HR Survey

One of the great things about Cvent Web Surveys software application is that it is constantly getting “better.” I, for one, am not aware of another survey software company that can state with confidence that 80% of all product enhancements come directly from the requests of current clients. Cvent, however, has certain processes in place so that every time a client expresses interest in seeing a new feature added to the online survey application, this request is quickly relayed to our technical team.

For those of you who were clients before our most recent product release in August 2009, you definitely noticed at least one big change in your account the first time you logged in after the release. As soon as you logged into your Cvent Web Surveys account, you saw that your surveys were no longer organized into folders on the Survey Selection page. Instead, they are now displayed in “views.”

Now, you may wonder why I chose to write my blog post this week on the transition from folders to survey views. It may seem like a pretty dry topic. I wanted to write on this particular survey subject because I get so many calls from clients asking how to create a new survey view that pull the appropriate surveys into view. If you have a lot of surveys created in your account, then this is a pretty important thing to know how to do, so that you don’t have to sort through all of your company’s surveys just to find the few that you are personally working on!

When you are ready to create a new survey view and filter the appropriate surveys into this view, you need to remember 3 simple steps:

1) Create a survey custom field. You can create survey custom fields under the Administration tab, on the same page that you create contact custom fields. Survey custom fields are primarily used to classify the surveys in your account and pull them into the appropriate views on the Survey Selection page. So, for example, if your marketing department and human resources department are running surveys, you may want to create 2 separate survey views, one for each department. The first step to do this would be to create a survey custom field for department.

2) Create a new view on the Survey Selection page. You can create a new survey view by choosing “add new view” from the Display drop-down menu. When you add the new view, you will need to name it and also specify certain options (i.e. whether you would like the view to be private or public). Finally, at the bottom of the page, you should apply an advanced filter based on the survey custom field you just created for department. For example, if you are adding the survey view for “Marketing Surveys,” you should choose “department” as the field, “equals” as the operator, and “marketing” as the value.


3) Now that you have created the survey custom field and added the new view, all you need to do is pull the appropriate surveys into the view you just created! When you added the new view for “Marketing Surveys,” you should have gotten a message, “no surveys match your criteria.” This is because you have not yet applied the survey custom field at the survey-level! To do this, simply go into an individual marketing survey, and click on  Settings on the top navigation bar. On the General Information page, you should click on the Custom Survey Fields tab. Here you can apply the “marketing” label to the individual survey, so that it will show up in the “Marketing Surveys” view.


Hopefully this post will be helpful to those of you who are struggling with the transition from folders to survey views. Believe me, survey views are completely customizable and will help you organize online surveys in your Cvent Web Surveys software account.

Halloween is time for spooky movies, scary amounts of candy consumption and silly costumes. This holiday always ensures you'll see at least one person around the office dressed up - but what about when you do an annual Halloween costume contest? How do you poll the office to come to a fair consensus? Quickly create a web poll using your online poll creator. You wont need to worry about writing your own online poll script because the online poll software tool will take care of it for you.

Here at Cvent, we have an annual Halloween Costume Contest, as you might have guessed. In the past, we've used the clapping and cheering approach (who ever gets the most applause wins) and our web polling software. With the image gallery, it's easy to upload your costume pictures. When you're creating a poll online, you can customize the survey questions and add your own graphics and pictures, in addition to information about what the costume is of - because let's be honest, sometimes it's hard to tell. After uploading the pictures, you can quickly send a note to your employees letting them know it's time to VOTE!

When was the last time you ran a quick employee poll for a silly contest to lighten up the hum-drum of the day-to-day office life?

By the way, since I'm sure you're wondering, this year's Halloween Costume Contest winner was a Taco. Congratulations Andy, but why didn't you bring enough Taco for the rest of us?

