In a competitive world with the need for businesses to be more productive and streamlined an organization can often find itself with a workforce working under pressure suffering from low moral and experiencing a high staff turnover. Organizations that have a highly motivated workforce can benefit enormously and having a workforce that is both productive and motivated should not be regarded as being mutually exclusive to one another.
If problems are left unresolved then companies run the risk of alienating their employees and events can then cause employee frustrations to boil over resulting in managers finding themselves on the back foot, faced with problems that cannot be ignored.
In an ideal world employers would take time to understand the needs of their employees and learn from their experiences of working on the front line, but employers are often themselves tied up day to day fighting their own fires.
Online surveys provide employers with an effective and affordable method by automating the process of collating the information and storing it in a format that allows for real-time analysis supplying the management with the intelligence required to achieve staff satisfaction and high productivity.
Unproductive & dissatisfied
There are many reasons why employees may be dissatisfied with their job and more often than not staff frustration is channelled into a demand for higher salaries and less hours. Managers who tackle these issues head on, making it all about salary and hours, will often find themselves dealing with the symptoms and not the root cause.
It’s not about money
The following are common barriers to achieving productivity, none of which are likely to be resolved by increasing salaries or reducing hours:-
- Inadequate training
- Out of touch management
- Dated working methods
- Lack of proper tools and equipment
Increasing salaries is not always a solution to employees’ problems nor as many studies have revealed is it the most important motivator for most employees.
Take the case of a single mother who is juggling a full time job with the need to look after two children. Out of frustration she may demand more money so that she feels that she is able to cope where a better solution, for both her and the company, may be more flexible working hours.
It is all about communication
It is in any company’s interest to promote good communication. An organization that makes communication between management and personnel difficult, or that takes the view that it is the responsibility for personnel who have a problem to say something, can often deceive themselves into thinking their workforce is content when it is not. It can take only one small problem and one employee to feel aggrieved for an entire workforce to develop a destructive ‘them and us’ attitude.
Improving communication
Ideally management would hold one to one meetings with each employee but in practice this would only seem practical for very small businesses.
Meetings between management and worker representatives are good in theory but can often spiral into becoming talking shops and losing their purpose as both sides become more familiar with one another and the meetings run the risk of being hijacked by the more extreme personalities.
Suggestion boxes can have their value but they can be viewed as token efforts by management as they wait for personnel to highlight a problem.
Newsletters can be a positive step, but their purpose is generally to inform and not discuss issues.
Maintaining the initiative
Conducting employee satisfaction surveys on a regular basis you are able to ask each employee specific questions and present a pro-active management initiative where the whole workforce can be canvassed on various issues. Surveys are able to provide a level playing field between the quieter and more vocal employees.
Consultation should not be seen as a sign of weakness, a confident manager will often take counsel from others before making a decision. By issuing a survey and keeping the initiative the employer is able to tackle problems from a position of strength as opposed to waiting for problems to fester and then develop out of proportion.
If small problems are left unresolved the employees mood can change from positive to negative over night should a minor problem breaks the camel’s back.
Easy and quick
For most organizations online surveys represent a proactive and low cost solution. For the majority of organizations where most of the personnel have desktop computers, online surveys are quick to design and deploy direct to the individual.
Where not all of the personal have access to a computer there are various options available that will allow you to accommodate their responses such as providing a shared computer, conducting telephone surveys or as a last resort, a hardcopy survey where the hard-copy responses can be added to those who competed the survey online.
Job satisfaction
There are a number of elements that combined will provide an employee with job satisfaction, from company ethics, working environment, methodology and ethos to having good and effective management. Job satisfaction brings benefits through improved motivation and productivity from a workforce that feels that they are treated as individuals and not a commodity item.
Inform and educate
Online surveys can be used to educate and disseminate information on to the workforce, ensuring that the ‘message’ is consistently delivered and does not suffer from the Chinese whisper phenomenon where a message can become distorted as it is passed on.
An online survey can explain to the employees a difficult situation and get valuable feedback as to the best solution. It is rare in this situation that the workforce would appear negative; it is more likely they will feel informed and empowered and that might be enough to turn a potentially negative problem into a positive challenge that unites the workforce.
Exit surveys
Exit surveys represent are a good way of making sure that when people leave an organisation they are leaving for the right reasons and not due to reasons that if appreciated earlier could have been addressed and resolved by management. If a problem has been identified it may be too late to prevent an individual from leaving but if addressed it could prevent other key personnel leaving for the same reasons.
For a Sample Employee Satisfaction Survey:- Employee Satisfaction Survey Template
For a sample Employee Exit survey:- Employee Exit Survey Template