Why Employee Satisfaction questionnaires and Employee Exit questionnaires Make Good Sense

Organizations that implement a change management programme need to be careful that all the predicted efficiencies are not then negated by an abundance of dissatisfied employees suffering from low moral and excessive pressure. The benefits of a company having a highly motivated workforce can be considerable and having a workforce that is both motivated and productive should not be regarded as being mutually exclusive to one another.

Left unresolved employers run the risk of alienating their employees and events can then cause employee frustrations to explode resulting in employers finding themselves on the back foot, faced with problems that cannot be ignored.

In an ideal world employers would take time to understand the needs of their employees and learn from their experiences of working on the front line, but employers are often themselves tied up day to day fighting their own fires.

By automating much of the intelligence gathering process and providing the findings in a format that can be readily analysed online surveys provide employers with an efficient, effective and low cost method to help achieve a pleasant working environment, where staff satisfaction and productivity is high.

Dissatisfied & unproductive

There are a plethora of reasons why employees may become dissatisfied with their job that can result in them channelling their frustrations into demands for higher salaries and reduced hours. Employers who tackle these issues head on, making it all about salary and hours, will often find themselves dealing with the symptoms and not the root cause.

Not just about the money

The following are barriers to achieving productivity, none of which are likely to be resolved by increasing salaries or reducing hours:-

Inadequate training
Out of touch management
Out of date working methods
Lack of proper tools and equipment

Many studies have shown that salaries are rarely the number one priority of employees and providing an employer is paying market rate they would be fundamentally wrong to think that paying higher salaries is the answer to all employee problems.

Take the case of a single mother who is juggling a full time job with the need to look after two children. Out of frustration she may demand more money so that she feels that she is able to cope where a better solution, for both her and the business, may be more flexible working hours.

Good communications is what it is about

It is in any company’s interest to establish good communications. A company that makes communication between personnel and management difficult, or that takes the view that if personnel have a problem they will say something, can often delude themselves into thinking their workforce is content when it is not. It can take only one small problem and one employee to feel aggrieved for an entire workforce to develop a destructive ‘them and us’ attitude.

Improving communication

Ideally employer and employee would meet one on one but in practice this would seem practical only for very small organizations.

Meetings between management and worker representatives are good in theory but can often spiral into becoming talking shops and losing their purpose as both sides become more familiar with one another and the meetings run the risk of being hijacked by the more extreme personalities.

Suggestion boxes can be useful but can be viewed as token efforts by management as they wait for personnel to highlight a problem.

Newsletters can be useful, but their main purpose is generally to inform and not discuss issues.

Maintaining the initiative

Conducting employee satisfaction surveys on a regular basis you are able to ask each employee specific questions and present a pro-active management initiative where the whole workforce can be consulted on various issues. Surveys are able to provide a level playing field between the quieter and more vocal employees.

Consultation should not be seen as a sign of weakness, a confident manager will take counsel from all quarters before making a decision. By retaining the initiative and conducting a survey the employer is able to tackle problems from a position of strength as opposed to waiting for problems to arise and develop out of proportion.

If small problems are left unresolved the employees mood can change from positive to negative over night when a minor problem breaks the camel’s back.

It is easy and quick

For the majority of organizations online surveys represent a proactive, effective and low cost solution. For the majority of organizations where most of the personnel have desktop computers making online surveys quick to design and quick to deploy direct to the individual.

In situations where not all of the personal have access to a computer there are options available to implement the online survey solution such as providing a shared computer, have an operator input their responses or as a last resort, a hardcopy survey.

Job satisfaction

There are many elements that go towards providing an employee with job satisfaction, from the working environment, working methodology, working ethos, company ethics to having good and effective management. Job satisfaction brings benefits through improved productivity and motivation from a workforce that feels that they are treated as individuals and not a commodity item.

Educate and inform

An often overlooked benefit of online surveys is that they can be used to educate and pass on important information to the workforce, ensuring that the ‘message’ does not become corrupted as it is handed down by the phenomenon of Chinese whispers.

An online survey can explain a difficult situation and get valuable feedback from the employees as to the best solution. It is rare in this situation that the workforce would appear negative; it is more likely they will feel informed and empowered and that might be enough to turn a potentially negative problem into a positive challenge that unites the workforce.

Exit surveys

Exit surveys are a good way for management to ensure that when people leave the organisation they are leaving for the right reasons and not due to reasons that if appreciated earlier could have been addressed and resolved. Identifying a problem may not be enough to prevent a person from leaving but it could lead to an unappreciated issue being resolved that may be all that is required to stop other key personnel from also deciding to leave.

For a Sample Employee Satisfaction Survey:- Employee Satisfaction Survey Template

For a sample Employee Exit survey:- Employee Exit Survey Template

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