Both in good economic times and when times are highly challenging, companies need to compete aggressively to grow and thrive. Business leaders sometimes rely too heavily on their own knowledge to make important decisions, without getting valuable input from employees throughout their organization.

Your company's managers and other employees have extensive information and insight about your company's processes, products and services, customers and other key drivers of business performance, competitiveness and profit. Employees know the barriers to their own performance and what it will take to make your company significantly more competitive and profitable.

The fastest and most effective way to tap the knowledge and insight of your employees is to conduct employee surveys and other types of HR surveys. A full service survey company can design and conduct your employee survey at a fraction of the cost of the payback they will provide. They provide value by knowing the right questions to ask and the right way to ask them. They also know how to optimize participation in your employee surveys, they are able to generate useful results reports quickly, and they are able to analyze your findings objectively and provide recommendations for achieving significant results.

Employee satisfaction surveys/employee engagement surveys should include at least 40 questions and as many as 70 questions organized in logical sections/topics in order to gather information and insight about a broad range of issues. In addition to asking employees to provide ratings for each question, they should also have the ability to provide their comments and suggestions after each question. A comprehensive employee survey typically includes the following topics:

 The Work Itself / Work Environment / Safety

 Decision Making / Empowerment

 Quality, Customer Service & Work Performance

 Innovation and Change

 Processes/Procedures

 Reward & Recognition / Compensation & Benefits

 My Manager

 Training/Development/Opportunity

 Teamwork / Collaboration

 Communications

 Employee Engagement

 Senior Management Effectiveness

 Commitment to Company Direction

Once employee satisfaction surveys/employee engagement surveys are conducted and the findings are analyzed it is important to take action based on the findings and to track progress in achieving increases in employee and business performance and competitiveness. Conducting the assessments annually will determine how well change is being managed and executed, and identify new problems and opportunities that have surfaced during the past year.

Other types of employee surveys/HR Surveys that will enable your organization to identify opportunities to save money and increase performance and competitiveness include employee benefits surveys (identifying employees' preferences for and satisfaction with your benefits program), sales force surveys (identifying what needs to be done to increase the performance of your sales people), employee turnover surveys (identifying reasons for high turnover and how to increase retention) and HR scorecard surveys. Human Resources scorecard surveys assess HR customer satisfaction with the full range of HR services typically including benefits planning and administration, HR generalists/HR business partners, compensation planning, HRIS, recruiting/hiring and other HR services.

Conducting an employee survey is significantly less costly than performing consulting studies to identify problems and opportunities, and it is the best way to gather comprehensive feedback from your employees on a wide range of HR issues. Whether your company is highly profitable or it is losing money, surveying your employees and taking action on the findings will generate significant increases in performance, competitiveness and profit.