Get Feedback from Staff with These Staff Survey Tips

One of the biggest expenses for every business is staff attrition. Why does your staff leave? Any organization that doesn’t listen to their employees and collect feedback from them on a regular basis is making a huge mistake. But, how can you get feedback? Staff surveys are the way to go because these can be useful in enhancing productivity, lowering absenteeism, boosting staff retention rates, improving customer relations and increasing profitability. However, one thing that businesses should remember is that they can only benefit from staff surveys if they manage them right. Otherwise, staff surveys will incur a lot of cost, have poor response rates, be time consuming process and lead to administrative challenges.

So, how can you conduct effective staff surveys? Here are some expert tips given by PeoplePulse that can be extremely helpful:

Communicate

You need to practice effective communication in your invitation emails, all business meetings as well as reminder memos for informing your employees of the assessment procedure. This will prompt them to get a buy in and increase participation in the survey.

Market the survey

In order to boost staff participation in surveys, you have to talk about it in several formats, which means getting creative with the campaign. You can attract attention with newsletters, table tents, posters, social media posts and even via your email signature.

Have the leadership team behind you

You first need to have the leadership team behind you before you can expect your staff to participate in the surveys. When it comes to the staff survey participation rate, leadership can play a very important role. To boost participation, the leadership needs to communicate to their staff that their opinions are valuable and they matter to the organization.

Keep them fun and simple

You can use creative themes for surveys to make them interesting for your staff, but it is also vital to keep things simple and ensure the survey is easy to understand. The survey needs to be to the point and short. Plus, you need to create a call to action and use concise and clear language.

Explain the advantage

To the leadership and management, the benefits of conducting a survey are rather obvious, but how does it help your staff? If they take the survey, will it have an impact on the kind of recognition they get, improve their work experience or enable them to have a say in the company? When your staff knows what they are getting out of the surveys, they are more likely to participate.

Promise confidentiality

In a staff survey, you can only build trust when you ensure 100 percent confidentiality. This assures them that they can enjoy the security and freedom of submitting honest opinions without needing to worry about any possible consequences. You can partner with an external vendor because this allows your staff to feel safe.

Once your survey is done, you should share the results with your staff and start taking action on the findings to show them that their efforts were not wasted and you value their opinion.