If you want to get a detailed understanding of what your employees think then an employee survey is the place to start. This may seem like a simple term but for clarity’s sake let’s start by defining what exactly an employee survey is.

What Is An Employee Survey?

An employee survey is a tool to gain a consensus of and feedback on employee engagement, morale and engagement. This information is usually collected anonymously allowing management to gain a realistic insight into working conditions. 

What Questions Should You Ask Your Employees?

You want to understand how your employees truly feel about their working environment. But first, you need to decide if you need industry-specific or general workplace questions would be a good fit.

The more important thing to note is that your questions should always be hyper specific and clear. Furthermore, each question should have a purpose. You also need to ensure there is no room for ambiguity in what you are asking about. 

This means that the questions you ask should not be too leading, you want honest answers. This will help you to garner information about what matters to your employees. For example, if you have introduced a new software, ask “what do you think of x software?” instead of “do you like x software?”.

You should also avoid any sort of double-barrelled or two-part questions. For example “Do you believe that we have a friendly work-environment that effectively motivates you?”, this is asking if there is a friendly work environment AND a motivating one. You need simple, concise answers which focus on one specific issue, it would be better to decide which question is of more importance to you or to split this question into two. 

Here are some examples of questions you could use:

• Would you recommend this organisation as a great place to work? 

• This is a good indicator of both employee satisfaction and employee engagement.

• Do you receive regular constructive feedback from your manager?

• These types of questions help you to understand the quality of your management team. This may seem as if it falls under the scope of a double-barrelled question but the “regular” is specific to “constructive feedback”.

• Does your job support your career growth plans?

• Your employees are more likely to be engaged with a job they see a career in. This is a key indicator of employee engagement as well as seeing the risk of talent loss.

• Do you have all the information you need to do your job effectively?

• These sorts of questions allow you to gain insight into both management and employee engagement.

• Do you feel that your opinions are valued at work?

• This again registers both the relationship between managers and other team members, and employee engagement but it also demonstrates how useful the survey is.

How Many Questions Should You Ask Your Employees?

The length of an employee survey is crucial to its success. You need a diverse range of topics but not so varied that you can’t use these answers to attack specific issues. 

We recommend 10 questions for a survey if you want to maintain your employee's attention. 

How Frequently Should You Perform Employee Surveys?

How often you should perform employee surveys depends on the length of time it takes to implement and see changes based on the responses. The lifecycle of employee surveys may begin and end with asking questions but it is what is done with the data collection that matters. 

It will likely take you 3 months to begin to see a difference, so this is the optimum time between employee surveys but every organisation is unique. Any more frequently than every 3 months and you may find you have less and less engagement. Your employees should feel like their responses are valued and should not be inundated with constant questions when they see little or no results.

For the same reason, employee surveys are particularly important in times of change. If your organisation is going through a shift in management or operation style it is crucial to ask them for their input sooner rather than later. They will have questions and concerns and an employee survey can make them feel reassured. 

How Can Convene Help You With Your Employee Surveys?

Convene is an award-winning Board Portal, now also available as an integration with Microsoft Teams, designed to streamline your management processes from start-to-finish. We have a built-in Survey feature which empowers your Administrators to simply organise the form and automatic reminders will be sent out to all participants.

With Convene’s Survey feature you can also enable Anonymous Responses, to protect the identities of responders and Score Calculations which computes totals and averages for numeric questions. 

If you would like to learn more about Convene’s wide range of features and capabilities, please contact us or book a free demo today!