I probably don't need to explain why creating employee surveys should be part of every HR department, but coming up with the correct employee evaluation template or employee job satisfaction survey questions isn't as as obvious as know you should do them. I recently came across a few sample workplace survey questions I thought may help when you start writing employee questionnaires:

One thing you should notice in the example employee satisfaction questions are they are different survey question types. A general online survey best practice to remember when crafting employee survey questions is to vary the question type. It helps keep the respondent engaged and lowers survey abandonment rate.

Increasing survey response rates is a major goal of most survey builders and market researchers. There's an art and a science to increasing campaign response rates whether it's an email marketing campaign or an online market research study. I wanted to share some of my tips for how to increase survey response rates:

• Make the email survey invitation from names easy to recognize. You can do this by including an individual's name within the organization that's well known (such as the CEO or if it's a client survey, the name of their sales rep). You can also use the organization's name, or both. For example, I'm subscribed to a few MarketingProf's newsletters. When they send out emails they include the same person's name and their organizations name so it looks like this: Anne, MarketingProfs. I recognize it everytime, and since I enjoy their newsletter, I made sure to open the email.

• Keep subject line's compelling, but short. The subject line and the From Name are the two most critical pieces to get your email opened. Try to keep your subject lines to 35 characters or less. You don't need to put the entire email in the subject line, but you do need to include enough information to make the recipients open the survey email.

• Create an attractive survey invitation. Studies have shown that well done HTML email messages get better response rates than plain text emails. With HTML you have the opportunity to include images, change font sizes, bold text, etc. Take advantage of this chance. It's one more way to get people to click through to your survey!

• Send personalized survey invitations. Personalizing your emails, even something as simple as including the recipient's name in the greeting, will return a higher response than a generic message. It creates a personal touch, and makes the recipient feel like someone took the time to send them a personal message (even though your email survey tool did it for you).

• Introduce the survey. Let the participants know why they should participate in your survey. If they don't understand why their opinion is important to your survey findings, why would they want to take the time to fill it out?

• How long will the survey take? Not setting expectations in the beginning for survey length leads to low response rates and high abandonment rates. Not what you want to see. If you don't let people know how long it will take to fill out your online survey, they're going to assume you're hiding something about how long it is. Tell them it will take X minutes or the survey is only Y questions long. Definitely be honest, if you lie here, you're going to hurt your future chances of getting those respondents to complete your next online survey questionnaire.

• Remind your survey sample that their responses will be kept confidential. This is particularly important for surveys about uncomfortable topics. For example, you created a poll for a public opinion survey to see how your population feels about an emotional topic such as abortion. If you don't keep the information confidential, you probably will not get honest feedback. Same thing goes with employee questionnaires, they should always be kept confidential and anonymous. Not keeping responses confidential will definitely hurt your response rate, as well as the validity of the data.

• Offer an incentive. Offering incentives is a proven method for increasing survey response rates. But this method doesn't work if you don't let people know about it up front. Put it in your email, put it on the welcome page of the survey, then make sure to follow up. Again, if you drop the ball here, the chances of that survey respondent completing your online survey form in the future is drastically reduced.

• Always say Thank You! Remember when your mom always made you write thank you notes when you got presents or cards from people for holidays and birthdays? It was because people like to feel their effort is noticed and appreciated. Same idea here, it's nice to just get a short note thanking them for their time. After all, survey respondents are doing you a favor.

• Don't over email your contact list. This is very important. You shouldn't be inviting the same people to complete your online surveys every month. It's important to segment your list using whichever survey sampling method that works best for your surveys to avoid email list fatigue. Make sure that you're coordinating with other campaigns as well. Just because you know they're different initiatives you're emailing about, your contact's wont necessarily see it that way. If you begin sending emails too frequently, contacts are going to just delete your email and never open it, opt out or report you as a spammer.

Have a tip that I missed? I'd love to hear it!

Here at Cvent, we get asked for survey templates all the time. That's why we've created a bank of survey questions and pre-created questionnaires for all clients to utilize within their account. But it never seems to be enough. Sample employee motivation surveys, employee evaluation survey examples, sample employee questionnaire, employee satisfaction survey templates, the list goes on, and on, and on...

