoor, Inc.

There are several reasons to conduct employee satisfaction surveys. Let’s explore some of them

Reasons to Conduct Employee Satisfaction Survey

Organizations worldwide conduct regular employee satisfaction surveys on a quarterly, semi-annual, monthly, or annual basis. The importance of employee satisfaction surveys ranges from measuring employee engagement to predicting organizational growth prospects.

1. Measure Employee Satisfaction and Engagement

An employee satisfaction survey is one of the easiest ways to measure your workers’ satisfaction and engagement levels. Engaged employees are passionate about their job and go one step ahead of their assigned tasks in taking up responsibilities. 

Studies show that engaged employees are 21% more productive as compared to their counterparts. Hence, they are an asset to your organization, and you may want to retain them at any cost.

2. Predict Attrition Rate

Did you know that 8/10 employees plan to quit their jobs just after one bad day? This can be disastrous for an organization as it is expensive to hire new employees. It can range anywhere between 16% – 213% of their annual salary.

Workers face several issues at their workplace like an unsupportive boss, dissatisfaction with pay hikes, lack of recognition, poor work-life balance and many more. With an employee satisfaction survey, you can tackle the concerns of your employees before things spiral out of control.

3. Understand Work Culture

Image Source: ISACA

Work culture is borne out of multiple factors like attitude and behavior of workers, institutional aims and objectives, governance of top management, and more. 

For example, some of your worker’s behavior might be in sync with the company’s mission and objectives. In contrast, few other employees may not be receptive to management decisions like dress code policy, merger acquisitions, appraisal policy, and more. 

4. Value Employee Opinions

Every employee respects an employer who values their opinion. When you lend an empathetic ear to the problems of your employees, they feel cared for. In fact, it encourages them to give more genuine and honest feedback in the future.

79% of surveyed employees said that they would not accept a job from a company that fails to act against sexual harassment. That’s the power of opinions. An employee satisfaction survey gives you a deep insight into how your workforce relates to social, economic, or political issues. You can be proactive and well prepared to address their impending challenges.

5. Means of Self-Reflection

People who introspect about their work are 23% more productive than people who never analyze their efforts. Employee satisfaction survey takes your employees on that self-reflective path by making them analyze their work challenges, organizational culture, nature of the relationship with their supervisors, and more.

Through the survey process, employees can deduce what is good for them and where they are lagging in their professional life. Giving genuine and honest feedback is a proactive way to enhance one’s workplace culture.

Image Source: The Process of it

6. Predict Long-Term Organizational Growth

Employee satisfaction surveys give actionable insights for predicting the future growth prospects of your organization. You get an idea of how employees view the management policies, their satisfaction with respect to pay and perks, the level of coordination between employees and managers, and much more.

For example, if most employees are not happy with the current ambiance and HR policies, you can expect a lot of resignations sooner or later. Hiring new employees always cost more in terms of effort and finances.

Image Source: Assignment Point

7. Foster Change at the Workplace

When managers get detailed feedback about their working method, they have a clear understanding of the needs of their team members. Accordingly, employee satisfaction surveys foster long-term behavior changes in the organization. This ensures a friendly working environment by bringing into perspective the needs of both – managers and team members.

Similarly, the survey gives the performance of different departments and verticals in a workplace. The best performing departments act as role models for other departments. They can adopt good practices and innovative ideas from the best departments.

8. Get Actionable Data for better Decisions

An employee satisfaction survey gives you concrete data about your employees’ preferences and opinions. With this measurable information, you can make well-informed decisions for the greater benefit of your organization.

For example, if 40/50 employees are not satisfied with a training program at the workplace, it is time to realign your events based on the genuine demand of the workers. This specific data will make you proactive in making changes rather than assuming the crude numbers.

9. Easy to Deploy

It is cost-effective and straightforward to create an employee satisfaction survey using some best survey software available in the market. Most of them come with attractive employee survey templates, have a combination of open-ended and closed-ended question types, branding options, and more.

You can easily edit the customizable templates and share the survey using platforms like social media, email, link, website embedding, and so on. In this way, you will not miss out on feedback from any of your employees.

Here are a few Employee Survey Templates that you can consider:

1. Employee Satisfaction Survey Template
2. Employee Net Promoter Score (NPS) Template
3. Employee Performance Survey Template
4. Employee Engagement Survey Template
5. Employee Motivation Survey Template
6. Work Environment Survey Template

How to Conduct Employee Satisfaction Survey

The process of conducting an employee satisfaction survey consists of various interlinked steps like gathering survey requirements, creating a survey, sharing it on multiple platforms, analyzing the results, and determining follow-up actions.

Let’s dive into these steps in detail:

1. Understand Survey Requirements

First and foremost, you need to understand the primary purpose of your survey and gather requirements accordingly. Only then you can take a focussed survey creation approach. Else, with a lack of concrete direction, you might end up wasting time and budget.

