How to Conduct an Employee Satisfaction Survey

Steps to a better employee satisfaction survey

Employee satisfaction surveys help you understand employee ideas, opinions and concerns – while there’s still time to act. Use this page to learn more about how to create, deploy and analyze employee satisfaction surveys. Then, sign up for Zoomerang to distribute surveys easily to all employees and gather fast, actionable feedback.

When to Distribute Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Gathering feedback at appropriate times allows you to monitor your most important resource before it’s too late. If a company does not provide employees the opportunity to communicate their feedback, it will be overlooking potential trouble spots in its business. Feedback should be gathered after a specific event (e.g. orientation) to monitor your processes as well as at specific intervals to gather useful satisfaction data.

The employee interaction drives the timing of event-based surveys; the data should be collected immediately after the interaction while the experience is still fresh in the employee’s mind. For employee satisfaction surveys, surveys should be spread out over the course of a year rather than conducting them once per year. If there is only one data point for each year, a single recent event could have a large impact on results, impacting business decisions.

Consider gathering feedback:

• Before an employee joins to improve your recruitment process
• After employee orientation to improve your process of bringing employees on board
• Quarterly for company satisfaction surveys
• Semi-annually for performance reviews
• After an employee exits to improve retention

Zoomerang’s 5 Employee Satisfaction Survey Tips

A quick way to get started and ensure a successful survey design is to use Zoomerang’s Employee Satisfaction Survey templates and example employee satisfaction questions. However, if you plan to build your own survey, follow the tips below.

1. Keep Surveys Confidential: When employee responses are anonymous it increases the employee participation rate as well as the quality of the feedback. To do this in Zoomerang, generate a hyperlink to include on an employee intranet or corporate email. Do not deploy through Zoomerang.
2. Use a 5-point Satisfaction or Agreement Scale: Question scales should have descriptive labels associated with the numbers, and the top end of the scale should mean that employees truly agree or are satisfied. If the ends of the scale are simply “satisfied” and “dissatisfied,” it will not provide a sense of the intensity of employees’ happiness with their supervisor or the company.
3. Be Consistent in Your Questions: Question scales should be consistent within a particular questionnaire as well as over time.
4. Keep the Survey Short and Focused: Focus on getting a read on your employees’ relationship with the company. Avoid the temptation to ask everything you’ve ever wanted to know.
5. Use Closed and Open-ended Questions to Gather Actionable Data as well as Anecdotal Feedback: Don’t overuse open-ends - sign up for Zoomerang and ask employee satisfaction survey questions today.