It is in a company’s best interest to monitor employee satisfaction as it reflects a company’s success. Acknowledging employees is the root to improving valuable business components, like reducing the company’s turnover rate or evaluating IT goals. The CEO of the Virgin Group, Richard Branson, revolved his company values around an employee-centric philosophy.  The Virgin Airlines website reads, “If you treat your staff well, they will be happy. Happy staff are proud staff, and proud staff deliver excellent customer service, which drives business success.”

There is no doubt that measuring employee satisfaction is beneficial to a company. Employees can provide valuable insight into processes, workflows, product-related improvements, and even helpful recommendations. However, how does a company collect employee feedback?

Let’s take a closer look at one of the most popular methods of collecting data; surveys.

A survey is a set of questions distributed to a specific group of people with the goal of gathering information about a specific subject. Usually distributed online, they are the easiest way to collect information from a lot of people. This can be compared to gathering information via interviews or focus groups where it takes a lot more time to set up meetings and then to collect information. Surveys, on the other hand, can be placed at different touchpoints to reach employees where they are most comfortable to talk about their experiences.

Several helpdesk/service desks have surveys integrated into their systems to facilitate the process of measuring employee satisfaction. As a result, surveys can easily be distributed to all employees. Their responses are then all sent back to the system, facilitating the collection of data into one central location. Before sending anything out, however, determine what you are evaluating. For example, the IT department wants to know what employees think of their service. This can be particularly important since the IT department is responsible for the continuity of productivity throughout an organization.

Steps To Create A Survey

1. Define what you are evaluating:

In many cases, surveys are conducted when something needs to be improved. In other cases, it is an effective way to evaluate a certain project/effort. Continuing with the example above, the IT department wants to evaluate their service. Examples may include speed of service, accessibility to a technician, how easy it is to submit a ticket, level of helpfulness.

2. Determine what you need to measure:

Identify the metrics/criteria that need to be measured that will help improve what you are evaluating. To evaluate the IT department’s speed of service, for example, it is reasonable to include metrics like length, delays, technical assistance.

3. Write out the questions:

In this step, you will write out questions you think can turn into actionable changes. In other words, include questions that have a purpose and that will contribute to a solution.

4. Determine format of the survey:

After getting an idea of the questions you want to ask, determine how you want to ask the question. Should it be multiple choice, a rating scale, or an open-ended question? Remember that all questions do not have to have the same format.

5. Put in logical order:

It will make it easier for employees to answer questions about their experience if the questions are presented in a logical order. List the questions in a chronological order, or how the experience unfolded, while trying to put the easiest questions at the beginning and ending with harder, longer questions at the bottom.

6. Distribute:

Finally, create the survey in your service desk and distribute the survey to employees. Remember that enough employees need to answer the survey for the data to be valid. The size of your sample depends on the number of employees in the organization and on your acceptable margin of error. However, the more people who answer, the more accurate your results.

Best Practices

1. Qualify your responders:

Before getting excited about how many people responded to your survey, it is highly recommended to qualify your responder. In other words, determine if they are the right person to answer your survey. An individual who has never used the IT department’s services, for example, is not a valid candidate to respond to your survey.

2. Ask one question at a time:

It is very easy to ask multiple questions at once. However, it will confuse the responders and the results won’t be quantifiable. For example, this should be presented as two separate questions: “Which IT services do you use? How many times a week?”

3. Keep the survey short:

Employees are already very busy. Increase their chances of answering a survey by keeping it short and sweet. A survey of 10 to 15 questions is reasonable, but anything over 20 questions might be overwhelming- think about surveys you have done!

4. Regular Check-Ins: Evaluating employee satisfaction should not only be done at the end of the year. It is a good practice to do them regularly. For IT, it might be optimal to send out a survey after every ticket is closed.

5. Reduce open-ended questions:

Open-ended questions are not popular among responders. The questions are longer to answer so responders may skip the question entirely. In addition, these questions are harder to tabulate. However, some argue that the most valuable information is from these questions. As a recommendation, use open-ended questions for probing. For example, a question might read, “Are you happy with the IT services?” the next question might probe a little deeper to determine why this person may be unhappy.

6. Ask what you don’t know:

Often, we end up asking questions we already have the answer to. A question may be originally part of the survey because it fits in the context; however, we don’t realize we don’t need to ask the question. For example, a service desk might already know the gender of the responders as the system is connected to the active directory. This information might be forgotten and asked in the survey.

7. Log feedback:

Ensure you collect and save data from the surveys. It contributes to the overall feedback of what you are measuring and will be valuable when making decisions or new goals.

Surveys are ideal for collecting feedback from employees. They are easy to distribute with the help of your service desk, and usually, have a good response rate. According to SurveyGizmo, a response rate of 30-40% is normal for an internal survey. As a result, the data collected can be used to make informed decisions. Obtain the data you need by creating a survey following the six steps mentioned above and consider the best practices to create valuable surveys.

Here is an example of a survey with explanations 

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