Employee Surveys Help Businesses Plan for Success

Your Employees Represent You and Your Image
Companies use employee surveys to learn how employees feel about issues such as working conditions, pay, benefits, co-worker and team dynamics, quality of supervision, etc.

In order to plan ahead and strengthen a company’s image, strategic-minded business leaders need to understand their employees’ views. Employee surveys will help a business gain perspective about where they have been, where they are today and where they need to go tomorrow. In this respect, employee surveys are an effective communication tool.

Strategically Plan Employee Surveys
The Internet is broadening and increasing the extent to which companies survey not only employees, but customers as well. This medium, and related technology, has significantly reduced survey costs in the last 10 years.  In fact, we see a trend of “over-surveying” because numerous online survey tools make it inexpensive to gather data from employees and customers. I absolutely believe that in order to keep its value, surveys should be thought of and used as a strategic business tool.

Employee Engagement or Employee Climate Surveys
Employee surveys help management gather feedback about the company’s business environment. The most common type of employee survey is an employee engagement or employee climate survey.

Feedback from this survey tells management if employees are:

1. engaged in the organization;
2. committed to the organization; and
3. equipped with the resources necessary to be successful and help the organization achieve its goals.

Many situations can determine why organizations gather feedback from their employees:

• Training needs assessments: information is gathered about current and future training needs; including measurable gaps around which training programs can be developed and implemented.
• Topic-specific surveys: companies frequently survey employees about their benefits—are they working for them and their families? Do changes need to be made in the benefits program or package?
• Customer-oriented surveys: for employees working in customer-facing positions; for instance, e-mailing employees about the extent to which good customer service is provided is as important as surveying customers about whether the business is providing good customer service.

Success Story
To give you an idea of how a well-planned, strategic employee-engagement survey leads to success, I will share this recent professional experience:

We are working with a national medical organization that runs specialty hospitals. We wanted to learn if there is a relationship between employee engagement and patient satisfaction.  We found that over several years, hospitals with higher employee engagement had patients who were more satisfied and more likely to recommend the hospital to friends and family.  The hospitals with higher employee engagement and patient satisfaction also had higher year-over-year net revenue growth. 

There is quite a bit of research showing that organizations with more highly engaged employees perform better. This research also demonstrates that there are positive correlations between employee engagement and a company’s financial performance and customer satisfaction.  

This is a great example because sometimes management has no idea what will be revealed. Our results confirmed to the executive group that employee engagement, and the survey process in general, is a really important way to measure success in an organization.  The relationship between employee engagement, patient satisfaction and financial performance was demonstrated; so it is a gratifying success story. 

In order to plan ahead and strengthen a company’s image, strategic-minded business leaders need to understand their employees’ views.