Employee Satisfaction

Are you investing in employee morale? In a recession, it's not unusual for employees to question their job stability. Fears of job loss causes concern about finances, which can drain employees' energy. When employee morale is low, just about any excuses is good enough to just stay home. Organizations need to invest in their employees.

A good way to keep tabs on employee moral is with employee satisfaction surveys. With the help of employee feedback, employers can identify possible causes for low morale and take steps to boost satisfaction.

We've mentioned before that employee satisfaction is linked to customer satisfaction. In a down economy, organizations need productive, efficient teamwork and happy representatives who want to help customers. Even little things such as personally greeting employees or thanking them for their hard work can boost morale.

What has your organization done to improve employee satisfaction based on feedback from employee questionnaires?

How green are your employee survey practices? In celebration of Earth Day, I wanted to spend some time talking about how Human Resources executives could green up their HR surveys. It's really popular to be seen as a "Green Organization" these days, but some people have the misconception that being green means you're spending more. This isn't necessarily true. We consume six times more paper today than 50 years ago, with the average office worker using 20 reams of paper annually (that's 10,000 sheets!). Just cutting paper consumption can save organizations money.

But how does this relate to greening up your employee surveys?

If you conduct employee evaluation surveys, job satisfaction surveys, staff opinion surveys, or any other type of HR survey, you have the opportunity to cut your organization's paper consumption just by moving your survey project online. Web based HR survey software can eliminate the need for paper surveys. Furthermore, you can gather more of the information you need. Anonymous employee online questionnaires could yield response rates as high as 80 or 90 percent.

Taking your employee surveys to the web have more benefits than just cutting the human resource department's paper consumption. Check out our past blog posts for some additional benefits to using HR survey software to send web based surveys to staff.

Are you interested in seeing Cvent's Web Survey software in action?  We recently added a new section to our website: Sample Web Surveys.  We have three online survey examples allowing visitors to see how different features look or function.  It also gives a sneak peak into three of our graphical templates and how easy it is to customize our templates to match your organization's branding.  Each survey example shows off various features, including:

Half the battle of conducting a survey is gathering the feedback you need.  We recommend using an email survey tool to solicit online survey responses.  Email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to increase responses to your customer questionnaire, employee satisfaction feedback form or marketing survey.  With more people moving to email marketing for promotions, sales and other marketing messages, email lists are seeing higher opt-out rates. 

I recently came across a MarketingSherpa survey asking why people unsubscribe from email lists:



With half of respondents citing relevancy or frequency of emails as a reason for unsubscribing, you look closely at your own practices.  Every organization can set their own business rules concerning the frequency of emails and surveys.  To combat the problem allow subscribers to set up their own preferences for how often they want to be contacted and what information they want.  Depending on your organization, some subscribers may want daily or weekly emails, whereas others may only want to hear from you once a quarter.  Giving control back to the subscriber and tailoring your message will boost responses across all your email marketing initiatives - not just your web based surveys.

When was the last time you surveyed employees to understand job satisfaction?  Staff opinion surveys can tell you a lot about the organization’s culture and overall employee satisfaction.  With organizations asking employees to do more with less time and resources, keeping the workplace positive and productive should be a top goal.  Every day, I read about job burnout and added stress at work, both these factors can increase the cost of doing business.  In this economy, most organizations are trying to cut costs, not increase them.  We recommend using employee questionnaires to identify possible areas to cut costs, reallocate resources or boost productivity.  You may find adding a break room would give employees space to relax for a few minutes and boost productivity when they return to their desks.  Most employees are happy to share their cost cutting ideas and program ideas with employers.  You may find that the best cost cutting ideas come from the trenches and not senior management. 

If you’re thinking about surveying employees, whether it’s to conduct employee performance evaluations or job satisfaction surveys, Cvent’s Web Survey software can help get your survey program started.  Cvent’s online survey tool has templates and question libraries, such as sample employee survey questions, to help get your HR surveys off the ground in minutes. To learn more about using Cvent's Web Survey software for your survey management needs, sign up for a product demonstration.  

If you've never conducted a survey before, you're likely looking for some sample survey questions to get started. Cvent offers a wealth of survey templates to jumpstart any survey project, whether it's a customer feedback, market research or employee satisfaction survey.

All our sample surveys follow our own advice: keep it simple and easy to understand. If you want to customize questions to fit organizational and survey goals, we encourage you to do that. All of our web survey templates are a great resource for examples of survey questions.

