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10 Key Benefits Of Employee Engagement Surveys

Employee surveys help bridge the gap between an organization and its workers. We’ll share the key benefits of employee engagement surveys for accelerating strategic goals in your workplace.

Employees are the driving force behind your organization’s growth and innovation, so keeping them happy and motivated is essential. That means allowing them to voice their opinions and contribute meaningfully to their work.

Employee surveys are a powerful tool for collecting feedback, gauging employee sentiment over time, and making employees feel valued. By regularly engaging with your workforce through surveys, you can create a positive work environment that boosts productivity and satisfaction.

In this article, we’ll explore the different types of employee surveys, learn why employee surveys are important, and uncover the top ten benefits they bring to your organization.

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What Is the Purpose of Employee Surveys?

Employee surveys gather feedback from your workforce to identify areas for improvement and uncover successes. They can serve multiple purposes, including:

  • Understanding employee sentiment regarding their roles and the organization.
  • Identifying issues within an organization.
  • Enhancing communication between employees and management.
  • Developing initiatives that boost engagement and productivity based on employee observations.
  • Tracking results and changes in sentiment over time as ongoing initiatives progress.
  • Building employee trust by showing employees their feedback is valued.

In essence, the purpose of employee surveys is to help organizations better understand their workforce, address issues, and continuously improve the work environment, leading to a more engaged and satisfied team.

Learn how easy it is to drop surveys into emails using ContactMonkey’s employee engagement software features.

What Are the Types of Employee Surveys?

There are many different reasons to survey employees and just as many tools and forms that those surveys might take. Let’s take a look at some of the common types of employee surveys:

  • Employee engagement surveys seek to measure how invested employees are in their work and the organization as a whole. These can take the form of anything from long-form surveys to quick employee net promoter score (eNPS) surveys.
  • Employee satisfaction surveys aim to assess how content employees are with various aspects of their jobs, including work conditions, compensation, benefits, and work-life balance. These surveys help identify areas that need improvement to boost overall job satisfaction.
  • Employee performance surveys evaluate how well employees are performing their duties. These surveys often include self-assessments, peer reviews, and manager evaluations to provide a comprehensive view of an employee’s performance and areas for development.
  • Employee onboarding surveys collect feedback from new hires about their initial experiences with the organization. These surveys help organizations understand the effectiveness of their onboarding process and identify potential ways to improve it.
  • Employee wellness surveys assess employees’ physical and mental well-being. They can cover topics such as stress levels, work-life balance, access to wellness resources, and overall health. The goal is to identify factors that may impact employee health and take steps to support their well-being.

Why Are Employee Surveys Important?

While employee surveys are not the be-all and end-all of internal communication, they play a crucial role in any effective communication strategy! That’s because surveys provide a direct line for the workforce to communicate with management while helping employees feel safe to share opinions.

Employees often have concerns about speaking their minds directly to their employers, believing it to be fruitless or even detrimental to their career advancement. This is especially true when pointing out existing organizational issues.

The anonymity and collective nature of surveys allow employees to be candid and offer honest feedback without fear of repercussions. When multiple employees highlight the same issues, these concerns carry more weight, compelling management to take action.

By incorporating employee surveys into your communication plans, you let employees feel heard. When you listen to the feedback you receive and make concrete changes, you can build real, lasting trust within your organization.

Top 10 Benefits Of Employee Surveys

Employee surveys are powerful tools that provide valuable insights into your workforce. By regularly gathering feedback, you can get the information you need to create a more positive work environment, address issues proactively, and boost overall productivity. Here are the top ten benefits of surveying employees:

1. Understand and connect with your employees

According to the 2024 Global State of Internal Communications survey report, 64% of internal communicators considered employee engagement to be their top area of focus in 2024.

To drive employee engagement or improve any employee satisfaction metrics, you need to understand your starting point. This is why the best employee surveys provide insight into engagement, satisfaction, and employee attitudes within an organization.

