It is crucial to connect with your employees to assess their happiness and productivity at work. That’s why human resource managers use employee experience surveys to understand employees’ satisfaction level, team morale, degree of engagement, awards, and milestones. These surveys provide management with insight into essential aspects of the employee experience, such as motivation, work culture, and communication.
Engagement Surveys
Employee engagement refers to how work is made and integrated, and identifies how employees think, feel, and act about their job to meet the company’s mission and vision.
Employee engagement surveys are done regularly – monthly, quarterly, or annually – and are incredibly beneficial in determining the company’s retention rate in the employee lifecycle.
Employee engagement surveys are used for numerous purposes, but they are best used in determining factors such as:
- Employee skillset
- Relationship with direct and indirect managers/supervisors
- Insights on employee mood, motivation, and productivity
Onboarding Surveys
As the famous saying goes, first impressions matter. As the new additions to a company, new hires are often provided with an overwhelming number of orientations, trainings, and seminars to integrate themselves in their new employer’s mission, values, and ethics.
Onboarding surveys are helpful mechanisms to acquire valuable data and information, especially from new team members who can provide fresh insights and feedback.
Effective onboarding surveys should include questions about:
- Recruitment – e.g. Were you provided with accurate information about the company during the recruitment process?
- Decision – e.g. What are the reasons why you joined the company?
- First-week experience – e.g. What’s one thing that the company could have done differently to improve the first week of your onboarding experience?
- HR orientation – e.g. Was there enough information provided on key company policies?
- Manager – e.g. Was your manager available to answer your questions promptly?
- Role perception – e.g. Does your role match the role description provided to you?
360 Reviews
As the name suggests, 360 reviews are performance-evaluation tools that generate feedback about an employee from all directions: their managers, co-workers, and direct reports. Also known as a multi-rater feedback assessment, these reviews provide a complete view of an employee’s functions in the organization and are best used for team development.
Even if these are anonymously conducted, data gathered from 360 reviews are effective because the assessments are implemented in a manner that involves trust, transparency, and accountability.
Effective 360 reviews should include questions such as, but not limited to, the following:
- Does this employee exhibit leadership qualities in their role(s) in the company?
- When this employee works with co-workers, what interpersonal skills do they demonstrate?
- Does this employee adjust their style to fit varied situations and people?
- How does the employee demonstrate their motivation and commitment to success in the company?
- Are the employee’s work methods and approaches to accomplishing the job effective, efficient, and continuously improving?
- Does the employee assist you when you are busy with other tasks?
Training Surveys
Training evaluation surveys can be used to effectively determine the value and assess the effectiveness of training tools, programs, and activities. These surveys help the company make significant changes, adjustments, and modifications while removing ineffective methodologies.
Training feedback is essential because it invites insights into employee reaction and participation, learning and knowledge acquired, training return on investment, and the impact of training on business improvement.
Training surveys should include questions such as:
- What level of expertise do you expect from this training?
- Was the training relevant to your needs?
- Did you think the content in the training material was sufficient? What could be added or improved?
- Did you get a chance to collaborate with your team members during the training?
- After this training, do you feel comfortable handling the assigned tasks?
Performance Reviews
Throughout the employee’s journey with the company, standard metrics must be implemented to measure performance and productivity. Performance reviews give managers, supervisors, and human resource personnel feedback on certain aspects that affect the employee’s job. This includes areas for improvement, key performance indicators, awards and milestones, additional needs, and expected future necessities.
The questions included in a performance review are essential for a company’s preparation, plans, and future actions. By encouraging regular performance reviews, both employees and employers are provided with constructive feedback and motivated to work with their strengths and needed improvements. Examples of essential questions in performance reviews are:
- What is the quality of the employee’s work and performance?
- Do you feel your strengths are maximized here?
- What are the ideal working conditions to be the most productive at work?
- What professional growth opportunities would you like to explore to get there?
- How do you prefer to receive feedback and recognition for your work?
Exit Surveys
Although it can be challenging when a company loses another member of its workforce, it is essential to gather honest and sincere feedback through an exit interview. When the company deals with employee retention and staff turnover problems, exit surveys are beneficial to bring clarity to these dilemmas.
Moreover, the exiting employee may also pinpoint the company’s weaknesses by explaining why they decided to leave the organization, including factors on the work environment, salary, rewards and promotion, and overall work culture.
To get an idea of what areas needed to be improved, the company’s exit surveys might feature any of the following questions;
- What prompted you to seek alternative employment?
- How did you feel about your salary and the employee benefits?
- How frequently did you have discussions with your manager about your career goals?
- How easy was it to balance work and personal life during your tenure at this organization?
- Do you have any concerns about the organization at large that you would like to share?
Surveys Equate to Success
One of the most common values that companies and businesses embody is a commitment to continuous improvement. By issuing surveys regularly, whether they consist of simple questions or free-form answers, organizations can get feedback, acquire insights, and discuss issues surrounding the aspects of company morale and employee satisfaction. With the continued use of surveys, companies are challenged to deliver bigger and better results not only for their business, but for those who make the business possible.
