Are your employees happy working for your company? Do they feel valued for their contributions? What adjustments would you need to make to improve your workplace culture and boost employee retention, satisfaction, and productivity? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, employee satisfaction surveys can help you discover the answers—and the potential solutions to make improvements.
Purpose of Employee Satisfaction Surveys
Employee satisfaction surveys gather information from your current team to measure and track just how content and empowered they feel about all the different parts of their job. The information collected in these anonymous surveys is then analyzed to provide feedback to human resources teams, business leaders, and key decision-makers covering a range of topics that may include:
- A sense of belonging
- Compensation
- General benefits
- Health benefits
- Relationship with Supervisor
- Career development opportunities
- Access to tools and resources
- Workplace environment
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
Employee satisfaction surveys are important for gathering information that inspires positive action, making things better for both the companies that conduct these surveys and their employees. Responding to these surveys help organizations improve the overall employee experience, foster engagement, and boost productivity.
The difference in a happy workplace is tangible. Employees who self-report as being happy in their current jobs are 12% more productive than those who report they are unhappy. What’s more, companies with a higher number of unhappy employees are more likely to have higher turnover rates and lower morale. They may even have a harder time recruiting great talent.
Sample Employee Satisfaction Survey Questions
Creating an effective employee satisfaction survey is crucial for understanding and improving your workplace environment. Here are twenty sample questions that cover a variety of important aspects:
- How satisfied are you with your current job overall?
- How likely are you to recommend this company as a great place to work?
- Do you feel proud to work for this company?
- Do you feel that the company provides a safe working environment?
- Are your job responsibilities clearly defined?
- Do you feel your job makes good use of your skills and abilities?
- Do you find your work to be interesting and challenging?
- How effective is communication within your department?
- How often do you receive constructive feedback on your performance?
- Do you feel that management values your opinions and ideas?
- Do you feel there are opportunities for career growth within the company?
- Do you have access to professional development resources?
- Do you feel recognized and rewarded for the work you do?
- Do you feel that the company supports a healthy work-life balance?
- Do you feel a sense of belonging at the company?
- How well do the company’s values align with your personal values?
- How would you rate the company’s efforts in promoting diversity and inclusion?
- What do you enjoy most about working here?
Effective Employee Satisfaction Surveys: The Dos
DO Conduct Surveys Anonymously
In one survey, 90 percent of employees reported that they would be more likely to remain at their current job if their employer would ask for feedback and act on it.
Even so, there are bound to be employees who readily voice their opinions regularly and others who don’t share their thoughts or concerns so openly. This has a lot to do with an imbalanced employer-employee power dynamic. Many employees may not speak up and share valuable, actionable insights because they fear retribution.
This is why anonymous surveys can be so impactful. They give your team a place to provide feedback without fear. Many employees are afraid to offer candid opinions and speak their minds about important issues, and an anonymous survey opens the door for them to offer their thoughts.
Even better? Enlisting the help of a third party to conduct the survey. With the combined promise of confidentiality and the extra separation between the people administering the survey and the people signing their checks, employees can feel much freer to share their insights.
DO Begin the Survey Process with an End Goal In Mind
You may be tempted to ask dozens of questions in an employee satisfaction survey, but you want your survey topics to feel very relevant to your employees, all pointed toward getting a clear answer about a specific end goal. Plus, asking too many questions can lead to survey fatigue, which can contribute to rushed completion or abandonment, which can affect your survey results. You want your survey topics to feel relevant to your employees, all pointed toward getting a clear answer about a specific end goal.
Do you want to know more about what’s contributing to employee turnover? Or perhaps discover how employees might feel more engaged and supported by your organization to improve loyalty? Maybe you want to better understand how to best expand your DEI efforts. Ask yourself what you plan to do with the data you collect, and work back from there. The survey should be designed with the goal in mind.
DO Include Both Closed- and Open-Ended Questions
The questions you ask within your survey can have a huge impact on the results—which means they can also influence the kind of insights you get. That’s why it’s so important to phrase your questions clearly and carefully and to direct all questions toward a specific end goal.
But it’s not just what’s being asked that matters—the format of your survey questions matters, too. You should plan to include both closed-ended questions as well as open-ended questions to pave the way for deeper feedback and honest insights.
Here’s why this varied approach to surveys works so well. Multiple-choice or other closed-ended questions are quick and easy to analyze. You can gather a lot of information from many different questions and understand how your employees feel about those concepts very quickly.
When you add open-ended questions, your employees have the opportunity to share more details and offer personal experiences and opinions that can paint a vivid picture of your team’s current outlook on the employee experience—especially if they know the survey results are anonymous. You may even end up with valuable information you weren’t even asking for!
By combining question types, you benefit from both quantitative analysis and qualitative details, enabling you to better chart your progress over time.
What to Avoid When Conducting Employee Surveys: The Don’ts
DON’T Copy and Paste Questions
Great employee satisfaction surveys are targeted and actionable, which often means a survey will either be successful or not based on the questions. You want your survey to be highly effective, so why would you settle for questions that you didn’t create? That’s why you should never just copy and paste questions from another source because they will be missing your cultural feel.
There are so many reasons why your company is not like any other—from the policies in place to the people working there to those managing the organization, your company culture and employee experience will look very different, even if they appear similar on paper.
Your employee satisfaction survey questions should be as unique as your company. They should be geared toward your end goal, taking into consideration the organization’s culture, concerns, and current workplace events.
DON’T Ask Questions About Offerings You Would Never Be Able to Fulfill As a Company
Another big “don’t” in creating your employee satisfaction survey is asking questions that may lead to suggestions your company may not be able to satisfy. For instance, if your employees would never be able to work remotely for your organization, refrain from asking them if they would like that option. Whether the nature of your work relies on collaboration, or you must interact with clients and customers in person, questions about working from home can be damaging to your survey results and, potentially, your employee’s outlook on your company.
Another example would be about offering health insurance. If you can offer health insurance programs, but not dental insurance, don’t ask your employees if they would like dental insurance.
Asking questions about something you can’t deliver plants a seed of doubt in the minds of your employees, both about the survey itself and about what you can and can’t offer as their employer.
DON’T Keep Results on the Shelf
Once you complete your survey and have the analysis in hand, now is the time to take action—and to be transparent about it.
Your employees want to know that their input matters. Once surveys are conducted, you should take the time to release this information to the company and then show them how the changes you are making are tied into their feedback. This accomplishes two things:
- It shows your employees that they’ve been heard.
- It makes your workplace feel more collaborative and supportive.
Employee Satisfaction Surveys: A Powerful Tool to Take a Big Step Forward
Employee surveys can be an important tool to discover important insights regarding the health of your company and the people that power it.
When surveys are thoughtfully designed and effectively conducted, the results can provide you with a clear path to make improvements and enhance your business as a whole—but it takes careful planning to make it happen.
Are you considering conducting an employee satisfaction survey? We want to hear from you! Contact us to learn more about crafting a survey that will lead to clear results and actionable insights.