How to Measure Employee Satisfaction With Employee Surveys

For running a business, you need to have some basic resources. A place at a suitable location to operate your business, some capital to invest, and some cash in hand to make the business activities running. These all are your assets to run a business, but what is the biggest asset or resource you need to build a successful business?

It is none other than your human resources, i.e., your employees! Good managers always want their employees to be happy and satisfied. After all, a team of happy and motivated employees is what makes your business a success! Studies have shown that happy employees are 12% more productive, and the companies with happy employees outperform the competition by 20%.

But how will you ensure that your employees are happy and satisfied with their jobs? Of course, by asking them, and the best way to ask them is to conduct Employee Surveys.

What is an Employee Survey?

An Employee Survey is a set of questions asked by employers from their employees to obtain their views and opinions about the organization and their experience. It is a questionnaire designed to evaluate the employees’ happiness, morale, enthusiasm, engagement, and achievements.

An employee survey is a great tool to measure employee satisfaction and engagement. In fact, Employee Engagement can be thought of as an outcome of Employee Satisfaction. If the employees feel satisfied, they are directly motivated to be engaged more in work and contribute to the business’s success. Studies suggest that highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability. Let’s explore why it is important to measure Employee Satisfaction.

Importance of Measuring and Ensuring Employee Satisfaction

In order to ensure Employee Satisfaction, it is a prerequisite to measure it. If you don’t know whether your employees are satisfied with their jobs or not, you would not be able to take the right actions to enhance employee satisfaction.

Measuring employee satisfaction is important to:

• To Ensure you Have taken the Right Actions – No matter how much you do for your employees, you will always be unsure what your employees like and what they don’t like. So it is always good to gather Employee Feedback and measure their satisfaction levels.
• To Facilitate better Employee Retention – Satisfied employees tend to work with you for a longer period of time, whereas unsatisfied employees are always searching for another opportunity. Measuring and ensuring employee satisfaction helps you with better employee retention in your company.
• To Get more Productivity from the Employees – Satisfied employees will always give more effort in their work than the dissatisfied ones, thus yielding greater productivity. Their productivity directly affects the performance of your company.
• To Facilitate more Employee Engagement – Employee satisfaction has a direct impact on Employee Engagement. Dissatisfied employees get less interested and engaged towards the organization’s success, whereas you can motivate the satisfied employees easily to do so.
• To create a Good Organizational Environment – Organizational environment is determined by its employees, and happy employees create a positive environment. Whereas, if the employees would not be happy, this will definitely affect the organizational environment adversely. Therefore, it’s important to keep your employees happy and satisfied to create a good culture in the organization.

Let’s explore the way to measure Employee Satisfaction.

How Can Employee Satisfaction Be Measured?

Measuring Employee Satisfaction is tricky. The moment you assume that all employees are satisfied in your organization, and there is everything perfect in your organization, you have started moving in the wrong direction. It is actually a warning sign that your employees cannot trust you enough to share their concerns.

So how do you get to know the truth? Should you talk to each employee face-to-face? Well, having face to face conversations is not really a bad idea, but if you solely depend on this for gathering Employee Feedback, you are cheating yourself. Employees do not tend to share all of their feelings about you and the organization.

You may think that your organizational culture allows every employee to share his/her feelings with their immediate managers or team-leaders, but what if they have problems with their managers or team leaders only? The results of a Gallup poll of more than 1 million U.S. workers concluded that 75% of the workers left their jobs due to a bad boss or immediate supervisor. This proves the fact that “Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers.

And even if you or they maintain a healthy relationship within the team, they may hide their actual perceptions because they don’t want to hurt you. So what’s the way here? The best way is to survey them. 89% of HR leaders agree that ongoing peer feedback and check-ins have a significant positive impact on their organizations.

So you should involve teams like the Human Resource team to conduct Employee Satisfaction Surveys, preferably anonymous ones, so that they feel safe to share their insights about the organization and the processes. Here are some methods and tips for measuring Customer Satisfaction with the help of Employee Surveys.