Take a peek at a couple of customer satisfaction survey questions in our customer satisfaction survey template:





To learn more about Cvent's survey templates, sign up for one of our free webinars.

If you've never conducted a survey before, you're likely looking for some sample survey questions to get started. Cvent offers a wealth of survey templates to jumpstart any survey project, whether it's a customer feedback, market research or employee satisfaction survey.

All our sample surveys follow our own advice: keep it simple and easy to understand. If you want to customize questions to fit organizational and survey goals, we encourage you to do that. All of our web survey templates are a great resource for examples of survey questions.

Take a peek at a couple of customer satisfaction survey questions in our customer satisfaction survey template:




Customer Satisfaction Sample Question

To learn more about Cvent's survey templates, sign up for one of our free webinars.

Think about the last time a company asked you about your last purchase or visit. Did you expect your opinion to resonate and influence a change (particularly if you were dissatisfied)? Or, consider the last time you were asked to fill out an employee survey. Did you expect management and HR to consider your thoughts when moving forward with a decision? Of course you did, otherwise you wouldn't have taken the time to complete the questionnaire.

When conducting surveys of clients, customers or employees, you're setting expectations that the organization is going to consider the survey responses before moving forward. If customers have a terrible experience with your brand, product or service and they complete your customer satisfaction survey, they're going to expect steps be taken to ensure their next experience is much better. If their next experience is the same, or worse, it's going to hurt any loyalty they feel towards the organization.

The same concept rings true for employee surveys. And, as we discussed in an earlier post, employee satisfaction has a direct impact on customer satisfaction.

If you're going to conduct surveys—and we clearly suggest you do, as they're a vital part of any organization— make sure you act on the responses. Surveys aren't just an exercise to forget about after launching. Ignoring responses can cause real damage to your perceived trustworthiness and your brand.

If you run web surveys and use email marketing to solicit responses, you may encounter deliverability issues. The common myth surrounding "Undeliverable" is that ISPs and organizations block messaging at the server level. We're not suggesting ISPs and organizations aren’t the cause for some of your undeliverables, but they can’t shoulder all the blame.

There are some things marketers should be doing to boost deliverability, especially when your customer research, training evaluation or employee satisfaction surveys rely on it. Here are a couple quick tips to improve email deliverability:

• Clean your lists. Following best practices to increase open rates and survey responses through email marketing doesn't matter if you ignore bounce backs. Using a web based survey company such as Cvent helps keep contact lists clean by automatically cleansing your database. It marks undeliverables so that those contacts never receive another email. Beyond that, you should have a monitored email address for bounce backs.

• Monitor results in real time. As a best practice, we suggest testing any survey before launching it to your entire list. This should include message testing to a segment of the list you plan to use. If you have the wrong messaging go out to your contacts, you're going to be hurt by spam complaints. Monitoring results in real time helps you identify and fix small problems before they ruin the integrity of your entire set of contacts.

If your clients are unsatisfied, do you know why? Customer retention should be a huge focus for any organization, if for no other reason than that acquiring new customers is five times more expensive than keeping a current customer.

As many HR executives and relationship managers know, employee satisfaction has a direct link to customer satisfaction. An employee who is satisfied with his or her job and work environment is more likely to work to keep customers satisfied. So, when it comes to increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, take care of your biggest asset: your employees.

Consider conducting an employee satisfaction survey. Just the act of running a survey has been shown to boost employee satisfaction. It lets employees know that management is listening and considering their concerns.

If they have valid concerns about overtime expectations or incentive plans or a range of other issues, just running an employee survey won’t solve those issues. It will, however, allow you to to identify issues affecting various parts of the organization and take steps to improve the culture and environment.

Unlike what some organizations have come to believe, each department does not live in a vacuum. If your marketing department is unhappy, it will affect your sales and client services teams. If your technology department is unhappy, it will affect your accounting and marketing departments. If your customer service employees are unhappy, look out! You may have a hard time renewing current customers and winning new clients.

Instincts tell us that poor customer satisfaction is linked to problems with your product offering or customer service, but it could have wider implications. Before investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in R&D to improve your offering, consider implementing a survey program to help identify the true cause of your customer retention problems.

A successful company is only as good as its employees. After all, the efficiency of your entire team—from sales to marketing to technology to human resources—determines your organization's profits and growth. Isn't it, then, more important than ever to make sure your team is productive and happy overall?

