Rebecca Noori is a freelance content marketer who writes about HR and careers for B2B SaaS companies. You'll also find her supporting beginner freelancers when they're starting out. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Companies that send out regular HR employee feedback surveys are sending a clear message: They care about the voice of their workforce.
And this is important because employees who feel heard are 4.6 times more likely to perform better than those who don't believe they're listened to.
Just as voting in an election gives citizens the right to stand up and fight for their beliefs, feedback surveys at work allow employees to express valuable opinions about working for your company.
Individually, a single feedback form may not overhaul company culture. But collective feedback can drive change for the good of the organization and employees' professional growth too.
Together with our curators, we have created a library of actionable digital marketing resources. Personalized to your team's needs.
An employee feedback survey is a short list of questions that ask staff about their experience of working for your company. You'll cover vital topics, including
Depending on your organizational model, you might also ask about remote or hybrid work where relevant.
Traditional questionnaires are printed and completed manually, but sending digital surveys is more efficient and produces greater response rates.
Tip: collect feedback anonymously to encourage more honest survey results.
Companies collect external feedback to determine customer satisfaction rates and understand how their audience interacts with their brand. Internal employee feedback metrics are just as valuable because they lead to:
Create your own employee feedback survey by covering questions about different aspects of working life, including the following:
Effective feedback gives you a valuable overview of whether your employees feel aligned with the company culture and your overall mission. But you'll also receive granular insights about how individuals collaborate within teams and communicate with supervisors. This impacts an employee's work-life balance and personal development.
The below questions use a sliding scale format, where the recipient will choose answers ranging from Strongly Disagree (1) to Strongly Agree (5).
Company culture is crucial to an employee's happiness and motivation in their role. Those who don't fit in or feel their values don't align with the company are likely to disengage and become unhappy in their work.
HR strategist, Gonzalo Shoobridge, explains,
"An employee survey is not an HR exercise in employee engagement; it's a life and death trip to the doctor to learn the truth about organizational health."
Ask questions including:
"I think the whole employee-employer relationship is shifting. And the power is sitting more with the employee to say, "actually, that doesn't work for me. What's going to help me more in my career is to have a rich dialogue, and understand what my experience with you is going to be like, understand where I need to grow, understand how I'm being accountable."
I think the scales really are for the employer to feel comfortable about how they manage their employee base."
Marie-Claire Barker, Global Chief Talent Officer at Wavemaker
Employees must feel the potential for personal and professional growth in their current roles. Regular pulse surveys enable HR leads and supervisors to understand if their team members feel supported in their development, whether they have the opportunity to progress, and if they're using their skillset to the best of their ability. Try questions like:
Employee engagement survey questions reveal so much about job satisfaction.
94.7% of employees who self-identify as highly engaged also feel their employer takes their feedback seriously. Disengagement levels impact retention, so this key metric will also tell you if your employees plan to stay with the company or leave in the near future.
Teams that can't work collaboratively are usually unproductive, unhappy, and have high employee turnover rates. A survey of more than 1,600 working adults found lack of teamwork contributes to high volumes of workplace stress. In particular, poor communication is responsible for 39% of stress.
Want to know whether your team is cohesive? These questions about collaboration highlight where the strengths and weaknesses lie and where you need to make changes.
Employees need to know management teams are hearing their voices and addressing their concerns in a timely manner. Strong communication comes down to the relationship between employees and their direct supervisor. But all too often, this can be lacking, with 69% of managers uncomfortable communicating with their employees. Ask the following questions to establish if communication channels work in your organization.
A good work-life balance is crucial to employee productivity and motivation. It's also an important part of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Employers must strive to help their team members achieve healthy work-life harmony. Why? Along with being the right thing to do, workplace stress also costs the global workforce an estimated $1 trillion in lost productivity annually. Check how your employees feel about the following statements:
There can be ambiguity about what it means to be part of a distributed team for both employees who work from home full-time and hybrid employees.
In a Deloitte "Return to Workplace" survey, 32% of employers consider "maintaining culture" a top concern. If you manage remote teams, your employees should always feel like they are still part of the company culture and have the same opportunities as employees who work in the office. Assess the following:
Sliding scale questions are helpful as they allow you to analyze sentiment at both an individual and aggregate level. But you'll gain more detailed insights from open-ended questions. Ask the following questions to entice more information from your survey recipients.
Remember: use these sparingly as they're more time-consuming than sliding scale questions.
To make life simpler for you, we have created not one, but two ready-to-use, yet completely customizable templates:
➡️ Get your free copy here.