While this post may not give you all the answers or the complete employee survey template you're looking for, it definitely is a start. Below are some sample survey questions for employee questionnaires.


While not all of these questions are necessary (or appropriate) in any given employee engagement survey or job satisfaction questionnaire, you should see how some of them will fit into your next employee satisfaction survey template.

There are several things to remember when creating an employee survey. Obviously, you must ensure no one outside the company can view or take the survey. This is simple enough to do by setting the survey settings in the employee survey software to only those on a targeted list. This will guarantee that your data is not compromised by pranksters, former employees or anyone outside the company.

You must also guarantee anonymity for your employees. This is generally a standard practice but cannot be emphasized enough when you create employee questionnaires. Employees are going to be more skittish than the average survey respondent because they may be concerned about repercussions if they admit dissatisfaction in the survey. So, you cannot express anonymity enough.

When creating a workplace employee survey, include both quantitative and qualitative questions. Provide an open-ended comment space for them to write down any concerns they felt were not covered in the survey. This is a great opportunity for employers to find out things that bother or impress employees. Employers should also share all survey results with employees once the online questionnaire is closed. It could negatively impact employee morale if the results are perceived to be kept secret. Also consider creating action items immediately, if they make sense for the company. For example, if employees express a desire for more training opportunities, look into them and offer a few on-site training classes if feasible.

You should think about employee workplace surveys as employee morale surveys.

Private businesses tend to guard findings from their research efforts very closely.  In some instances, where significant investment dollars and time were spent on sampling frames and reporting, this makes sense.  It's nice to have proprietary research at your disposal to impress clients and customers, and internal employee survey results, for example, may be reserved for senior leaders.

But in most cases, I suggest sharing your survey results with as many people as possible.  The benefits outweigh the perceived drawbacks.  After all, most survey research comes from of a specific point-in-time sample, and whatever narrow edge you may get from keeping the results private will be short-lived.

At minimum, you should share the results of your survey with respondents themselves.  People like to know what they're a part of (and why).  In fact, offering to provide respondents with survey results has been shown to increase response rates! 

It's a great idea to set up partnerships with community leaders before you even send out your community attitude survey.  Publicize your organization and your efforts toward being proactive.  Let your community know that you value them and are interested in feedback and suggestions about the process.  Create anticipation and eagerness to both complete questionnaires and receive the results after the survey is completed.

You can also organize a press release highlighting selected findings from your survey.  This can be posted on your website and in other locations (external websites, community hotspots, etc.).   Call local news organizations if you think the results would appeal to their audiences.  Tell all who will listen how you've made original contributions to the knowledge of your industry, and how you will improve business practices based on your results.

Every organization should ask themselves What is good customer service? and create their own definition for good customer service based on the answer they come up with. Giving customers the opportunity to provide feedback on their customer experience is one way to improve customer service quality, but only if the customer feedback gets back to the employees. Lots of organizations use customer service surveys to measure customer experiences and customer loyalty. What separates the organizations with mediocre customer service from the organizations with excellent customer service is sharing the feedback from the customer loyalty surveys with the employees. Seems pretty straight forward, right?

I suggest you take it a step further, however. While sharing the aggregate results of customer feedback surveys with front-line employees is important, you can use these customer surveys as assessments of employee performance or staff evaluations. If you're not already using customer surveys to support this type of employee performance feedback, here are some steps from the CRMBuyer to make this type of process possible:

• Move from random survey sampling to an attempted census. Random survey samples are great when you're just trying to get an overall sense of customer satisfaction rates. However, if you're trying to collect feedback to figure out how to improve employee performance, a random sample is unlikely to provide enough data for each employee. Like with all other types of surveys, not everyone you send personalized survey invitations to will participate, but you will likely get enough responses to support the employee assessments.

• Develop new employee reports. To improve workforce performance, organizations can't continue to provide infrequent high-level survey reports. Instead, employees should get to see weekly reports. Using standardized reports that compare the employee to the overall average and to their colleagues as a group have the most impact.

