This is one of the most powerful tools you can use as a business leader.

As a business leader, one of your jobs is to make big difficult decisions.  When making a decision as a business leader, you take care to look at all of the information you have available to you so that you can make the best, most informed, decisions.

And when it comes to making decisions about your people, it’s important to use the same due care and diligence, because your people are your greatest business asset.

What can help you make the best decisions regarding your team?

Employee surveys are the answer. They’re one of the most powerful tools you can use as a business leader, because they help you bridge the gap between what you think is going on vs what is actually going on!

Here’s the steps you need to follow to conduct the perfect employee survey:

Step 1: Create a specific focus for your survey

Before you even think about your survey questions, you need to define their purpose. The survey’s purpose should be a clear, attainable, and relevant goal. For example, you might want to understand why a significant number of your employees are leaving you with less than 6 months service.

Step 2: Decide how you’re going to conduct the survey

Whether that’s via an online form or in-person interview for instance. Think about what quality of information you need to receive. If you need to get in depth responses, these might be best asked in person rather than via an online survey.

Step 3: Create questions that will give you the insights you need

In a way that you can measure, benchmark and compare in the future.  Vaguely worded survey questions confuse respondents and make your resulting data less useful. Be as specific as possible, and strive for clear and precise language that will make your survey questions easy to answer.

Step 4: Keep it short and simple

Although you may be deeply committed to your employee survey, the chances are that your employees… aren’t – yes you heard me right! As a survey designer, a big part of your job is keeping their attention and making sure they stay focused until the end of the survey.

Employees’ are less likely to complete long surveys or surveys that bounce around haphazardly from topic to topic. Make sure your survey follows a logical order and takes a reasonable amount of time to complete.

Step 5: Pre-frame the survey to your employees and encourage them to take part

 To increase the number of responses, incentives, discounts, offers, gift cards, or sweepstakes, can all prove helpful. However, if your employee survey is going to be anonymous – this may not work!

With employee surveys, it’s about framing the survey in a way that your employees will resonate with. This might be that you value their feedback, that their feedback is important and will help you as a business to identify any changes you can make to be an even better employer!

Step 6: Take your survey for a test drive!

Want to know how to make a survey a potential disaster? Send it out for a test drive!

However short or straightforward your questionnaire is, it’s always a good idea to pre-test your survey before you roll it out fully so that you can catch any possible errors before they have a chance to mess up your survey results.

Share your survey with at least five people, so that they can test your survey to help you catch and correct problems before you distribute it.

Step 7: Review results and create findings

This is the hard bit! You need someone to do this who is good at analysing data and is able to create key patterns and themes emerging from your data and this isn’t everyone’s skill set! So make sure you find the person in your business that is good at this, and make sure they are able to help you with this critical part of the survey.

Step 8: Create your action plan

From your findings, you need to create an action plan. This is where we would suggest you hold sessions with your employees’ to share the findings from your surveys with them, and ask them for their ideas!

This isn’t about saying that you will do everything that they come up with, but it’s getting them involved and getting their buy in or support for the actions you will take!

From these sessions, you can then decide on what actions you will take either as a management or leadership team.

Step 9: Communicate findings and actions to your team

Once you’ve agreed the actions that you will take, it’s time to communicate these to everyone.

Step 10: Check in 6 months later to see if you’ve made improvements

 Re-do your survey, using the same questions to see how your scores have changed or improved.

How can Meraki HR help?

We are Gallup Q12 accredited, so we love a great employee survey! If you’d like our help creating a survey or implementing an employee survey in your business, then please get in touch and we’d be happy to chat through your employee survey ideas with you.

And if you’d like us to start surveying your employees, we’re here to help you get this set up!