5 Benefits of Employee Surveys

Why is a survey a useful way to collect feedback from employees? It’s a simple question, but one that provides rich answers in understanding how to drive positive outcomes for your organisation.

I was recently asked to present to a group of General Managers about the key benefits of running an employee survey. There are many benefits, but below I have outlined five key points that I shared with the managers to show how surveys help uncover actionable insights that can drive real change.  These benefits also apply not only to employee engagement surveys but also to other special purpose surveys such as onboarding and exit surveys, 360s, equity and inclusion surveys, wellbeing surveys, etc. 

Understanding the ‘why’ of an employee survey is not only useful for leaders considering starting a survey, but also for empowering you as a manager when you receive your survey results.  Appreciating the value of the report in front of you can help you to use the feedback effectively and to act with confidence on the results.

1. 5% higher engagement is worth 10% of payroll

Improving employee engagement is one of the goals for most employee surveys, whether they be ‘engagement’ surveys or more special purpose surveys. Voice Project’s data has shown a clear dollar consequence of improving engagement, a finding also demonstrated by other researchers (see Employee Engagement ROI). To give an example, for an organisation with 1000 staff and payroll costs of $100 million, having 5% higher employee engagement is associated with around $10 million in value through lower employee turnover, higher productivity, lower health and safety claims and costs, higher customer satisfaction and higher innovation.

Causality is working both ways here – higher engagement drives organisational performance, and higher organisational performance helps lift employee engagement, so it becomes a virtuous cycle. Of course, numbers never play out perfectly in real life - so the impact will be greater or smaller across different organisations. Yet this finding is a robust one. The main message here is that there is a clear link between employee engagement and many other desired outcomes including a significant impact on the bottom line.

2. Involvement and follow-up increase engagement

Leaders often see surveys as a way of gathering ‘people metrics’ which are then used to plan and track actions. Yet a well-run employee survey is a positive act in itself, with its own benefits. The survey itself becomes an important consultation and communication channel with considerable value in addition to the metrics captured.

Staff like being involved. If they feel safe providing feedback and see that their feedback is taken seriously, they will feel more engaged. Conversely, when a survey is run that staff don’t trust is sincere, where they don’t feel safe providing feedback, and which doesn’t produce any actions or change, engagement will suffer. So, remember surveys are not only a means to an end. The process itself has an important impact on engagement.

3. Breadth and confidentiality increase the value of feedback

Surveys enable you to collect and aggregate feedback from a wide range of staff, increasing the value of the feedback. If you limit the breadth of who you ask for feedback, you’ll often end up giving the most attention to the most noisy or outraged staff. But this group often doesn’t represent the majority of staff. Yes, you may still hear some outrage and trolling in surveys, but you’ll also hear from a much wider and more representative cross-section of people.

Of course, people will only provide feedback if they feel safe. Surveys provide a more confidential channel for feedback than face-to-face questioning. So take care with how you run your survey to maximise confidentiality – allow staff to choose to not take part if they don’t want to, don’t force them to provide answers, minimise use of identifiers, set a minimum group size for reporting, and don’t try to track down who said what after the survey.

4. Benchmark workplace outcomes and practices

Surveys help you measure parts of your workplace that otherwise don’t have metrics, and as the saying goes ‘what gets measured gets managed.’ It’s important to measure outcomes such as engagement, wellbeing and performance. But it’s equally important to measure the work practices that drive the outcomes. Outcomes like engagement can be very useful summary metrics for understanding the health and effectiveness your workforce and workplace, but in themselves are not easily actionable – having high or low engagement doesn’t tell you much about what to do. So you should also ask questions about aspects of your workplace such as safety, training, communications, confidence in leadership, resources, technology, etc to pinpoint areas for change.

Once you measure the outcomes and practices, you can then analyse which practices have the biggest impacts. You can compare scores across different parts of your organisation and you can benchmark against other organisations. One of the most valuable comparisons is across time, when you repeat the survey at a later date to see how well you have improved.

5. Gather frontline intelligence that managers miss

Your staff are closer to your customers than leaders are, closer to your products and services, closer to your facilities, your processes. They have experiences and insights that leaders don’t. Surveys are a great way of gathering that information and aggregating it in a digestible way for leaders.

Leaders sometimes see employee surveys simply as a channel for employees’ voicing their grievances. You will of course hear some grievances, but you’ll also hear a lot about how processes and products can be improved, how customer service can be enhanced, how costly bureaucracy can be refined. Your employees want your organisation to thrive, and surveys are an opportunity for them to give their thoughts on how to drive positive change.