Company surveys for employees: What you need to know.

Company surveys are a mechanism employers use to collect information about their employees. The information that is collected helps employers to obtain opinions, evaluate employee mood and morale, degree of engagement, as well as employee achievements. When employers gather a wide range of information about their employers, they can leverage it to improve employee satisfaction and the performance of the organization as a whole. There are various types of company surveys for employees that individually gather specific information about employees. Some popular company surveys for employees on the market include employee engagement surveys, workload analysis surveys, 360-degree feedback appraisal surveys, and culture audit surveys.

Employee Engagement Survey

An employee engagement survey measures how valued employees feel in an organization. The survey is a questionnaire that assesses employees, motivation, commitment, and enthusiasm for their work and organization. Additionally, the employee engagement survey provides a complete picture of how employees feel about things like working conditions. Understanding how engaged employees are has many benefits for employees and the organization. Through employee engagement surveys, the organization can identify issues that prevent its employees from doing their best work. Once identified, these issues can be resolved and ultimately benefit the business. In a study done by Gallup, the results indicated that worldwide, at least 87% of workers are disengaged from their jobs, and firms with highly engaged workforces outperform their rivals in earnings per share by 147%.

Benefits of Employee Engagement Surveys

1. It helps the organization identify gaps and issues they may not be aware of. Once the gaps have been identified, the organization can focus on addressing these issues.
2. Organizations can predict who is likely to stay or leave. This helps in succession planning as the organization knows where to invest its time and resources.
3. The information that comes from the surveys can help the organization identify the key engagement drivers.
4. The organization can retain and attract top talent if information from the employee engagement surveys is utilized.
5. Employee engagement surveys help employees to feel heard.
6. They encourage honest feedback, which helps the organization in making better decisions.

Organisational Culture Survey

An organizational culture survey is an assessment tool that analysis the existing culture of an organization and how the employees of that organization relate to it. Organizational cultures can develop naturally or through purposeful, persistent planning and effort. Organizations that deliberately work on creating an inclusive and positive culture are often the best in creating employee experience and satisfaction. Understanding your company's culture will help you identify areas where things are going well and potential roadblocks to even better results. The surveys will give an organization insight into how the company is doing, how the team members perceive the company's values, and what they need to be successful. Therefore, conducting organizational culture surveys is essential in retaining, attracting, and creating a competitive advantage for your organization.

Benefits of an Organisational Culture Survey

1. It helps identify areas of cultural strength and weakness and organizations can therefore leverage the strengths and work on the weaknesses to improve the employee experience.
2. It helps an organization see how employees relate to their existing culture.
3. It helps in strengthening the performance of the business.
4. It helps in attracting and retaining quality talent.
5. It helps in keeping employees aligned with the organization's values and beliefs.

360 Degree Feedback Appraisal Survey

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360-degree or multi-source feedback is a tool used to assess an employee's performance on agreed dimensions. It incorporates feedback from those who observe and are affected by the performance of the employee. Organizations that value the development of their employees administer these assessments so that employees can self-introspect their performance in the organization. Self-introspection allows employees to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses, which they can leverage or work on. The ability to leverage strengths and work on weaknesses is beneficial to an employee's performance and the performance of the organization as a whole. On the other hand, getting feedback keeps employees motivated if they are reaffirmed about their strengths.

Benefits of the 360 Degree Feedback Appraisal

• It helps in identifying development and training needs.
• It helps employees to self-introspect.
• It helps identify an individual's strengths and weaknesses.
• It fosters a need in employees to do better and gives them confidence in areas in which they perform well.
• It helps in improving the performance of individuals and the organization.

Workload Analysis Survey

A workload analysis survey is a technique used to assess how much time, effort, and resources an organization requires to pinpoint the precise requirement for quality and quantity of human resources in accordance with its strategic objectives and plans. The workload is vital in an organization as it determines employee productivity and performance, directly impacting the organization. Organizations must be mindful of the workload of each employee, as this heavily affects their productivity and performance. Therefore, it is pivotal that a workload analysis survey is conducted to understand each employee's workload.

Benefits of workload analysis surveys

1. They help the organization measure levels of productivity and performance for employees.
2. They help in adjusting employee workloads to meet basic needs and standards for employment, which results in employee satisfaction and engagement
3. Results from the survey can boost employee productivity.
4. They help to reduce the backlog and work-related stress.
5. They help in identifying training needs.
6. They help identify underutilized employees, which helps spread responsibilities or remove redundant employees, resulting in more productivity for the business and cutting down on unnecessary employee costs.

Employee Compensation and Benefits Survey

Employee compensation and benefits surveys, popularly known as salary surveys, are used to collect information about employee benefits and salaries. Organizations use salary surveys as benchmarking tools to help them decide on pay structures. Salary surveys enable an organization to pay competitively within the market. Paying competitively and rewarding employees well has many benefits, including retaining and attracting top talent and keeping employees satisfied and engaged.

Benefits of Employee Compensation and Benefits Survey

1. The organization can pay competitively based on the market trends
2. The organization can attract and retain top talent.
3. The organization can keep employees motivated and productive.

Conducting/Administering Employee Surveys

Most employee surveys are conducted online by use of questionnaires. Some organizations will opt to get an external consultant to design and conduct the surveys on their behalf, and others prefer to develop and administer the surveys in-house.

Reasons organizations get external consultants

1. This makes employees feel more comfortable sharing their honest opinions as an outside consultant will handle the information.
2. It helps in making the process to be free from bias.
3. They may not have the capabilities that allow them to develop the surveys.
4. It saves time on their part and makes the process easier and faster.

Reasons why organizations conduct surveys in house

1. It saves on the costs of hiring external consultants
2. Organizations have the technical capabilities and personnel to complete the surveys.
3. There may be information that the organization may not want external people to know.

Conclusion

It is clear that with all types of company surveys for employees, the main objective is to gather the information that will help the organization make informed decisions that help keep employees motivated and productive. Organizations must therefore invest in conducting employee surveys.