Discovering what they think

You don’t need to be a highly qualified Human Resources specialist to accept the thought that a key to employee relations is finding out what workers think.

Most managers would like to know what their people ‘really’ think. They would particularly like to have some hard data on where the company stands on each of the critical "4Cs" of employee satisfaction: Commitment, Culture, Communications and Compensation.

This is where employee surveys can be invaluable.

The reality is that the opinions of your employees can impact financial performance by affecting such fundamentals as retention, quality of work, morale, and productivity. Measuring worker attitudes is critical to enhancing overall performance through people.

For those organisations that want to measure employee perceptions but do not want to spend time or money developing their own instrument, there are now numerous off-the-shelf surveys.

Employee surveys can provide useful input at any time, but most HR professionals would especially recommend them in situations such as:

• Rapid growth: When an organisation is growing quickly, new people are coming into the company and new ideas are being introduced. It is a period that can create concerns for some workers. It is critical to find out how employees feel about their jobs and the changes that are taking place.
• High or growing turnover rate. Growing turnover is a problem for any organisation. If your absolute level of turnover exceeds the industry average, you have a problem. An employee survey WILL NOT solve the problem can it can be an invaluable tool for gathering accurate information to work with.
• Planned or recent organisational changes, including change of leadership. Change can be difficult for many people. If not handled properly, productivity and profits can decline.

There are countless things that employees can be surveyed about in most workplaces but some of the more important would normally include:

Benefits
Are employees satisfied with their benefit package and how does it compare overall with the packages offered by other companies?

Communication
Are employees comfortable about expressing their ideas to supervisors and other leaders in the company and do they feel that leaders adequately communicate pertinent information to them?

Customer and Quality Orientation
Do employees believe that they, their co-workers and their leaders, work to satisfy customers and provide quality products and services?

Empowerment
Do employees have the feeling that they can make decisions that affect their work, do they have personal autonomy and do they feel that the company hierarchy takes their ideas seriously?

For large organisations especially, there are some obvious benefits from doing employee surveys online. Where employees are scattered across the country or throughout the globe, online has obvious benefits for conducting any feedback process.

With an online system, data is collected by a third-party, and therefore the level of confidentiality is enhanced in that fewer internal employees have access to view the data. In addition, when you use a web-based tool to collect, store, and analyse data you can avoid the time consuming and potentially inaccurate task of entering data into a spreadsheet for analysis.