Employee surveys are one of the most valuable yet underutilized market research methodologies available.
With so many benefits of employee surveys, organizations can take a step in the right direction by understanding the needs of their team.
Conducting this type of market research is a very effective tool in driving real change for an organization and improving job satisfaction.
In this blog post, our employee survey company discusses 12 benefits of this methodology.
Third-party employee surveys are a valuable tool for organizations to gather objective feedback from their employees and make data-driven decisions to improve their workplace culture and employee satisfaction.
More specifically, the benefits of employee surveys include:
Each of these employee satisfaction survey advantages is discussed below. But, if you’re looking for a shorter recap, watch the video below.
Employee surveys provide a vehicle to collect feedback. The most cost-efficient methodology for conducting these surveys is done online through email.
This is done through a simple list exchange of employee email contacts after an NDA is signed.
Invitations are scheduled as well as reminders to boost response rates as high as possible. Among all the types of surveys in market research, employee surveys often produce some of the highest response rates.
You will not find a more engaged audience than the employees of your brand.
Another benefit of employee surveys is that they provide the management team with an opportunity to create follow-up meetings and dialogue with teams.
Although this is not as confidential as an online study it serves as a follow-up action item to take the next steps with the data.
Here are some tips our market research firm recommends for follow-up meetings:
For example, let’s say the survey identified three key themes that need improvement: employee benefits, communication with managers, and better evaluations.
The follow-up work sessions would be centered around these topics using an independent moderator to gather more detail and context.
This is an obvious benefit of employee surveys but also crucial. By measuring satisfaction levels you’ll understand where your scores compare relative to other like-companies.
Overall, measuring employee satisfaction is important to understand whether your team is happy with areas such as company culture, benefits, morale, and so on.
This is a key metric within an employee survey to review year over year as it will determine if changes made to the company helped improve employee satisfaction or not.
Even more so, it is important to compare the level of employee satisfaction with those who are competitors or in the same industry as you.
You can work with a market research company like Drive Research to purchase other employee survey data for similar companies in your industry to see how your organization stacks up.
It also serves as a great metric to track year-over-year to see what improved and what did not.
Types of market research benchmarks include:
All of these employee survey benchmarks are beneficial to measure. Each shed new light on comparisons.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, much like making major company changes will not happen overnight.
One of the key benefits of an employee survey is that it can identify the most pertinent areas of improvement for human resources or leadership teams to focus on.
This vital advantage identifies those core areas and factors that are important to employees but also the ones they are less than satisfied with.
The areas that are of high importance and low satisfaction become priority action items for your management and human resources teams.
It ensures that post-survey, you’ll be spending your time on the items that matter most to employees.
For instance, perhaps the employee survey reflects your team is least satisfied with the lack of proper training available.
Use this as an action item to offer free training classes, webinars, or lunch and learns as a step in the right direction of meeting employee needs.
It is not likely the results of an employee engagement survey will only show positive reviews from your team. Do not be discouraged.
While most managers and HR professionals hope their employees are 100% satisfied, this is typically not the case.
An employee survey company will pay close attention to low ratings through regression analysis. This type of analysis determines the relationship between independent variables on dependent variables. In other words, what are the key drivers which impact overall satisfaction?
For instance, if loyalty is your main objective, your organization can determine which factors most impact loyalty.
Essentially, regression helps an organization stake a claim like if we improve A, B, and C we’ll improve loyalty by 10%. Doing so often identifies hidden drivers of satisfaction.
An example of using regressional analysis for employee surveys would be…
Employees state that salary is not important to them. But based on the regression analysis that looks at correlation, satisfaction with their job and satisfaction with salary are highly related to one another.
As one goes up, the other goes up, and vice-versa.
In addition to overall results, another great benefit of employee surveys is that you can use back-end segmentation.
If the feedback of your employee survey shows employees overall are not satisfied with your company, take a look at the individual factors bringing the satisfaction score down.
A market research company specializing in employee surveys will use segmentation to slice and dice the survey data by categories such as departments, the employee’s manager, how long the employee has worked with the company, and more.
Additionally, Drive Research partners with some of the best executive coaching and training companies that can assist your organization in taking some of these next steps for your efforts.
Employee surveys also allow management teams to dig deeper into specific factors affecting employee satisfaction.
Exposure to these key elements is a major benefit of employee surveys.
