How You Can Set Up Employee Opinion Surveys That Drive Productivity

Successful organizations are powered by productive teams of highly-engaged employees. A 2023 Gallup report on the State of the Global Workforce reveals that employee engagement is just 23% worldwide. This low level of engagement leads to low productivity which costs the global economy around $8.8 billion USD every year. While this might sound bad, the Gallup team also identified the best way individual organizations can boost engagement and productivity: listen to your team, let them know you’ve heard, and act on what you learn. 

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Employee opinion surveys are a great place to start. Open lines of communication and leadership teams that listen and take action are key to employee engagement, productivity, and talent retention. So let’s explore how you can use employee opinion surveys to drive up employee engagement and productivity. But first, let’s start with the basics.

What is an employee opinion survey?

An employee opinion survey questions employees on various aspects of their work environment like communication, leadership, work-life balance, job satisfaction, and organizational culture. They are usually served to employees via secure online platforms like Checkbox where they can offer honest feedback anonymously. Measuring employee engagement is a kind of productivity survey of your organization that helps you gauge the sentiment of your workforce and to identify areas that might need attention. 

Why should you conduct employee opinion surveys?

To run an organization well, you first need to understand what it needs. By getting regular feedback from employees about what they’re thinking about or struggling with, leadership teams can take specific, timely action as and when it’s needed. Managers can also better understand what drives—or drains—motivation, morale, and productivity. 

Getting a measurable sense of employee loyalty and commitment can help businesses make decisions about retention, reward, recognition, and talent management strategies. Employee opinion surveys also help businesses ensure their employees feel heard, valued, and respected. 

What are the benefits of employee opinion surveys?

Listening to employee opinions is necessary to create a positive and productive working environment. The simple act of paying attention to the people you work with helps your company build a more cohesive, engaged, and motivated workforce, resulting in a better-run business. 

Tools like Checkbox also help you create an employee opinion survey results presentation to share with leadership so you can get buy-in for any changes you’d like to make. So, if you have never conducted an employee opinion survey, it might be time to consider implementing one. 

Here are some of the key benefits:

1. Identify areas for improvement

Employee opinion surveys provide valuable insights into areas where your company may need to improve its policies, procedures, management, and benefits. You can collect feedback on almost anything and tailor your surveys to your specific company culture and goals. This feedback allows you to make data-driven decisions to address emerging problems rather than guessing when something is wrong.

2. Increase employee engagement 

Traditional business structures tend to be hierarchical with a top-down approach, which often results in employees feeling undervalued or ignored. By conducting an employee opinion survey, you provide employees with the opportunity to voice their opinions and feel heard. Furthermore, asking employees for their opinions creates a sense of trust and inclusivity. The more engaged your employees are in your business, the more likely they are to be motivated to improve their work output.

3. Boost employee morale

It's no surprise that positive feedback is essential to maintain positive staff morale. Employee opinion surveys are a great way to reward and recognize employees for their hard work. The more employees feel heard and appreciated, the more motivated they are to continue working towards the company's goals. Recognizing and rewarding success adds to a sense of satisfaction and purpose among employees.

4. Support transparent communication 

Communication is key in any healthy relationship, and the employer-employee relationship is no exception. Employee opinion surveys are a way of opening up communication channels across the company. By having honest and open conversations, you can create an environment of mutual respect and understanding. This not only strengthens working relationships but also helps foster innovation, cooperation, and a shared sense of purpose.

5. Retain top talent

If a company doesn't respect its employees' opinions and value their contributions, it may quickly lose its most valuable employees. Employee opinion surveys allow them to convey concerns, ideas, and feedback that helps employers understand what is required to retain them. Implementing the changes they recommend can enhance loyalty and retention of top performers.

How to create an employee opinion survey

Creating an effective employee opinion survey action plan means taking a thoughtful, systematic approach that will result in meaningful impact. 

1. Define clear goals

Before you start, define clear objectives for the survey and identify key areas you’d like to get feedback about such as work culture, communication norms, or job satisfaction. 

2. Craft meaningful questions

Well-crafted survey questions are clear, comprehensive, specific, and avoid ambiguity. Keep questions open and do not ask questions that lead people to a desired answer. 

