When we try to uncover the secret of happy employees, we know that there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ answer. But employee experience is what drives it. However, the only way to monitor employee experience, understand if people are happy at work and find out if there are things that could make a difference, is to ask them.
Whilst the age-old annual employee survey was a great idea in principle, let’s not forget the impact of the moment - especially in recent times. As human beings, how we feel in general can be influenced by a multitude of factors and annual surveys are too infrequent and unreliable to truly identify any meaningful trends. Besides, some leaders may find excuses not to act and employees may succumb to survey fatigue, particularly if nothing happens after giving their feedback.
More focused regular employee satisfaction surveys with the right employee engagement survey questions are simply better all round. Here are 8 reasons why:
1. Higher response rates
Since pulse surveys are delivered in short and sweet bursts, many organisations find that they get a much better response rate compared to that of traditional annual surveys, which often cram in a tedious amount of long-winded questions. Plus, when employees know their feedback is truly being taken on board, what’s a few minutes out of their day now and again?
2. Boosted engagement and motivation
Asking your workforce for regular feedback is a sure-fire way to improve employee engagement as it improves connectivity and communication between your staff and your leaders. What’s more, you’re illustrating that you care about the views and opinions of your employees as playing an important role in shaping your organisation’s future direction and growth.
3. Almost real-time measurement of satisfaction
We’ve already mentioned the importance of getting feedback from employees in the moment. Pulse surveys allow you to receive information based around morale and satisfaction often and quickly, so that you have a clear insight at that point in time as to how staff are feeling, rather than weeks after the survey has closed and the data has been analysed.
4. Improved workplace culture
If creating an outstanding workplace culture is a top priority for your HR department, implementing an employee pulse survey can only strengthen this. Asking for feedback (and acting on this promptly) can create happier, more engaged employees which can positively impact your organisation’s culture and enable you to hold on to, and attract top talent.
5. Focus on topics that matter
As you gather feedback over time, trends will inevitably emerge about what resonates most with your employees. These topics can then be regularly included in your surveys to bring more awareness to them and encourage positive habits to be formed. The trick to this is asking repetitive questions over a long period of time, such as about work-life balance.
6. Accurate analysis of trends over time
Comparing feedback one month to the next rather than year-on-year can yield far more accurate results as you can more easily pinpoint the reasons for any significant changes. For instance, you should see that the introduction of an Employee Assistance Programme has a positive impact on how employees feel they’re being supported in terms of their wellbeing in the following months.
7. Cost-effective
Annual employee engagement surveys can be both expensive and time-consuming due to how involved the creation, collation and analysis of this kind of data really is. Whereas pulse surveys can usually be managed in-house with the support of an accessible delivery and collation mechanism such as your HR solution or alternative staff survey software.
8. Supports future employee experience initiatives
Through regular pulse surveys, you can not only harness the immediate thoughts and feelings of your workforce but also discover insights into ways improvements can be made in both the short- and long-term. There’s no one better placed than your employees to help drive a positive employee experience by telling you which new initiatives could really make a difference to their working lives.
Best practices for employee engagement surveys
- More frequent surveys must be shorter. If your carefully crafted annual survey covers everything the organisation is interested in hearing about, take the questions and separate them into smaller chunks.
- Make sure employees don’t see more than 10 questions at a time and present them through your HR software or another digital format.
- To maximise participation, tell them how long it will take and when you will ask for feedback again in future.
- Try to account for the goals and variances you would expect from different teams in different roles and tailor the questions accordingly.
- Consider how you will share the results with employees once the survey has closed – and what actions the organisation will take based on the feedback given.
Ready to take the plunge? Now is as good a time as any to make the move to employee pulse surveys. And you might be pleasantly surprised at what you discover…
Discover how to facilitate this and deliver an exceptional employee experience through our scalable HR software. Book a free demo today.