This helps identify which managers are doing well and which are not, from the perspective of their subordinates. It is one of the most common primary objectives of an employee survey.
So many of our surveys focus on leadership effectiveness and management principles.
This type of data can also provide your organization with unique training items and follow-up criteria which is manager-specific.
As an HR team, it gives you objective data to push back to management and leaders to create change.
Another employee survey advantage is that they are a great step in opening the lines of communication with employees. Since everyone has a chance to reply, employees can share all of the good and bad feedback about the company.
All in all, it’s better to be aware of what employees think and need, rather than assume. If you don’t ask you’ll never know.
There are also types of employee surveys that focus on unique objectives such as diversity and inclusion.
The simple act of reaching out and listening carries a lot of weight. It’s a proactive approach to show you care, and it’s natural for staff to feel cared for when they’re offered an employee morale survey.
The tone is much different from reacting to employee complaints on a daily or monthly basis. All of these anecdotal comments can be quantified through an online survey.
You may hear only the extremes through a comment box (i.e., those who really love or hate you). A survey provides you with a representative view of your entire employee base.
With any time of market research project, it is important to use the data and results to implement change. This is extremely crucial when conducting employee survey research.
Employee surveys are an excellent first step to changing the culture in an organization.
Because the responses are anonymous, employees can freely share their thoughts. Not only is this a great benefit of employee surveys, but this is great for boosting employee mental wellness (more on that in a bit).
Oftentimes disgruntled employees do not share negative feedback with management. Before you know it they’ve left the organization, taking another role elsewhere.
While it is great you are asking for employee feedback, it is important to listen to this feedback and make necessary changes for employees to really feel as if their opinions matter.
These surveys help you proactively identify and address common problems in an anonymous forum.
Drive Research recommends featuring some of the key highest-scoring criteria in your recruitment campaigns and marketing.
For example, let’s say you learn from the survey that there was overwhelmingly positive feedback for Friday lunches, flexible work schedules, and team attitude.
These are all data points the company can feature in their recruitment strategies, all from the voice of your employees.
Customer satisfaction starts from inside your organization. If your employees aren’t satisfied you’ll struggle to score high on customer satisfaction metrics including CSAT and NPS.
And now, for our final benefit of employee surveys – improved mental health.
Not surprisingly, all of the other advantages we’ve listed come together to create a space where staff can openly share their thoughts.
As a result, this automatically boosts mental health in the workplace.
And we think that’s more important than ever.
Roughly 19% of current employees have stated that their mental health is poor, or fair at best. And when employees are not at their mental “best,” their work suffers.
So with that information in mind, how can you cultivate a stable work environment with your survey results? Let’s discuss this.
In short, employees thrive when they feel their needs are being covered. More importantly, their mental health can improve by feeling at ease in the workplace.
Recommended Reading: How (and Why) Organizations Should Improve Employee Wellbeing
While the benefits of employee surveys are plenty, many can be missed if the survey is conducted in-house.
It’s vitally important to use a third-party firm for employee engagement surveys because:
If employees feel as though they cannot trust the responses being kept anonymous they will not be upfront or truthful, and they may not even respond at all which will hurt your response rate and margin of error for statistical reliability.
However, outsourcing the study to an employee survey company, like Drive Research, assures your team’s comments and feedback can be shared openly and honestly with no repercussions.
To learn more, read our Ultimate Guide to Using a Third-Party for Employee Surveys.
The benefits of employee surveys are endless.
If changes need to happen with your culture, the change needs to happen from the inside out.
Figuring out what your employees need in terms of resources and how to address improvements is the first domino that needs to fall before you ask them to properly serve your customers.
Additionally, by partnering with a third-party employee survey company, employees are more likely to share their open and honest feedback.
All survey responses are anonymous and confidential to encourage full transparency. This is a major factor in reaping the benefits of employee surveys and driving real change in any organization.
Don’t forget about the most important customers of all: your employees.
It is easy to place a large value of your business on your customers and their opinions or usage of your company, brand, products, and services.
However, by obtaining employee feedback with an online survey agency you can better understand your employee’s needs so they can be better brand advocates and better performers.
Drive Research is a national employee survey company. We work coast-to-coast with organizations in a variety of industries on employee survey efforts.
We design custom surveys to address your unique needs and develop a report to help you understand the results and take action.