3. Conduct the survey

Send the survey to your team via your chosen platform and set a deadline by which the surveys should be completed. Most organizations conduct employee opinion surveys on a monthly or quarterly basis. Checkbox makes it easy to customize, share, and manage your employee opinion surveys. 

4. Analyze the data

Once the survey is conducted and responses are collected, analyze the data to identify trends, patterns, and areas of concern. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a data scientist! Checkbox lets you see real-time reports that make data analysis easy. 

5. Decide what needs to change

Prioritize the key issues that need to be addressed and involve relevant stakeholders in the decision-making process. Develop a detailed action plan that outlines specific strategies, timelines, and responsibilities for each identified issue. 

6. Communicate your findings

It's crucial to communicate the findings and proposed actions transparently with employees, fostering a sense of involvement and ownership. Remember: part of the purpose of conducting employee opinion surveys is to show that you listen to your team. Being transparent about your findings, both positive and negative, will foster a sense of trust.  Now you understand some employee opinion survey best practices, let’s look at some example questions you might ask. 

Sample employee opinion survey questions

Coming up with good questions can be hard. Here are 10 sample employee opinion survey questions to get you started. 

1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your current role and responsibilities?
2. How well do you feel your skills and abilities are being utilized in your current position?
3. How often do you receive constructive feedback and recognition for your work?
4. How would you rate the communication within your team and across different departments?
5. Do you feel valued and appreciated by your immediate supervisor and management?
6. Are you satisfied with the opportunities for professional growth and advancement within the company?
7. How well does the company's mission and values align with your personal values?
8. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your work-life balance?
9. Do you feel that your workload is manageable and reasonable?
10. How likely are you to recommend this company as a great place to work to a friend or colleague?

Remember to balance quantitative and qualitative questions, and consider tailoring these questions to the specific context and goals of your organization. Additionally, consider adding open-ended questions to allow employees to provide more detailed feedback and insights.

You’re already well on your way! Below, you’ll find a template you can use but first, let’s walk through the steps of how you can set up an employee opinion survey with Checkbox so you can start building your own straight away.

Step-by-step guide for running an employee opinion survey with Checkbox

1. Sign up or sign in to your account at an app login page

First choose your Account name. Enter your email and password.

2. Create Your First Survey

Create a blank survey by clicking the Create Survey button.

3. Fill in the main information related to survey

Give title to your survey, as well as a custom URL that your employees want to see. Also, choose the folder where you want to save it.

4. Add survey questions

Now that your survey has been created, you can start adding questions. Checkbox offers you various different forms of questions and includes their descriptions, so it’s easier for you to choose.

Since the questions are the heart of the survey, they need to be absolutely perfect. If a question is too vague or difficult to understand, you’ll get inaccurate results. Badly phrased questions can lead respondents to the wrong conclusions or skew the data. 

While many of the questions will be straightforward, let’s recap some guidelines to help you craft the perfect questions: 

• Be direct and specific. 
• Avoid leading questions that might elicit an unfair or biased response. 
• Avoid ambiguous terms or buzzwords that may mean different things to different people. 
• Make sure the question is relevant to the survey topic. 
• Consider what information you’re seeking and how it will be used. 
• Customize your questions

5. Customize your questions

Enter your question text and optional additional text. Enter your answer choices and add more options if needed. Under appearance, you can change your question layout.

6. Add survey logic if needed

Add Conditions to your question if you’d like to only show a question to someone based on how they answered a previous question, or based on something about them (e.g. show certain questions only to high ranking employees).

7. Add additional survey pages if needed

Add additional pages by clicking on the Add New Page button. You can also change the order of pages by dragging and dropping them with the Move icon.

8. Customize your completion page if you want

The page that shows up to employees when they finish the survey comes with a basic thank you message, “Thank you for taking the survey.” Click the edit icon to change it according to your needs. You can add multiple messages and add logic rules to each so employees see custom messages. There is also an option to add action items such as redirects to other URLs with the Add Action Item.