Surveys can reveal whether employees feel connected to the company’s mission, whether they are satisfied with their roles, and how they perceive management. These factors combine to form a more complete picture of how employees view their workplace and their own role inside it

2. Help employees feel heard and valued

Employees want to feel listened to and to be taken seriously by leadership. In fact, feeling heard is often a fundamental aspect of job satisfaction and overall workplace happiness.

Asking employees to voice their opinions using surveys is a powerful way to send the message that company leaders value what they have to say.

And the full impact of employee surveys goes beyond just giving employees a platform. The real benefits of surveying employees come when employers actively listen to the feedback and take meaningful action on the issues or needs that employees identify. When workers see their suggestions lead to tangible changes, it reinforces that their contributions are valued. This practice not only instills trust but also boosts morale as employees feel that their voices can drive positive change within the company.

3. Get honest employee feedback

Employees may not always feel comfortable sharing their opinions directly with managers or in open meetings due to fear of reprisal or simply not wanting to rock the boat. Surveys provide a safe and anonymous outlet for employees to voice their thoughts and concerns, leading to a truer understanding of your workplace environment.

Without unfiltered feedback, management might only hear from a vocal minority of employees or receive overly positive feedback that in no way represents general sentiment. The purpose of employee surveys is to reveal large issues like systemic problems and unaddressed grievances, as well as smaller concerns like areas where employees feel unsupported or undervalued. Plus, candid feedback does not have to mean negative feedback. Surveys can highlight positive aspects of the workplace that might otherwise go unnoticed, helping management reinforce these strengths and build upon them!

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4. Identify and fix issues in a timely manner

Judicious use of employee surveys helps you pinpoint specific issues and problem areas, whether within an organization, on a team, or even with a specific project or initiative. Identifying problems like dissatisfaction with management practices, lack of resources, or communication breakdowns is the first step toward addressing and resolving them effectively.

Survey data can also help you identify which improvements will make the most immediate and dramatic positive changes! That way, you know where to put your resources to the best use, how to get more bang for your buck, and the best way to drive meaningful improvements.

5. Better manage organizational changes

Change management pulse surveys can play a pivotal role in giving employees a voice during times of transition, ensuring changes aren’t imposed top-down but shaped by the collective input of the people who will be most affected.

The purpose of employee surveys in this context is to provide a structured way to ask employees feedback questions on proposed or ongoing changes. This feedback can be invaluable for identifying unanticipated challenges or areas of resistance and proactively addressing them. And employees who see their feedback taken into account feel a greater sense of ownership over organizational changes!

In essence, leveraging surveys for change management helps create a more resilient and adaptable organization, increases the chances that changes will be well-received by a workforce, and facilitates smoother transitions to new tools, offices, teams, policies, and more.

6. Anticipate and prevent employee turnover

High turnover is disruptive and costly to an organization. And when teams or companies begin to lose key employees, others may soon follow.

Employee surveys can highlight factors contributing to turnover intentions, allowing you to take proactive measures to retain top talent. By addressing concerns early, you might just be able to prevent the exodus. And even if you can’t, addressing the factors that led to employee turnover in the past will help you prevent continued employee churn in the future!

7. Set benchmarks for internal comms

Employee survey results provide valuable quantitative metrics, such as eNPS scores, that serve as benchmarks for your internal communication initiatives. These metrics not only highlight areas needing improvement but also provide a baseline from which to set realistic goals. By leveraging numbers from your employee surveys, you can establish clear, measurable objectives to track progress over time. As you continue to survey and track the results against your benchmarks, you can gauge the effectiveness of your strategies and adjust them as needed to achieve desired outcomes.

8. Measure progress over time

Identifying problem areas and setting goals for improvement within your organization aren’t the only benefits of employee surveys. To ensure your efforts are effective, continuous surveying through pulse surveys is another important piece of the puzzle. These shorter, more frequent surveys allow you to track the impact of your initiatives over time. They help you validate whether the changes you’ve implemented are producing the desired results or if adjustments are needed.

