Do you make these simple mistakes in your staff survey

One of the most common mistakes company owners make when crafting employee surveys is creating inadequate questions. Making use of words like “never” and “always” twist genuine responses and may persuade employees to adopt a negative behavior; additionally, focusing on more than one concept in a question may have serve repercussions. This is a frequent mistake that rookie survey designers make all the time.

When there’s no comprehensive knowledge of staff survey tactics, people don’t realize when the sample they have available is suitable or not. Staff surveys that are incorrectly designed render results that that inaccurate. This could make a company take wrong actions. In the long term, this approach causes decline in employee morale, engagement and satisfaction.

Employee surveys shouldn’t be crafted without professional advice

A lot of company owners and CEO think that they can build employee surveys on their own. However, without the expertise of a professional to help you design the best survey, you risk asking the wrong questions and approaching issues that are valueless. Employee surveys benefits from trade benchmarking.

It is fundamental that you do them right in order to tackle real company issues and boost company bottom line. A skilled team of statisticians and psychologists is required to help you understand the results of the survey; furthermore, you need professional assistance to assist you with improving organizational performance.

Put an end to spamming emails to employees

For a company, it is important to get people to complete staff surveys. However, there’s no need to have all employees fill out surveys to gather a set of important data and tackle a specific set of issues. It is recommended that you send reminders, but this doesn’t mean spamming workers who already responded to the survey the first time.

There are ways to convince employees complete surveys without sending non-stop reminders. Filling your staff’s message inboxes with spam can do more harm than good.

Employee surveys alone are not the best way to improve engagement

Employee surveys must not be seen as an engagement action plan. They’re more like a means to collect feedback. Your action plan is your act to boost engagement and address the feedback. These two are not the same thing though. An employee survey alone can’t make workers feel more motivated. It must be combined with the company’s willingness to make a change and do whatever’s necessary to create balance at the workplace.

No privacy

Some companies just don’t want to understand that a staff survey can only be efficient when it is anonymous. For an employee to be honest in answering company questions the survey must not demand them to give their names; if there is this requirement, then the worker will provide false information.

False data leads to statistics that are not accurate, and eventually the HR department will strive to fix issues that may not even exist. Give your employees some privacy. Make staff surveys anonymous and they’ll feel comfortable when giving answers. This way the information collected is correct, thus permitting the company to tackle real issues and add improvements.

Ignoring answers

Staff survey answers must be read thoroughly. If you can’t do it yourself have your HR department do it. This is important because they offer valuable answers to stories behind the basic questions and answers. Staff surveys are meant to help companies improve their bottom line by fixing issues. Believe it or not, your workers have many things they want to say.

Most of them can’t because they don’t have an opportunity. Don’t ignore the power of staff questionnaire; when done right, these can greatly influence the way your company works.

Employee surveys can help businesses gauge employee perceptions and attitudes concerning everything from business practices and leadership style to their own personal satisfaction with benefits and compensation. The benefits of conducting a survey can be significant. And yet many companies ignore this aspect and choose to run their business without caring for the engagement of their employees.

Choose to be different, focus on keeping workers engaged and you’ll have a much more fruitful company long-term. The happier the employees the better chances you have to boost bottom line and maintain your business on the floating line.

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Images via Flickr users: AIESEC Germany, Bjørn Tore Hoem and Hartlepool College under C.C.2.0