What Employee Motivation Surveys Can Tell You...and What to Do About It
Soliciting feedback using job satisfaction and employee motivation surveys can be an effective method for evaluating the effectiveness of your work environment. This article outlines what information you can gather on your surveys and what to do with the feedback your employees provide you.
Most of us have seen them and many have used them – surveys designed to measure employee motivation, surveys to determine employee engagement levels, questionnaires to measure employee job satisfaction. All of these tools can give you insight into how employees are feeling about their jobs and your company’s work environment.
Employee surveys have become a key employee motivation and retention strategy and allow leaders to gauge how employees are responding to all aspects of their organization. The information gathered from these surveys can have immeasurable value for employees, leaders, and customers.
What can an employee motivation survey tell you?
Anything – depending on what you want to know! From job satisfaction to employee motivation, surveys can give you a lot of information and can help you to:
Provide a forum for employees to identify areas of concern
Solicit employee suggestions for improvement
Identify and address barriers to productivity and efficiency
Determine employees’ understanding and perception of Human Resources programs and policies
Pinpoint the perceived value of employee motivation efforts (bonus and incentives, recognition programs, benefits, training, etc.)
Determine areas of communication breakdown
Identify employee and organizational training needs
Predict employee responses to organizational change
Uncover the source of morale and turnover problems
Handling job satisfaction and employee motivation survey results
Be prepared to address the issues and areas of concern that your employees identify when responding to the survey. This doesn’t mean you have to act on every specific thing mentioned, it’s best to acknowledge your appreciation of their feedback and provide them with an overview of next steps.
Next steps should include developing an action plan to deal with issues, trends and suggestions raised by your employees. Once you have completed this plan of action, it is a good idea to share some of these key actions with employees as well. Employees can become disillusioned if they feel that their concerns and suggestions aren’t acted upon. It is likely that there will be some things that you choose not to act upon. If this is the case, you might consider providing an explanation to employees about this as well.
Of course, it all boils down to the quality of your communication. The better the communication in your organization, the better quality input you’ll receive from employees. Having good channels of communication works in your favor when communicating survey results to employees. They are more likely to get behind the action plan when you communicate your approach in terms they understand.
