How To Make The Most Of Employee Feedback Surveys

Improving company policies to create a better environment for everyone

Feedback surveys are a great way to find out how your employees feel about working for your company. Questions might ask how they feel about recent decisions, how the company can improve the working environment, or what help they need to progress in their role.

Sending employee feedback surveys are a simple but effective way to find out more about how employees feel about working for your company. You can send the same questions to everyone, or tailor them based on how long someone has been there or the department they’re in.

Answers can help to improve company policies to create a better environment for everyone; to help employees progress in their roles; or to find patterns in why employees stay or leave.

Larger companies that want employees of all levels to feel heard. Employees at the bottom of the ladder often feel invisible and like their opinions matter less to HR and senior management. 

Offering them a way to voice their opinions makes them feel like a valued part of the company regardless of how long they’ve been there or where they are on the hierarchy.

They’re also useful for HR teams and senior management to find out more about the company. As companies scale, it becomes difficult to monitor employee satisfaction. Surveys help to track this over time, showing if improvement measures need to be adopted and if so, how successful they are.

Before coming up with the questions for your survey, it’s important to know what you want to know. That will dictate the questions you ask. Sending a survey as a box-ticking exercise is a waste of time for the people sending it and for those that have to answer it. Employees know when this is the case, too. It means when you send an important survey out, they’ll be less likely to fill it in. You should, therefore, send surveys for a reason and make sure that that reason is clear to everyone. The more employees understand the motivations behind the survey, the more likely they’ll be to take part.

If you’re looking for answers that you can compare and contrast, closed, multiple-choice questions are effective for this. They make it easier for you to find patterns in employee answers. However, it makes answers black and white, giving employees little room to elaborate on their responses.

One way around this is to offer them the chance to explain their answers either at the end of each question or at the end of the survey itself.

Alternatively, you could give them to option to schedule a call with an HR representative at the end. This allows them to talk about issues they’ve raised in more depth, getting answers faster and showing to them that their feelings and opinions are valid.

Make sure the questions are easy to understand so that employees can give the most accurate answer. Anything that’s open to interpretation or confusion will mean that your data is less valid and it will be harder to look for patterns.

If you’d like to ensure honest feedback from your employees, you could give them the chance to answer anonymously. You can’t ask for further details this way, but sometimes employees are only comfortable coming forward about issues if they have the protection of anonymity.

Employee feedback surveys are an effective way to get to know your employees, particularly in larger organizations. They help you to track company and team growth, the effectiveness of changes that are made within the organization, and employee satisfaction over long and short periods of time.

How often you send feedback surveys is up to you. The more you send them the less likely employees will be to engage with them, especially if they’re long and require detailed answers. Shorter surveys will get more responses, but it’s important to ensure that the questions you ask get you the answers you need. If you need longer responses from employees to get those answers, you could use incentives to encourage them to respond. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that the more engaged employees are, the more likely they’ll be to fill in the survey.

Questions should be specific and not open to interpretation to ensure that answers are clear to the person analyzing the results. This gives you the most information to use to inspire future improvements, whatever they may be.

Kristina Proffitt works as a Content Marketer for Cronofy. Connect Kristina Proffitt Follow @cronofy