Employee Surveys: What an Employee Survey Can Achieve
An article by board member Matthias Diete was published in the MIT blog – SMEs | Industry | TechnologyOpen in new tab, in which he explains under which conditions employee surveys can achieve their full benefit.
What is the benefit of an employee survey? Read the full article here:
Modern Employee Surveys – If Gandled Correctly – Enable Sustainable Changes and Improvements in Companies
Matthias Diete from Konstanz-based Cubia AG explains under which conditions these surveys are useful.
Committed, committed employees, better leadership, functioning processes, successful change projects – companies that enter into dialogue with their staff in the form of an employee survey benefit in many ways. The feedback not only shows how satisfied and willing the employees surveyed are to perform, but it also shows what companies should change in order to optimize leadership, corporate culture, interfaces or processes. Employee surveys are therefore much more than a compass for management and employees.
Surveys develop particular added value when they accompany or are integrated into management strategies and when the results are used for personnel and organizational development processes, for example. If the employee survey is repeated after a certain period of time, it can be evaluated to what extent strategies, projects and follow-up measures are actually successful.
Prepare the Survey Well
If a company has decided to conduct an employee survey, management should set the objectives of the survey and appoint a project team that will be responsible for the preparation, implementation and follow-up. It is important to involve employee representatives at an early stage. As a rule, they will participate constructively and positively in the employee survey, because employee representatives are also interested in facts that make the interests of the workforce more visible than a presumed mood.
The project team determines when the survey will be carried out and which media will be used (paper and/or online). In addition, the depth of the survey and evaluation must be defined and it must be determined who should later be informed about the (partial) results and how the findings will be used for organizational and personnel development.
The majority of companies that plan an employee survey involve external consultants. There are several reasons for this. The external specialists not only have appropriate experience in process planning, questionnaire development, implementation and evaluation. They also have tools that make data handling easier and guarantee data security. In addition, they know from comparable projects how improvement measures can be derived from the results, implemented, and controlled and documented in the further process. In order to achieve the set goals and a sustainable benefit from the employee survey, technical and methodological competence must be taken into account when selecting the external service provider.
Communicate Goals
Even before a survey is conducted, the need for information and communication is high. The sooner you start to credibly advertise an employee survey via the available internal company communication channels, the better. Otherwise, employees might fear that it is a token survey and that management is not taking the results seriously or that follow-up measures are not being taken. Any concerns about anonymity and data protection must also be addressed.
As part of the communication measures, it must be made transparent what the objectives of the survey are and who receives which evaluations. It must also be conveyed that the employee survey is intended to lead to improvements that benefit the company, managers and employees (see checklist). This should make managers realize that their own management work will be easier from now on. If it is possible to create a commitment among managers and employees in this way, high participation and response rates are achieved. As a rule, the participation rate in the commercial sector is over 60 percent, and between 70 and 90 percent among employees and managers.
The quality of the survey questionnaire is crucial for the success of the project. Questionnaire development is therefore a central step in the overall process, in which the company should be actively involved. A professional consulting company will therefore also incorporate the opinion of “ordinary” employees, for example from production, into the development process. “Off-the-shelf” questionnaires, on the other hand, often miss the opportunity to obtain the crucial strategic information.
Identifying Potential for Improvement
Depending on the objectives of the survey, the questionnaire should not only address the classic research topics such as job satisfaction, but should also explicitly ask about potential for improvement in areas such as leadership, communication, corporate culture, processes, projects, etc. For reasons of credibility alone, the questionnaire should also address topics that may be controversial. What is often not considered: the questions can also be used to communicate messages that are relevant to the company. For example, the results of major restructuring can be asked about, or appropriate questions can be used to draw employees’ attention to important topics such as innovation and willingness to change.
The survey itself is usually conducted online and can be supplemented or, in rare cases, replaced by a classic paper survey. The justified and significant requirements regarding data protection, data security and legal regulations must be taken into account. If external consultants are involved, they should be able to show appropriate certifications. TAN procedures also make it possible to check that only the invited group of people takes part in the respective survey and that each employee can only fill out one questionnaire. The collected data is managed centrally on a protected server, the security of which is ideally checked regularly by external specialist institutes.
Follow Up with Actions
Once the results have been determined, the data must be prepared and interpreted. Benchmarks can be helpful if the question and the framework conditions were identical in other companies. The complete results are summarized in a management summary, which forms the basis for subsequent result workshops with the project team and the decision-makers in the company. In the interest of a transparent, fair process, every employee should be able to see the overall results, for example on the intranet or by posting. Managers receive both individual feedback and a department- or area-related report, which serves as the basis for internal discussion.
The survey results or the management summary usually show what can be improved in the company. To do this, a concept must be developed on how the identified weak points can be eliminated and which personnel and organizational development measures are required to do this. Necessary steps can also be discussed on a topic-specific basis within the framework of project groups, which should include employees from different hierarchical levels and, if necessary, different locations. The task of these project groups is to specify the measures and make them ready for implementation.
The key to success is to inform the workforce about the work and progress of the project groups. Acceptance for future employee surveys will only continue if the analysis is not enough, but actions are followed that are positively evaluated by management and employees. It is also the job of managers to discuss the results that affect them with their employees and to initiate improvement processes.
Initiating continuous improvements strengthens the company’s competitiveness. At the same time, they increase the willingness of employees to stay loyal, as they recognize that their commitment is valued. Not least in the competition for qualified employees, it is an enormous advantage if the company is perceived as being seriously interested in the concerns of its employees.
Checklist: The Advantages of Employee Surveys
For Companies
- Targeted corporate development
- Support and implementation of the corporate strategy
- Increasing employee commitment
- Increasing employee motivation
- Identifying performance drivers
- Optimizing critical processes
For the Managers
- Instrument for strategic corporate management
- Improvement of leadership culture
- Improvement of internal communication
- Self-reflection and encouragement for further development
For the Employees
- Your own opinion is given a voice
- Active contribution to company development
- Improvement of the working situation
Success Factors of Employee Surveys
- The objectives of the survey must be clearly defined.
- The available resources must be clarified in advance.
- The management must actively and unconditionally support the project.
- All those involved must be informed about the process steps of the employee survey from the outset.
- Data protection and security regulations must be observed.
- Commitments such as anonymity must be strictly adhered to.
- An organization-specific questionnaire should be developed.
- It must be defined who has access to which reports.
- Lower and middle management must be involved in the survey project and later in the follow-up process.
- Systematic process control is required.
Author: Matthias Diete is the founder and CEO of Cubia AG. Cubia AG offers companies professional solutions for their personnel and organizational development. This includes in particular the planning, implementation and evaluation of employee surveys and feedback procedures as well as support in the implementation and realization of change projects.