Giving employees the opportunity to give feedback is a big part of keeping them engaged. It can also help boost retention.
However, a report by HR tech Personio found that 28% of employees in the UK are not given a chance to share feedback to leadership on their experiences; less than half said they feel leadership actually listens and acts on any feedback they do get.
In our Startup Life newsletter, I chatted to Lenke Taylor, Personio’s chief people officer, about how employers can design surveys to collate employee feedback — and actually act on the results.
Prepare beforehand
Before you start putting a survey together, consider why you are doing a survey in the first place and what you hope to get out of it. This will determine the direction you want to take with it: for example the format of the survey (whether it’s a big annual survey covering a lot of ground, or a more specific topic) and what questions you want to ask. Other things to consider include:
- Timing. When does it make sense to do the survey depending on your operating calendar, and when employees will have time and headspace to fill it out? (For example, if you’re nearing the end of Q4 and your sales team is trying to close as many deals as possible and your product team has a new product to ship, it’s probably not great timing).
- A plan for after the survey period has closed. Assess what capacity you have after the survey closes to take in the survey data, report back to teams with the results and create a plan on how to implement that feedback (we’ll dig into this a bit later). Delaying the latter part too long will make employees lose trust that their feedback has been digested and will eventually be implemented, so plan in time for that in advance.
Decide on the format
This goes back to the why you are doing a survey in the first place. You can do an annual engagement survey with a big set of questions to understand where employee sentiment sits across many aspects of the company — but be aware that it’ll likely take a long time to implement that kind of feedback. (For example, if feedback shows that leaders need to better communicate company strategy so that all employees understand how their job feeds into it, that will take time.) In terms of duration, two weeks is a good window for big engagement surveys. This gives people enough time to participate, even if they take paid time off while the survey is circulating.
Another approach is to do regular ‘pulse surveys’ — a much shorter survey that zooms in on a particular topic (such as whether employees are happy and engaged at work) and can be carried out by individual teams. This helps you go deeper on a specific thing instead of asking broad questions across many subjects.
Explain what is anonymous vs confidential
Explain to employees the difference between anonymity and confidentiality — the latter of which means that HR knows who gave which answers but won’t publicly share the responses. Doing surveys confidentially is best in the sense that it helps HR teams understand which feedback is coming from certain teams, business locations or managers in order to identify trends. Anonymous feedback should be reserved for sensitive issues that should be communicated through a company’s whistleblowing hotline.
Figure out your tools
It’s easy to create your own surveys via online tools like Typeform. But there are benefits of using specific employee engagement survey tools that allow you to manage the survey experience over time. Many of these tools allow you to see what templates you used previously and what questions you asked, and can show you how data has changed over time. You can also then visualise the outcomes of the survey to make the data easily shareable among teams. Make sure the tool you’re using is usable to all your employees that may have different accessibility requirements.
Pick your questions
If you’re doing a broad, annual engagement survey, break it down into categories that are important for your organisation. For example: management, communication or career development.
Ask questions on leadership. For example: does the leadership team communicate clearly what the goals and expectations are for the company? You can also create questions that have different threads coming off of them, like:
“Does your direct manager a) give you constructive feedback b) help with career development and c) have openness to different points of view?”
Make sure you use questions that you can repeat over time so that you can analyse trends in the answers. A common question to ask in a survey is the net promoter score question: “Would I recommend [X company] as a great place to work” to see how attitudes towards your organisation change over time.
Spend time brainstorming
Be intentional about what questions you’re asking and how information can be gleaned from them. It helps to spend time as a team iterating the survey questions to ensure they are crystal clear, and that employees actually understand what you are asking — having a number of perspectives to weigh in on that can really help.
You can also test your questions for the survey in two ways before sending it out:
- One way is to ask a small group of employees: ‘How do you interpret this question?’, and ‘what does it mean to you when I ask it this way?’
- Another is to ask a small number of employees to test your survey once a first draft is ready to see whether the answers you receive are the ones you’re looking for.
Either way, you can take this feedback to improve the questions again before pushing out the finished survey.
Encourage participation
Surveys shouldn’t be compulsory, but there might be times when you need to increase participation. One way of doing this is to publish regular numbers showing a percentage of people who have completed the survey from each team — it gets people to be a little competitive with each other. Department heads or team leads can also help by setting aside time for their team to come together at a certain time to fill out the survey over cookies. Ultimately, encouraging participation comes from showing employees over time that you are acting on the feedback you’ve been given. It helps motivate employees to opt into the next survey and to share their point of view.
Implement the feedback
Some of this thinking should already happen pre-survey. You need to understand in which areas the company is willing to invest — for example, employee benefits — and where the company may not be able to make big changes. Then you need to focus your survey around those key topics. For example, it’s not a good idea to ask a question about whether your company should offer extra career development programmes if you don’t have the budget for that. On the other hand, asking people about which benefits they most value can help you rejig your offering.
Communication after the survey is really important.
- First of all, you should thank employees for giving their time to fill out the survey.
- HR teams should collaborate with internal comms teams to help you think through what message you want to send to employees in terms of the actions you will take. Communicate what you can action or change in the short term based on the feedback, and what might take longer.
- Share the survey results with team leads so they can see the results for their specific team and change things on a team level — for example, when it comes to the way managers communicate with direct reports.
- Also, use the survey to share with employees what is going well in the organisation; it’s an opportunity to celebrate those things.
On the subject of… employee feedback surveys
1. What to ask in your employee happiness survey? Here’s a breakdown of some key questions.
2. How to do a pulse survey. Personio breaks it down here. There’s also a downloadable template.
3. If you’re only getting positive feedback — this could signal that there are deeper issues at your startup that are yet to be uncovered.
4. Happy workers means a healthy bottom line — according to a report by Harvard Business Review.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/employee-feedback-surveys/