• Develop new management reports. Like with how employees see the customer feedback reports needs to change with this strategy, management reports do too. Managers should be able to see responses by employees so they can take appropriate action. Managers will have different opinions on how much information should be shared with their staff; some will want to share every customer comment from the employee performance evaluation form, others wont want to share individual survey results.

• Develop HR guidelines for the use of these employee reports. The HR department should be deeply involved in the creation of these HR employee appraisal forms and employee survey reports. If an employee constantly receives negative customer feedback, the organization may choose to terminate their employment so it helps to keep HR in the loop. However, that shouldn't be the goal of this type of customer survey program. The survey feedback should be used to improve employee job performance and mentor them. With the help of customer service assessment surveys and employee performance review forms organizations can figure out how to improve customer service quality.

If there's one thing that can be frustrating about building surveys online, it's putting together the appropriate questions and responses that will give you the survey data you're looking for.  Furthermore, manually inputting questions you re-use in different surveys can be tedious at best.  But you don't have to continue this repetitive task.

Cvent's feedback management solution comes equipped with both question and response libraries designed specifically to save you time and energy when building out your surveys.  Once you've crafted that perfect question or set of answer choices, simply save them to your libraries for future use.  Take it one step further and categorize them so you can find them quickly and easily.

In addition, Cvent's online web survey system provides standard questions in multiple categories, including Customer Service, Demographics, Marketing and Sales, HR, and Training.  Standard responses range from demographic questions, income levels, frequency and survey rating scales.

Here's my plea: Don't get bogged down in adding the same questions and responses over and over again.  Utilize robust question and response libraries in your survey software tools to springboard your thinking and streamline your survey creation processes.

Have you ever applied for a job and been asked to pre employment assessment? Lots of companies have pre employment assessments in place before hiring new employees. Why? Because these new employee survey assessments help hiring managers select the correct people. Hiring a new employee has its own expenses associated with it, so human resource departments often look for ways to increase employee retention rates. Pre employment assessments are one way they improve their employee retention programs.

When you hire the wrong person a few things can happen:

1. You spend extra dollars on new employee training to get them caught up to speed, when you could have hired someone with the right experience from the get-go.

2. You will face employee turnover that causes you to go back to the drawing board with advertising the position, screening applicants and interviewing - again, wasting more dollars.

Neither one of these scenarios are good for your organization. It's much easier to put a formal screening process in place. One added benefit of pre employee assessment surveys is they protect your organization from claims of discrimination in the hiring process. I certainly don't think pre employee assessments should be the only thing hiring managers look at when reviewing a job application, but I do think it should be part of the process.

While many organizations are continuously focused on cutting costs, it becomes ever more important during a tight economy. While expensive consultants can do a great job at finding these bottleneck areas, there may be a more economic recession friendly way to cut costs: just ask your employees.

Employees tend to be the largest expense an organization faces and, believe me, they know it. They may be "expensive", but they're worth it. Your workforce is the DNA of your organization, which is why they are the first people to know where minor costs can be eliminated. By asking for employee feedback and suggestions of areas to eliminate expenses, you are identifying expenses that wont affect their productivity. For example, you may offer employees complimentary snacks and beverages to keep them going through that afternoon hunger. However, an employee opinion survey may show employees think the organization should cut out the snacks in an effort to cut costs. It wouldn't be what you expect, but it's certainly a real-life example.

So the next time you're trying to cut costs due to a shrinking budget, survey your employees. You may just find out that the cookies and soda aren't as important to them as keeping their job.

This Friday we are will be celebrating our blogs' first birthday. I can hardly believe it's been almost a year of sharing our Web Survey Best Practices with you. Each day this week we will be counting down our top favorite posts. You might have already guessed, today's theme is employee surveys.