You can start by brainstorming your survey requirements on these lines:

• Does your survey have a long-term or short-term goal?
• What kind of feedback do you wish to gather?
• Can you meet the budgetary requirements?
• Do you have the resources to survey all your employees?
• What is your survey frequency?
• Will the surveys be conducted online or offline?
• What will be the follow-up action after the survey?
• What are the lessons learned from the previous survey?

2. Create a Survey

This is the crucial stage of survey creation where you need to decide the survey mode,  the type, and the number of survey questions. Powerful survey tools like ProProfs Survey Maker make this process easier with the availability of ready-to-use, customizable survey templates. You just need to edit the employee satisfaction survey questions to suit your business needs. These questions can be both qualitative and quantitative.

For example, a multiple-choice question collects quantitative data from your employees. They simply have to select from predefined answer options. In contrast, essay-type questions require your employees to give detailed feedback to a question. This qualitative data gives you an in-depth understanding of their sentiments.

Watch: How to Create Your Online Survey in Under 5 Minutes

3. Test Your Survey

Before you send out your survey, you need to ensure that it is free from technical glitches, the questions are easy to comprehend, the survey length is appropriate for your target audience, and more. This helps you avoid unnecessary costs involved in correcting the errors later on.

The best way to test your survey is to share it with a group of people in-house or outsource the testing process to a third party. For example, 20-30 people from your organization can take up your survey and share their experiences. Similarly, expert panels can look at your survey and see if the questions suit your audience or if the order of asking a question needs to be modified.

4. Share Your Survey

Once you test your survey, the next step is sharing the survey with your employees. Before that, you need to communicate the timings and intent of the survey. You can take different approaches like company newsletters, emails, and more. With this, your employees are well-informed beforehand, and they understand the importance of taking up the survey.

To share the survey, you can send a personal email to each employee. This is a simple and cost-effective way to collect feedback. Alternatively, you can post it on your company website, where it is accessible to everyone, and employees can take the survey at their convenience. Also, social media link sharing has a comprehensive outreach, and you do not miss out on any of your employees.

5. Analyze the Results

The feedback analysis stage helps you decode the sentiments of your employees question by question. Qualitative and quantitative questions require different approaches. For example, quantitative questions are close-ended and give you a concrete result, be it yes or no or multiple-choice questions. When it comes to open-ended questions, you need a thorough analysis of the text and associated employee sentiments.

All thanks to online survey software, survey analysis has become easier. Many tools like ProProfs Survey Maker come with an advanced AI-powered analysis mechanism. You can easily access digestible survey statistics and reports. There is also an option to segment your audience based on demography, location, preferences, and more. Further, Qualaroo is a popular sentiment analysis tool to understand the emotions behind your employee’s response.

6. Take Follow Up Actions

What’s next after analyzing your survey responses? How are you going to utilize the collected data? It is crucial to communicate the employee feedback to all the relevant stakeholders in the company like top management, supervisors, HR, and so on. Ensure that you make a concrete action plan based on their suggestions. 

Also, employees need to be informed about how their feedback was utilized. It makes them feel valued and cared for. With an empathetic approach, you can ensure that the responses to successive employee satisfaction surveys remain high.

The quality of your survey questions plays a crucial role in designing an employee satisfaction survey. You can use certain best practices to ensure that your surveys stand out.

Best Practices While Designing an Employee Satisfaction Survey

While creating an employee satisfaction survey, make sure that you design the questions to reduce survey fatigue and dropout rates.

• Use a balanced mix of both open-ended and closed questions to elucidate responses from your employees.
• Avoid double-barreled questions that are confusing as it contains unrelated elements or questions.
• Use simple and jargon-free language so that your employees can interpret the questions easily.
• Adopt a non-biased language to ensure a transparent survey process.
• Reduce employee fears of confidentiality by making the survey responses anonymous.

Survey your Employees, Act on Feedback and Grow your Business!

If you want to keep your employees productive and delighted, you must regularly gauge their needs and concerns. An employee satisfaction survey is a suitable platform to judge employee sentiments and prevent attrition rates. Further, these surveys give you a clear picture of workplace ambiance, future growth prospects of your business, space for self-reflection, and more.

Keep in mind that you need to have a concrete plan to conduct regular employee satisfaction surveys at the workplace. Make sure that the survey objectives are clear, and use an automated survey tool to get started. While sharing the survey, ensure that you use different platforms like social media, website, email, and SMS. And ensure you have a concrete action plan to assess and implement the feedback collected for a better environment and business growth.

Looking for an awesome survey tool to get started with an employee satisfaction survey? If so, try out ProProfs Survey Maker to access more than 100+ custom survey templates.