Ways to Use Employee Surveys to Measure Employee Satisfaction

1. Conduct eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) Surveys
2. Conduct Employee Satisfaction Surveys
3. Identify Issues and Make Improvements
4. Gather feedback at various touchpoints
5. Work on Employee Feedback Trends
6. Use an Effective Employee Survey Software

Let’s learn how these tips can help you measure Employee Satisfaction through Employee Surveys.

1. Conduct eNPS Surveys

eNPS or Employee Net Promoter Score is a popular metric that helps you ascertain your employees’ loyalty. eNPS Survey is a single-question survey that gauges the employees’ likeliness to refer to your company as a good entity to work with. The question is:

“On a scale  of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company as a place to work?”

(10 being ‘Most Likely’ and 0 being ‘Not at all Likely’)

Based on the employees’ answer choices, they are divided into three categories, namely, promoters, detractors, and passives.

• Promoters are those who rate 9 or 10. They are the happiest employees and have the highest tendency to work with you for a longer period of time and praise the company among their friends and family.
• Passives are those employees who rated 7 or 8. They are neither too satisfied nor too dissatisfied. They neither spread bad word of mouth against your company nor praise it among their friends and family. They may work for a considerable period of time but can churn as soon as they get a little better opportunity.
• Detractors are those who rate from 0 to 6. They are the most dissatisfied employees and will never recommend your company to anybody. There is a high risk of early turnover of such employees.

For calculating eNPS, the percentage of detractors is subtracted from that of promoters, which will give you a score between -100 to 100. Positive means you have a higher number of promoters, whereas a negative score shows a higher number of detractors than promoters. Higher the eNPS, the better it is.

So, your aim should be to improve your eNPS over time.

2. Conduct Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Employee satisfaction surveys are another one of the best ways to gauge the satisfaction of your employees. All you need to do is ask some questions regarding different aspects of your company and ask the employees to rate those aspects.

The score varies from 1 to 5, where 5 means ‘Most Satisfied’ and 1 means ‘Most Dissatisfied’. The rating options can be shown with different words or emoticons also.

Here are some examples of the questions you can ask in an employee satisfaction survey:

• How happy are you working in this organization?
• How do you feel that you are well recognized and rewarded for your work?
• How satisfied are you with the work culture of the company?
• How satisfied are you with the onboarding process?
• How satisfied are you with the work-life balance in the organization?

3. Identify Issues and Make Improvements

With the help of employee surveys, you should identify the issues of your employees. If some employees are dissatisfied, what is the reason behind it that needs improvement? If some employees are extremely satisfied, what is the most liked aspect that you should maintain?

With your employee survey questionnaire, try to gather the answer to these questions. This will help you in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your company in regards to managing employees. In this way, employee surveys can be utilized to identify core issues that can bother the employees, and you can make improvements in those areas.

4. Gather Feedback at Various Touchpoints

Measure customer satisfaction at all the touchpoints of the company and employee journey. You should gather feedback about the interview and selection process, training and onboarding processes, and much more!

You can also collect feedback across different locations and different company facilities like washroom feedback, cafeteria feedback, etc. This will help you to identify key areas of improvement and work on them.

5. Work on Employee Feedback Trends

In order to measure employee satisfaction, you should also measure whether it is increasing or having a downfall. You should look into the prevailing trends in your company regarding employee satisfaction. You can compare the eNPS and employee satisfaction scores from the previous year or quarter.

This will help you know whether you are moving in the right direction or not, creating an environment where employees feel valued and motivated to give their best in the common organizational objectives.

6. Use an Effective Employee Survey Software

It is important to use a good employee feedback software to gauge employee satisfaction. The tool you use should be able to send surveys through multiple channels and track metrics like eNPS and employee satisfaction. It should enable you to compare Employee Satisfaction across different locations and touchpoints.

The tool should enable you to create customized surveys as per your needs and easily and quickly send them to employees.

In this way, you can use Employee Surveys to gauge Employee Satisfaction in your organization.

happy employees – DepositPhotos