• HR Survey Tips: Weed Out Unqualified Job Candidates: In this post, we talked about how pre employment assessments can be a big time saver for HR. It can be a real struggle for hiring managers to identify the best candidates. It's no secret that asking pre-interview questions or providing job applicants with a pre-interview questionnaire can save you from having to speak with people who are not a fit from the start.

• Employee Surveys Can Help Cut Costs: This post highlights how staff opinion surveys can help you identify areas to cut costs. You may find that the best cost cutting ideas come from the trenches and not senior management. All you need to do is ask.

• Employee Satisfaction Surveys Boost Productivity: This post is about employee morale and satisfaction surveys. Research has shown that motivated and satisfied employees tend to contribute more in terms of organizational productivity and maintaining a commitment to customer satisfaction. So how do you make sure your employees are, and remain, motivated and satisfied?

• When other companies come calling, will your employees remain loyal? This post talks about how you may have high employee retention rates now, but that doesn't mean you have satisfied employees. When the economy picks up again, organizations will begin to grow their workforce and skilled professionals will be in high demand. If your business fails to take care of their employees now, they may not keep those employees once hiring starts again.

• Employee Surveys Can Improve Customer Experience: This is my favorite post on the list, probably because my precondition to focus on the importance of creating a positive customer experience. One of the best ways to measure client satisfaction and experiences is to measure employee loyalty using employee satisfaction surveys.

Employee surveys don't always need to be measuring employee satisfaction or gauging employee commitment and loyalty. Sometimes, you may want to conduct an employee information survey to just update employee contact records. Employee surveys don't always need to be about discovering ways to improve a process or increase employee retention or satisfaction rates.

You can also create employee recognition surveys to identify employees who deserve extra recognition at your next company event. It may be a matter of some employees consistently going beyond the "call of duty" to help co-workers, but it's not something management sees. Like with a 360 degree feedback survey, colleagues and peers can have a different view of someone's work ethic and tasks they complete than management.

A common myth in the workplace is that employees don't need recognition, or shouldn't be recognized for "just doing their jobs." But if you were to do a quick opinion poll, you'd find that's not always the case. Instead, having employee recognition programs can serve to reinforce the good work employees are doing, and simultaneously increase employee satisfaction, productivity and loyalty. Those are all things organizations strive to promote within their employees. Employees want to know they've done a good job and their work, effort and time mean something to the organization.

How do you get started with an employee recognition survey? First, choose an online poll survey software for employee surveys (I would recommend Cvent Web Surveys Software). Then begin designing survey questions to fit your survey goal: identifying employees who deserve extra recognition. Example employee survey questions might include asking who they would like to nominate for an employee recognition reward, and why that employee deserves to be recognized.

In a recent survey of senior executives from some of the nation’s largest companies, more than 30% indicated increasing staff would be a top priority in the upcoming year as the recession tapers off and our economy starts to recover.

As executives begin to emerge from a defensive, survival mode and look to expand their business, it’s important that they don’t overlook their organization’s lifeblood and most valuable asset, their existing employees. While it is true that bringing new talent into an organization is exciting and reinvigorating, the collective knowledge and insight of your current workforce is invaluable and protecting this resource must remain at the forefront of every executive’s mind.

As one of Cvent Web Survey’s whitepapers on employee satisfaction mentions, 21% of individuals are eager to change careers, while only 20% feel very passionate about their jobs. This should be a very sobering fact for business executives with the economy picking up pace, workers will become particularly empowered to look for a new career path if they do not feel a strong commitment to their employer. Couple that with the prevailing statistic that it costs 10 times more to hire and train a new employee than it does to retain one and executives should begin to see the value in periodically checking the pulse of the workforce through internal surveys, specifically employee engagement surveys and employee commitment surveys.

When the economy picks up again, organizations will begin to grow their workforce and skilled professionals will be in high demand. If your business fails to take care of their employees now, they may not  keep those employees once hiring starts again. As the Reuters article points out after polling 150 survey respondents by telephone, recognizing employees does not always need to be monetary. Tracking employee satisfaction and engagement can help identify ways to keep employees feeling valued.

