Do you need or want to increase the performance of your employees and your organization's performance? Conducting employee satisfaction surveys / employee engagement surveys is a fast and highly cost-effective way to achieve breakthrough increases in the performance of your company and your business.

The best approach for achieving great participation in employee satisfaction surveys / employee engagement surveys is to keep all responses to your employee surveys anonymous. Employees are much more likely to participate in employee surveys and to provide honest answers to questions including ratings and comments/suggestions when they are confident that their answers will be anonymous.

There also are several other things you can do to increase participation in an employee satisfaction survey. Having a survey company conduct the survey will make employees more confident that their responses to the survey will be kept anonymous. Telling employees that you will share the key results with them and then doing so in a timely manner will also increase participation, especially if it is followed up by taking action to make changes based on your employee survey findings.

Getting the most value from an employee satisfaction survey / employee engagement survey requires asking the right questions the right way. Don't be afraid to include many questions. A minimum of 45 questions and a maximum of approximately 75 questions usually works well. You should want to gather as much useful, actionable information and insight from your employees as possible.

Well designed and executed employee surveys will enable your organization to strengthen your employer of choice reputation, significantly increase employee satisfaction and engagement, and generate breakthrough improvements in both employee and organizational performance. Of course, achieving results requires analyzing employee survey findings effectively and objectively, and then creating and executing an action plan focused on achieving results.

It is best to include a comments field after every question that uses a rating scale. Ratings assess how well employees agree with each question or how satisfied they are and that is really important. Comments tell you why the ratings are high or low and what you can do to significantly improve employee and organizational performance, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and business competitiveness.

Employee surveys should include demographic questions, enabling you to assess responses by demographic criteria such as location (for companies with multiple locations), department, years of service with your organization, and other demographics where the information is likely to provide actionable information (e.g. gender, race, age range, etc.), as well as results for your organization overall.

Topics that are usually included in employee opinion surveys:

 Company Culture/Climate

 Employee Satisfaction and Engagement

 Workplace Environment

 Safety (for companies where safety is an issue)

 Authority/Empowerment

 Customer Service and Quality

 Ingenuity

 Business Process Effectiveness

 Reward and Recognition

 Compensation and Benefits

 Your Manager/Supervisor

 Training and Development Opportunity/Effectiveness

 Teamwork and Collaboration

 Communications

 Senior Management Effectiveness

 Company Direction/Mission/Vision/Values

The cost of conducting employee surveys is very low and the payback can be huge. By doing assessments annually you will be able to track trends and determine how well changes are being made. You will also be able to identify new opportunities and problems that have surfaced since your last assessment.