9. Customize survey appearance and settings

How to Distribute Your Survey

You’ve designed an employee opinion survey and crafted the perfect questions. Now you need to distribute the survey and get the data. There are a number of ways to distribute your survey, including social media and text messaging. Luckily, Checkbox can help you with all of them.

Security and permissions

With Checkbox you can control who can take surveys. You can also choose when they take it and how many times. All data is private and secure when using data encryption in transit and at rest.

Results and reporting

Checkbox provides you with reporting which gives you data to act on. Export raw data in reports with charts, tables, or to .csv or .sav formats for use in Excel, SPSS, etc.

Automation and integration

You can automate surveys and integrate it into your business processes. Checkbox has survey action items, API, and other integration options you can utilize to not perform tasks manually.

Employee opinion survey template

An effective survey template is the key to getting honest and reliable feedback from your employees. It’s important to create a survey that is short, to the point, and easy to complete. A survey should cover the most relevant topics and have questions that are relevant to the survey topic. 

Asking the right questions will help ensure that you get the most accurate responses from your employees. With Checkbox, you can develop an employee opinion survey template that will yield the best results and that you can reuse.

Here is a simple employee opinion survey template that you can use as a starting point:

1. Overall, how satisfied are you with your job?

• Very satisfied
• Satisfied
• Neutral
• Dissatisfied
• Very dissatisfied

2. How satisfied are you with the level of support and resources provided to you by your manager and team?

• Very satisfied
• Satisfied
• Neutral
• Dissatisfied
• Very dissatisfied

3. How well do you feel that your job duties and responsibilities align with your strengths and interests?

• Very well
• Well
• Neutral
• Poor
• Very poor

4. How would you rate the communication and collaboration within your team?

• Excellent
• Good
• Neutral
• Poor
• Very poor

5. How satisfied are you with the recognition and rewards you receive for your contributions to the team?

• Very satisfied
• Satisfied
• Neutral
• Dissatisfied
• Very dissatisfied

6. Are there any specific areas or aspects of your job that you would like to see improved? (Open-ended question)
7. Do you have any additional comments or suggestions for improving the work environment and team dynamics? (Open-ended question)

Keep in mind that this is just a basic template, and you may want to tailor the questions to fit the specific needs of your organization and team. It's also important to make sure that the survey is anonymous and that employees feel comfortable providing honest feedback.

Bottom line

Happy and satisfied employees are essential for any successful business. Employee satisfaction can take into account many factors, such as compensation, benefits, job security, working conditions, and the overall work environment. It is also important for employers to pay attention to the support and recognition that employees receive from their supervisors.

 A supportive and encouraging environment can go a long way in improving employee satisfaction. Companies that focus on creating a positive and collaborative work environment tend to have higher employee satisfaction levels. Ultimately, employee satisfaction is about creating a workplace where employees are motivated and have a sense of purpose. And there is no flashy perk that will help you retain employees better than good communication. 

Employee opinion surveys are the best way for you to get the insight you need. However, you don’t need to be an expert to design surveys, collect data and get conclusions. With a couple of clicks, you can start a free trial with Checkbox.

FAQ

• Do employee opinion surveys work?

You bet they do! Employee opinion surveys are an invaluable tool that helps business owners gain insight into the thoughts and feelings of their employees. After all, knowing how your staff feels about their workplace, their job, and their co-workers can give you invaluable information on how to make your workplace better. Surveys also help to form a solid foundation for creating a culture and atmosphere that encourages employees to stay and be productive. By taking the time to gather feedback from employees, business owners can identify areas that need improvement, as well as areas where their staff feels most valued. Surveys also give employees a sense of ownership in the workplace and ensure that their needs and opinions are being heard. Employee opinion surveys are an invaluable tool for any business owner, and the results from these surveys can help you make decisions that will benefit both you and your employees.

• Are employee opinion surveys really anonymous?

One of the biggest concerns for employees is whether or not these surveys are anonymous. The answer is yes - in most cases, these surveys are completely anonymous. Companies use various techniques to ensure those survey responses are kept confidential. For example, a survey might be conducted online through an anonymous platform, or the questions might be worded in a way that doesn't reveal the respondent's identity. This means that employees can give honest feedback without fear of retribution.

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References:

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx