Conducting comprehensive employee surveys is like doing a full-body scan of your organization. They can identify cancers that are eating away at and threatening your business. Comprehensive employee surveys typically include 40-70 questions. This is contrasted with limited-question employee surveys that have 10-25 or so questions.

Five reasons for conducting comprehensive employee survey:

Five key reasons to conduct comprehensive employee engagement surveys, employee satisfaction surveys and employee opinion surveys include:

1 - Well designed comprehensive employee surveys tell you what you need to know to achieve significant increases in company performance and competitiveness. Comprehensive employee surveys assess the magnitude of known problems and opportunities, and identify hidden problems and opportunities that are impeding competitiveness and profit, negatively impacting customers and creating risks that can be very costly and sometimes embarrassing.

2 - While ratings for each employee survey are important in telling you about how engaged and satisfied employees are, employees' comments often are even more important than the ratings. Comments tell you why employees provided high or low ratings for each survey question and comments collectively tell you what needs to be done to address problems and take advantage of opportunities identified in the survey.

3 - Whether your organization has fewer than 50 or more than 50,000 employees, it is likely complex with many problems, challenges and opportunities. A limited question employee survey such as the Q12 employee engagement survey that is offered by Gallup. The Q12 survey, which includes only 12 specific questions, can't possibly identify all of an organization's employee-related and other important problems and opportunities, and point to the necessary solutions. Comprehensive employee surveys assess a broad range of topics, providing detailed quantitative and qualitative information and a roadmap for achieving breakthrough increases in employee and organizational performance.

4 - Most employees are willing to tell you the "good, the bad and the ugly" when they are confident that their responses, including ratings and comments/suggestions are anonymous and they have no fear of retribution due to their honest survey responses.

5 - The information, perceptions and insight gathered by employee engagement surveys, employee satisfaction surveys and employee opinion surveys eliminates the need for guessing about what is right and what is wrong. Comprehensive employee survey data enables organizations to avoid costly decisions, initiatives and actions taken by managers (sometimes based on recommendations from consultants) that are based on insufficient or wrong information and guesses about causes of problems.

Illustrative Comments:

Following are illustrative comments received from sales people in an employee survey conducted for a company with several thousand people selling office equipment to business across the U.S. The comments demonstrate the need to conduct comprehensive surveys and to take action based on the survey findings. Does your company have any of the following issues and problems? What other problems are hurting your organization's performance?:

Departments Communicate Effectively with Each Other:

• "Sales and Service have NO communication with each other as sales has an "air" of UNFOUNDED superiority toward Service."

Feel Comfortable Going to Manager with Problems:

• "My manager has absolutely no people skills and I can never go to him in order to obtain help with my work. I feel he has a problem with me personally and continues to push me into a state of hating the job I once loved. He does not assist or lead us in any manner, he only piles on more work each day to the point that my job cannot be completed."

Feel Good About Working for Manager:

• "My manager does nothing to address really important issues. We do not have enough time to properly complete our work. Processes are too complicated and cumbersome. Answering the phone is a big factor in not being able to complete our paperwork, emails, voicemails, etc. We are constantly taking on new customers problems and not having the time to take care of the old problems. This leads to frustration."

Company Communicates Effectively:

• "Management is very rude and disrespectful when communicating with employees on a day to day basis."

Feel Good About Job Overall:

• "I would feel real good about my job if I had more knowledge about my job, and more training. Also having a manager that I can go to for assistance would make the job a whole lot easier. I cannot ask my manager anything related to my job. She knows nothing and refers me to others for assistance."

Have Information Needed to Do Job:

• "Sales people do not have access to any of our customer information. The Customer Service Center took our file cabinets and now they have lost thousands of our customer files. Furthermore, we don't access to Oracle info (even read-only rights) that would allow us to pull meter readings, etc."

Have Sufficient Authority for Job Responsibilities:

• "I feel like every little thing I do is being watched very closely and any wrong decision is treated like I just killed a man. I do not feel like I can properly assist customers with that mind set, for the fact that I have to tell them to hold on TRY and get a hold of someone and once I finally do go back to the customer tell them what upper management said, if they have any questions or disagree I have to put them back on hold and do this game of back and forth back and forth."

Am Inspired to Do Best Work Every Day:

• "I will do my best regardless of what I am doing. It often feels as if there is no difference in result no matter how much effort I put in. I am too reliant on multiple depts and sales rep and things don't get resolved. Over time, that gets to you."

Manager Encourages Environment of Openness/Trust:

• " My manager frequently threatens us with write ups and employment termination."

Manager Listens to Concerns/Interested in My Ideas:

• "My manager is very ineffective with communication and frequently degrades employees in staff meetings in front of the entire department. If we disagree with her or question the validity of instructions she responds negatively or not all."

One Thing Company Could Do to Increase Engagement:

• "Listen to these surveys, and engage the workers in more open honest feedback. Address our concerns."

Job Performance Is Evaluated Fairly on a Timely Basis:

• "I only had 1 review in over 2 years & never spoke a word to anyone about it - I was evaluated on paperwork being done on time & with little mistakes - I thought I would be evaluated in other areas & not just that- It was very disappointing that no one called me to review it verbally ; it was all done on line- I even asked about 1 part & never heard back from anyone on it"

Would Take a Lot to Get Me to Leave:

• "Our department has a very high turn around. The stress, inconsistent communications and extreme workload have caused over 8 people to leave in the 10 months I have been here. Migraines, ulcers and regular headaches are common complaints from people in my department because of the pressure and inconsistent management approaches."

Training Classes Effective:

• "I have not been given the opportunity to attend any classes, even though I asked. I was told I can take only online classes because of budget restrictions, but I feel in person classes are necessary for me and the entire department; specifically in Customer Service skills"

Management Values Employees:

• "This is something that is told to us constantly, with compliments and comments. However, none of the employees at my level feel they are valued with pay and respect which would be more honest indicators."

Things You Like Least About Your Job:

• "My manager's inability to communicate without offending. He is constantly telling everyone how thin my co-worker is and saying she is a size 2 and then offering me Hoodia to lose weight because I'm a 12. That is SO INAPPROPRIATE AND INCREDIBLY RUDE."