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An employee feedback form must be clearly defined with goals to understand what you're measuring. For better buy-in, you should also set expectations for your recipients.
Promise absolute anonymity for employees, and they will likely be more honest when completing your survey. However, if you'll need to share survey data with line managers or Human Resources leads, be transparent about this from the get-go to earn employee trust.
To get the most out of your survey, you need to understand what you want to achieve. Do you want to improve employee retention? Do you need to increase employee productivity? Only once the goals and objectives for your survey are crystal clear should you start to formulate your questions.
This study of over 2,500 respondents revealed a 7% increase in response rates when their name was used in a personalized invite for online surveys. These people were also 2.6% less likely to drop the survey before completing it correctly.
Drop-offs happen when respondents don't complete your entire employee feedback questionnaire. Start with straightforward questions to minimize this problem.
Data skewing can also occur when bias creeps into your question order.
Example: if you ask your survey respondents to list the three main areas your company could improve on, immediately following a question on flexible working, your respondents are likely to include flexible working in their answer.
Survey too frequently, and you risk becoming a nuisance; survey too little, and you might not collect enough actionable data. Bonusly reports that 41.8% of employers solicit feedback from their employees annually or less frequently. When defining your survey frequency, ensure you have enough time to implement changes based on received feedback and measure the impact of those changes.
Looking for employee survey success stories? Here are 3 companies who’ve enjoyed great results from investing in feedback strategies.
Icelandair is dedicated to creating an attractive and welcoming workplace, which it achieves by checking in regularly and listening to employee feedback. Their annual company-wide survey has an excellent 85-87% response rate, but team leaders also send out more frequent pulse surveys. HR leaders act on feedback quickly, which encourages employees to trust the process and complete surveys again in the future.
Capital Asset Management has used insights from survey data to improve team collaboration and communication in the workplace. During the pandemic, employees who had switched to remote working were concerned about job stability - this was surprising to management, who knew the business was stable and robust. Leadership was able to reassure and set up further benchmark employee engagement studies to offer enhanced communication.
Facebook distributes two internal surveys each year along with more regular pulse surveys. A Facebook spokesperson explains,
“Feedback is an integral part of our culture, and we regularly conduct internal employee surveys to find out where we are doing well or where we need to improve. In areas where we’ve seen declines, we hear from our people, take their feedback seriously, and most importantly, take action.”
Your employees are busy, so design a short, meaningful survey that doesn't take up too much of their time. Aim to have them complete it in under 5 minutes - test this out and mention the survey length at the top for extra motivation.
Focus on survey user experience too. Your questions should be specific, and your employees shouldn't be confused about what you're asking them. Survey response rates can fall if the questionnaire is too wordy or the answer fields don't match the questions.
While incentivizing your workforce to complete their surveys is common (perhaps offering entry into a prize draw), a 100% response rate is often a red flag. This can signal coercion and managerial influence that impacts survey responses and data validity.
You also want to avoid response rates that fall below 50%. When employees don't complete your form, it's often because they're significantly disengaged. Facebook reports they learn a lot when people don't participate in their surveys. Those who don't are 2.6 times more likely to leave in the next 6 months.
Response rates between 65 to 85% are the most useful. If you're struggling to achieve this score, try sending out reminders to people who started a survey but forgot to complete it. Also, look at the survey design to improve the UX for participants.
Collecting employee feedback shouldn't be a one-off event, but neither should your workforce feel bombarded with questionnaires.
41.8% of employers solicit feedback from their employees either in annual surveys or less frequently, according to Bonusly. A better strategy would be to collect responses:
Zavvy's innovative employee solutions make it easy for companies to retain high-potential employees and promise them a rewarding future.
Our employee feedback tool allows you to create a feedback culture on autopilot. You'll schedule regular feedback cycles running in all directions, including:
But what can you do with all this feedback? Our employee enablement platform supports companies in taking the next step after measuring the status quo. Whether you're remote, hybrid, or office-based, you'll find it straightforward to transform feedback insights into improved company performance, culture, and well-being.
➡️ Want to know more? Get in touch with Zavvy to arrange a demo and consultation today.
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Companies that send out regular HR employee feedback surveys are sending a clear message: They care about the voice of their workforce.
And this is important because employees who feel heard are 4.6 times more likely to perform better than those who don't believe they're listened to.
Just as voting in an election gives citizens the right to stand up and fight for their beliefs, feedback surveys at work allow employees to express valuable opinions about working for your company.
Individually, a single feedback form may not overhaul company culture. But collective feedback can drive change for the good of the organization and employees' professional growth too.
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