To improve employee satisfaction, you need to measure it regularly. When is the best time to do this, and why?
- Before planned changes, to establish a baseline
- While changes are being implemented
- After changes have been implemented, to check their effect (e.g. new working-time models, restructuring, new software)
- At regular intervals, to spot trends and respond in good time
Employee satisfaction templates and samples
You can find more free questionnaire templates for employee surveys here: Employee survey questionnaire templates. You can copy the questionnaires to your own LamaPoll account and adapt them as needed.
Measuring employee satisfaction: direct and indirect methods
Employee satisfaction can be measured directly or indirectly:
Indirect measurement relies on metrics you can collect, such as the sickness rate, staff turnover, resignation rates, absenteeism or error rates. These metrics have to be tracked continuously and can serve as indicators of satisfaction. However, indirect measurement should be treated with caution. The thresholds are arbitrary and almost meaningless without benchmarks: what counts as a low sickness rate, especially in your industry? Indirect measurement also leaves important questions unanswered, such as why your employees are satisfied or dissatisfied, and with what.
Direct measurement lets you ask your workforce specifically what they would like to change, where the problems lie and what is working well. To gather this direct employee feedback regularly, yet quickly, easily and at low cost, we recommend an online survey. Once you have set up your questionnaire, you can copy it at regular intervals and run the survey again. If you condense the responses into metrics, you get figures comparable to those from indirect measurement, plus your employees’ comments. That way you know not only how satisfied your team is, but also which measures will make the biggest difference. With the right survey tool, the effort is low. Add a few open-ended questions to your rating scales so that you also learn the reasons behind the scores.
You can also use the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) to measure employee satisfaction. You can find out more about this metric here: Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
To find out how to combine the responses into an overall score, see Measuring the employee satisfaction index. For practical measures, see Improving employee satisfaction.
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.