Cvent’s Web Survey application is uniquely suited to reinforce a connection between employee and employer through employee surveys. Using our advanced survey question logic in combination with the ability to create custom contact fields, survey creators can ensure their employees only see questions that pertain to their specific job responsibilities.  For example, your finance department won’t see a question asking them, “How satisfied are you with the leads generated from marketing?” because that does not’t apply to their daily responsibilities. The robust capabilities of our online survey technology ensures your efforts to improve employee loyalty and engagement don’t backfire and end up alienating your employees!

Survey reports in the Cvent Web Surveys software tool offer a wide variety of ways to view your data and begin conducting your market research survey analysis. The answer summary by question report, for example, pulls up a table, a graph and basic statistical analysis for each survey question. Another example survey report, answer details by respondent, offers you the option of seeing each respondent’s answers on a separate page or answer details for all respondents gives you the opportunity to see all the answers for all respondents on a single page!

But sometimes these are not enough when you want to make a professional report for your boss to present to the board members. This is exactly why Cvent has the presentations feature within the survey application. The presentations section allows you to create reports with unique combinations of filters and display options. You can use our presentations creator to access data views that are unavailable with other out-of-the-box survey reports. Creating distributable reports in the Cvent Web Surveys software tool makes it easy to communicate the survey results in either Word or PDF format.

To determine what you see on each page of your sample report, choose from the options below:

Does it matter if not everyone takes your survey? What if only half your survey sample actually completes the survey questionnaire - or a third? You're never going to get everyone you invite to complete your survey. Those people conducting employee surveys, such as employee opinion surveys or workplace surveys will see the highest response rates on their survey projects. Some HR surveys see response rates as high as 90%. But if you're conducting a consumer survey, help desk satisfaction survey or customer feedback survey 90% response rates may be out of your reach.

The question remains, if I'm never going to get everyone, do those who didn't voluntarily complete your survey matter? Absolutely. Like with most things related to market research, there has been a lot of research to uncover the truth: are survey respondents different from non-respondents? It seems that research points to yes. Even early responders and late responders different, and this is probably due to interest in the survey.

There are a few things you can do to boost your response rates and limit your nonresponse bias.

1. Send email invitation reminders and partial response reminders to those on your email list. Two things happen when you do this, the first, you catch people who never even read your first email. The second benefit is you remind people who were willing to complete your survey but forgot about it.

2. Make sure there aren't any errors in your survey design. Double check your survey question logic, your question and answer choices, your graphical survey template, even your introduction on the survey welcome page.

3. Keep it short. This is a general survey best practice tip you should always follow. While there's not much you can do after you have already sent out email survey invitations and begun the data collection process, you should remember to keep your surveys short and limit the number of survey questions during the survey design phase.

It's important to keep non-response bias in mind when you're analyzing survey data and drawing conclusions from your market research results. Are your respondents different from your non-respondents? Perhaps only heavy users completed the survey, or only people with full time jobs, or only single individuals. Do those who opted not to complete your survey have a different opinion? These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself when evaluating your survey data. In some cases, it may not matter, in others it could cause you to make a decision based on skewed results.

When it comes to losing weight or saving more money, one of the most daunting aspects is simply wrapping your head around where to start. With hundreds of books and celebrity “experts,” it’s easy to feel overwhelmed before you even begin.

Administering, writing and creating survey questionnaires is no different. Ask questions, send them out and let everybody respond? Sounds easy, right? Not always. What survey questions do you ask? How do you know what’s important to ask versus what’s going to produce a meaningless data point?

Just as people turn to financial advisers and personal trainers, Cvent's Web Survey software tool offers more than 170 expertly crafted survey questions and survey templates to help you overcome the inertia associated with getting the ball rolling on your next survey research projects. Our question library helps users create customer service satisfaction survey forms, write employee questionnaires or staff attitude surveys, design marketing survey templates, and more.

