Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Most employers are of the mistaken belief that the need to go in for an employee satisfaction survey indicates that there is something wrong with the company. The view the fact that the management has to resort to a survey as being indicative that the traditional reporting structures and response mechanisms have collapsed. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if truth be told, organizations which conduct employee satisfaction surveys are considered to be ones that care about the opinions of their staff. Organizations that conduct employee satisfaction surveys are construed to be the ones that are concerned about having satisfied employees.

If you’ve ever faced dissension among the ranks at work, or if your productivity is sliding after a confrontation between your management and the staff, or if the general air of cooperation between and among your employees is missing, you might consider going in for an employee satisfaction survey. A good employee satisfaction survey needs to be predictive in nature. It needs to identify problem areas, put them into questions that elicit productive responses and to use those responses to change or remedy the situation. An employee satisfaction survey that is administered at the right time can often do much to remedy the problems that plague a company from within. And if these problems are not identified and rectified, they will lead to large scale collapse of systems.

What questions you need to build into your employee satisfaction surveys depends a great deal on the kind of industry you operate in. If you are in manufacturing, where you have an assembly line workforce and supervisory staff, expect to include a number of organizational behavior questions. You might even have a number of opinions regarding unions, pay per hour, overtime and even break lengths. If you operate with a predominantly white collar workforce for instance, expect to have questions related to job security, job satisfaction. If you work with service-providing staff, be prepared to deal with stress, customer interface and training issues. In short, the nature of your employee satisfaction survey depends almost entirely on the kind of employees you have.

There are also a number of website that can provide you with ready made or customizable employee satisfaction surveys. www.explorance.com is one such enterprise-wide survey software provider you can use if you want to conduct an employee satisfaction survey in a large enterprise. www.questionpro.com on the other hand provides you with easy to use, simple surveys that you can try for a month and then buy for effective dissemination. There are scores of other websites that offer simple to complex surveys that you can test, customize and implement. Remember though that these employee satisfaction surveys can only allow you to rate how satisfied your employees are (or aren’t!) What you need to do to rectify the situation and to convert all your employees into happy, content professionals is something that you will have to determine on your own, through the knowledge and understanding that your surveys have provided you with.