Research has shown that motivated and satisfied employees tend to contribute more in terms of organizational productivity and maintaining a commitment to customer satisfaction—both essential characteristics of an organization that will successfully weather the economic storm. So then how do you make sure your employees are, and remain, motivated and satisfied?

Employee satisfaction surveys are great tools for boosting morale within an organization. In fact, it's generally seen that companies that encourage or engage their employees to provide ideas and suggestions have higher employee retention rates and job satisfaction. Give your employees a chance to share insights and suggestions, and you'll have invaluable information that can be acted upon to increase workplace satisfaction and improve business processes.

Employee feedback and satisfaction are critical to the success of any organization. To read more about how to successfully implement a survey program that will positively impact your culture and bottom line profits, read Cvent's new white paper on employee satisfaction.

Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve. When creating questions for your survey, it’s important to mask any biases you may have. Asking loaded or leading questions can destroy your survey data and the accuracy of your results, so eliminating or rewording any such questions is an important step in your survey design process.

How to you spot a leading question? Often times they are easy to identify because they point towards a specific answer. Consider these customer survey questions:

LEADING: Most Americans prefer to purchase products manufactured in the United States. Do you prefer to purchase products manufactured in the United States?

BETTER OPTION: Where do you prefer products you purchase to be manufactured?
The leading question uses a generalized statement at the beginning that implies your respondent is un-American if he or she disagrees.

The better option is an open-ended statement, allowing respondents to enter or select a country. This also gives your respondents an opportunity to say the origin of their purchases doesn’t matter.

Here is a similar example of employee satisfaction survey questions:

LEADING: People working at ABC Corp love their jobs. How do you feel about your job here at ABC Corp?

BETTER OPTION: On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being very dissatisfied and 5 being very satisfied, how satisfied are you with your position at ABC Corp?

Again, the leading question pressures the survey participant to say they, too, love their job. You likely won't get an honest response—or accurate data—with this.

The better option is written in a neutral manner, giving respondents the opportunity to respond with their sincere feedback.

By asking leading questions, surveyors are not getting the most out of their survey programs. The objective of any survey is to get honest results on how respondents feel about the survey topic. Don't let leading questions deter you from this goal.

If your employees aren’t happy, you can bet that it won’t be long before your clients won’t be happy. Prevent the negative effects of a disgruntled workforce with an employee satisfaction survey designed to get honest and accurate feedback. Ensure success for your company with a survey that:

• Is anonymous. Give your employees the privilege of speaking their minds without consequences. A survey that maintains employee privacy and encourages honest feedback is one that a company can truly use as a resource.

• Asks for suggestions. Whether you want descriptive solutions to specific problems or just want to get a date for the next office social event, an online survey that gives an open invitation for change is worth every question. Be sure to include open-ended questions that give employees a chance to elaborate on their ideas and suggestions.

• Offers a benefit. If the chance to speak their mind isn’t enough of a reason for your workers to complete an employee satisfaction survey, consider adding an incentive for completion. Work locations with a satisfactory completion rate can reward their workers with a special event, small prizes (like gift cards), or an entry into a giveaway for a larger award.

Employee satisfaction surveys can increase loyalty within your organization and enhance morale among both individuals and teams. Consider using online surveys to help achieve your long-term business goals today.

The Rolling Stones could have used a quality online survey tool. Their hit song, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” sums up what nearly every business in America is talking about today: satisfaction. Or lack thereof.

It’s not limited to just customer satisfaction anymore. Recent days have witnessed a spike in the popularity of buzz words such as employee satisfaction, job satisfaction, training satisfaction, and more. The question at the heart of all of these terms is still the same:

Are you satisfied?

Who is “you”? You can be a customer. You can be a lead. You can be a company website visitor, an online reviewer, a senior level manager, or a front line assembly worker. The fact is companies are not static entities. They are organic living dynamics, thriving off of human interaction.

You—whoever “you” are—define the company and its success. Unless you are satisfied, the company isn’t going to thrive.
 
Ask and You Shall Receive

Whether you are a human resources manager asking about employee satisfaction, or a marketing executive who wants to know why clients are or are not using your product, the fact remains that anyone can benefit from a little more information.

A business needs to make sure everyone in its sphere of influence is satisfied, and asking the right questions will start you in the right direction. You don't need a hit song to do it anymore. With the advent of quick, affordable and easy-to-use tools such as online surveys, it’s never been easier to ask.