From this extensive library of questions, we have created 20 fully built survey templates including customer satisfaction survey templates, training evaluation samples and employee exit survey templates.

Although Cvent won’t take those first steps on the treadmill for you or stash those first few dollars in your proverbial piggy bank, we are able to leverage our extensive experience to help you initiate your first survey project with pre-built survey templates.

In Cvent's survey application, survey account administrators can create different user roles with different permissions, controlling what particular people can view and access in the account. Administrators can add, view, edit and delete users, user groups and user roles. This feature is particularly helpful, if you have multiple surveys running at the same time with different people in charge of the creating and writing the surveys. For example, the administrator may want to restrict people in the marketing department from accessing HR surveys to maintain employee privacy or perhaps marketing finance shouldn't be able to see marketing surveys.

Users: Users are the individuals using the Cvent Web Surveys tool. A user can have only one user role and be a member of none or multiple user groups. The users are going to be the survey creators, designers and writers.

User Groups: User groups are used to set visibility for users. Based on their user group, users will be able to see different information within the survey software. You have several options to choose when setting up user groups:


User Role: In user roles, administrators can add, view, edit, copy and delete user roles from an account. Each type of permission may have a variety of specific permissions. For example, there are permissions to be able to edit a survey or launch a survey. The reason this is important is it helps ensure workflow. If the survey writer isn't allowed to launch the survey because only the department head has the power, by setting user roles you ensure those organization rules are enforced. Specific permissions may have no access, full access or read only access.

Sometimes a goal of employee feedback programs are to improve employee performance. Following the simple survey questionnaire tips and best practices we've shared before will help you collect the data you need to make tweaks to processes - or invent new programs - to improve employee satisfaction and productivity.

What are some of these human resource survey best practice tips?

• Collect anonymous survey responses. Make sure you select an online data collection tool with the option to collect contact information or collect anonymous surveys.

• Don't ask too many personal questions. If you're conducting an anonymous employee feedback forms, employees shouldn't feel like their responses could be tracked back to them. Asking what department they're in is one thing, but asking what department, what age group they fall into and their gender may be pushing it too far - besides, do you really need any demographic information?

• Ask questions about a third party. Asking questions in the third person can sometimes make the employee completing the web survey feel less threatened. Do your co-workers You may feel like your questions are fair and unbiased, but employees may think you have a hidden motive.

• Do something with the survey results. The importance of employee surveys is unmistakable, but if you're not going to act on the results the whole surveying exercise will be in vain. More importantly, if you don't close the feedback loop, employees won't take your next survey project seriously. When you do take action as a result of the survey report, let them know changes were made because of employee's feedback!

Is your employee survey software getting the job done? Having a survey program in place to collect employee feedback and measure employee satisfaction should be a no brainer for human resource departments. Unfortunately, a lot of departments haven't put a program in place yet, or worse, have never conducted an employee job satisfaction survey project.

You may be thinking to yourself, Why do we need to measure employee satisfaction? Our employees are generally happy. My response is, How do you know? I mean really, how can you know if your employees are actually satisfied and happy if you've never conducted a survey to ask them? No one is going to come to your office and tell you they hate working at your organization. Some HR professionals think they can measure employee satisfaction based on employee retention rates. Looking at employee retention rates isn't necessarily the best way to judge how happy your employees are. Employees who don't have high job satisfaction may stay at an organization because they're satisfied with something else, such as the work environment. Or in today's current economic environment, even the most dissatisfied employees will be reluctant to leave an organization because they think the job market looks bleak.

As you can imagine, there are many factors contributing to worker and staff satisfaction such as:


In past posts, I've recommended collecting survey responses using anonymous online employee survey questionnaires generated by an employee survey tool. By periodically conducting surveys organizations can measure employee satisfaction with management, the mission and vision, teamwork and corporate communication.

Don't forget if you use survey creation software to create employee satisfaction surveys, you should also create surveys to conduct exit interviews. After all, most of the time a satisfied employee is not going to leave an organization.