By regularly measuring progress, you avoid investing resources into strategies that aren’t yielding the expected outcomes. This iterative approach also enables you to demonstrate success to senior management, showcasing the return on investment (ROI) of your efforts.

Moreover, continuous surveying helps you stay agile and responsive to evolving circumstances! If your strategy works in the beginning but gets less effective as circumstances change, you can respond accordingly, adjusting or even discarding strategies that aren’t working before you sink too much time and too many resources into them.

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9. Improve business outcomes

Employee engagement survey results help you understand how you can change your organization to ensure an engaged, motivated workforce. Having motivated employees will contribute directly to your organizational goals. That’s because increased productivity, innovation, and commitment to work are all benefits of employee engagement!Not to mention, employee surveys are a great way to get feedback on business processes. Your employees can identify inefficiencies within the organization, suggest ways to boost productivity, and refine processes to be more effective. They can even propose new projects and products.

10. Compare feedback across departments and teams

Not all the factors that affect employee engagement and satisfaction are at the organizational level. Differences in pay, workload, management, and team cohesion can all contribute to two different employees in the same organization having vastly different experiences.

With surveys, you can compare feedback across different departments and teams to find areas of strength and weakness. Understanding how different teams differ allows for targeted interventions where they’re necessary and, ultimately, promotes an organizational culture that supports every employee.

Learn how to interpret and act on your employee survey results.

Further reading: Discover all the best ideas for employee engagement that you can try at your company.

Are Employee Surveys Effective?

The effectiveness of an employee survey will always depend on what you’re trying to learn and what you do with the information you collect.

Sure, you can send out a pulse or long-form survey and get thoughtful, thorough feedback from employees. But if you take that information and file it away without doing anything with it, how “effective” was your survey really?

When you send out an employee survey, have a clear idea of why you’re doing so. Be prepared for the possibility that you won’t get the answers you were hoping for. Whether the feedback is positive or negative, sharing the results with complete transparency and following through with actionable steps will be the real measure of the survey’s success.

How ContactMonkey Can Help With Employee Surveys

ContactMonkey is a great option for organizations looking to incorporate regular pulse surveys into their employee feedback strategy.With ContactMonkey, you can add a pulse survey to any internal employee emails or newsletters you send. Build newsletters in the simple drag-and-drop email builder and drop a survey block anywhere you like. Then, choose from multiple survey types, such as yes/no to star ratings, emoji reactions, eNPS surveys, and more.

ContactMonkey's Email Template Builder survey options

Want more in-depth answers? Allow employee comments alongside survey responses. Employees who answer your pulse survey will be prompted with a text box to provide additional thoughts and information to go with their responses. Comments are kept completely anonymous to ensure that employees feel comfortable sharing their true thoughts.

Survey responses and comments will show up in real time in your ContactMonkey analytics dashboard. ContactMonkey will even calculate your eNPS scores for you.

Want to see how ContactMonkey can help you collect and track employee feedback? Book a quick demo to learn more!Or, check out this helpful guide on how to get valuable information from employee feedback surveys.

Revitalize Your Workforce with Feedback Collected Using Employee Surveys

Employee surveys are vital for an organization aiming to create a positive and productive work environment. By seeking and acting on employee feedback, leaders not only improve communication and morale among employees but also drive company-wide innovation and growth.

From easily dropping pulse surveys into any email or newsletter to tracking survey results, ContactMonkey helps you make the employee survey process seamless. ContactMonkey’s email builder makes it easy to get the answers to your pressing questions by simply dropping a pulse survey into any email. Easy as pie.

Plus, robust tracking options help you understand not just what your employees are saying but how they interact with your survey emails themselves. If your surveys underperform, you still collect helpful data to help you figure out why and adjust your survey strategy accordingly. You’re never left without helpful data!

Use ContactMonkey’s employee survey features to ensure your employees feel heard and valued. Book a free demo and learn more about the transformative impact ContactMonkey can have on your employee engagement strategy.

Revive employee engagement with targeted, interactive emails and newsletters

Book a 15 minute call with one of our team members