Comprehensive Employee Surveys Boost Employee And Company Performance
Conducting comprehensive employee surveys is like doing a full-body scan of your organization. They can identify cancers that are eating away at and threatening your business. Comprehensive employee surveys typically include 40-70 questions. This is contrasted with limited-question employee surveys that have 10-25 or so questions.
Five reasons for conducting comprehensive employee survey:
Five key reasons to conduct comprehensive employee engagement surveys, employee satisfaction surveys and employee opinion surveys include:
1 - Well designed comprehensive employee surveys tell you what you need to know to achieve significant increases in company performance and competitiveness. Comprehensive employee surveys assess the magnitude of known problems and opportunities, and identify hidden problems and opportunities that are impeding competitiveness and profit, negatively impacting customers and creating risks that can be very costly and sometimes embarrassing.
2 - While ratings for each employee survey are important in telling you about how engaged and satisfied employees are, employees' comments often are even more important than the ratings. Comments tell you why employees provided high or low ratings for each survey question and comments collectively tell you what needs to be done to address problems and take advantage of opportunities identified in the survey.
3 - Whether your organization has fewer than 50 or more than 50,000 employees, it is likely complex with many problems, challenges and opportunities. A limited question employee survey such as the Q12 employee engagement survey that is offered by Gallup. The Q12 survey, which includes only 12 specific questions, can't possibly identify all of an organization's employee-related and other important problems and opportunities, and point to the necessary solutions. Comprehensive employee surveys assess a broad range of topics, providing detailed quantitative and qualitative information and a roadmap for achieving breakthrough increases in employee and organizational performance.
4 - Most employees are willing to tell you the "good, the bad and the ugly" when they are confident that their responses, including ratings and comments/suggestions are anonymous and they have no fear of retribution due to their honest survey responses.
5 - The information, perceptions and insight gathered by employee engagement surveys, employee satisfaction surveys and employee opinion surveys eliminates the need for guessing about what is right and what is wrong. Comprehensive employee survey data enables organizations to avoid costly decisions, initiatives and actions taken by managers (sometimes based on recommendations from consultants) that are based on insufficient or wrong information and guesses about causes of problems.
Illustrative Comments:
Following are illustrative comments received from sales people in an employee survey conducted for a company with several thousand people selling office equipment to business across the U.S. The comments demonstrate the need to conduct comprehensive surveys and to take action based on the survey findings. Does your company have any of the following issues and problems? What other problems are hurting your organization's performance?:
Departments Communicate Effectively with Each Other: