The specific goals of employee surveys vary widely, but the first step is usually to gather information. Which topics you need to explore depends on the situation in your organisation. Below you will find a range of possible goals, examples and planning steps.
Contents
Goals of an employee survey
An employee survey provides the information you need to initiate and support change in your organisation. Depending on the change process, it can support a range of goals:
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Improving the working atmosphere
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Increasing employee motivation
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Reducing sickness absence
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Strengthening retention and reducing staff turnover
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Improving leadership
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Supporting quality management
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Supporting change projects
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Identifying risks and weaknesses
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Reviewing (improvement) measures
The goal of an employee survey often stems from a specific trigger: for example, you notice that sickness absence is rising year on year, that productivity in certain areas is declining, or you are planning a refurbishment and want to involve your employees.
Who should be involved in setting the goals?
Involve all stakeholders as soon as you start setting goals: senior management, the works council or other employee representatives, HR, the data protection officer, and specialists and managers. For the design, implementation and communication of the survey, it can also make sense to involve corporate communications or the IT department. Alternatively, a steering group can coordinate the project with support from these departments. Senior management and line managers should visibly back the project. To find out why the works council should be involved early on, see Involve the works council early.
Setting the goals
The goals of your employee survey should be precise, clear and above all realistic. For a pilot survey, we strongly recommend not aiming too high and planning the analysis from the outset. If the first survey fails, the instrument often loses credibility within the organisation for a long time.
Management should communicate its expectations clearly to the workforce at the outset. Take care not to raise unrealistic expectations while still motivating people to take part in the change process.
From goal to question
A goal only becomes measurable once you translate it into specific questions and a metric. Take three steps: define the topic area, formulate suitable questions and set a metric for comparison.
- Reducing staff turnover: Topic area: retention and career prospects. Question: “How likely is it that you will still be working here in two years’ time?” Metric: share of “very likely” and “likely” responses.
- Improving leadership: Topic area: feedback from managers. Statement: “My manager gives me helpful feedback on a regular basis.” (agreement scale) Metric: average score per department.
- Improving the working atmosphere: Topic area: teamwork. Question: “How satisfied are you with collaboration in your team?” Metric: change compared with the previous survey.
You will find more topic areas and sample questions under Employee survey question categories.
Employee motivation
Employee motivation is a common goal of employee surveys. The key motivational factors are generally well known (interesting work, a positive working atmosphere, work-life balance, performance-based appraisal, recognition), but many organisations do not know how well these factors are met in their own workplace. An internal employee survey closes this knowledge gap.
We recommend the following approach for improving employee motivation sustainably:
- Use an initial survey to identify the main motivating and demotivating factors and your priorities for improvement.
- Work with your employees to set goals for increasing motivation and define measures to achieve them.
- After implementation, run a follow-up survey to measure satisfaction with the measures and track the progress of the change process.
To ensure the employee survey leads to more than a short-term improvement, run surveys regularly or, ideally, integrate them directly into existing business processes. This can be done simply, quickly and efficiently by tracking comparable figures over time: quantify your motivational factors!
Example
Satisfaction with internal communication is measured every month with two questions:
- How satisfied are you? (rating question on a scale from 1 = very good to 6 = very poor)
- What is the reason for your rating? (open question)
Because the questions are so simple, you can determine the current rating every month with little effort. With the right software, you can also view the responses to the open question separately, for example all reasons given for a rating better than 2 and all reasons given for a rating worse than 3. This shows you at a glance where things currently stand and how they are trending. Because the survey runs at regular intervals, you can even relate the ratings to the measures and projects you have implemented. All with little effort: two simple questions that take around two minutes a month to answer.
A short, regular survey like this is a classic pulse check.
What is LamaPoll?
LamaPoll is a survey tool for creating employee surveys and measuring employee satisfaction. You can use it to create, conduct and analyse all types of employee survey. Create your employee survey in just a few steps, apply your organisation’s corporate design and invite employees conveniently by email or via your intranet. You can quickly gain insights that help improve employee satisfaction. You can register for our survey tool free of charge and immediately conduct surveys for up to 50 employees with no obligation. If you need more responses to your online employee survey questionnaire, simply choose one of our monthly plans. You can also use our employee survey questionnaire templates and examples.
