Employee Experience Surveys: Dos and Don’ts
Employee experience (EX) surveys are all about collecting honest, thoughtful feedback from staff. They measure employee satisfaction and motivation, and inform a company of whether its values and mission align with employees' perceptions.
Companies can use insights gained through feedback to better understand their workforce and improve the employee experience.
Best Practices for EX Surveys
Employee experience surveys, when done right, offer a lot of value to companies. They can inform decisions and goals regarding employees and improve overall satisfaction.
Employee survey questions might include:
- Do you feel your company values your role?
- What’s one thing that could make your job easier?
- Do you understand the company’s structures and processes well?
- What two words would you use to describe employee experience at the company?
- If you were to leave your company today, would you recommend it to friends?
If looking to deploy employee experience surveys at your company, here are four best practices to follow.
1. Talk About the Survey’s Purpose
Don’t send out employee experience surveys without any communication beforehand. Instead, talk to staff about what the survey will look like, why it’s important and how the company will use responses, said John Anyetei, people operations at Move.
“Letting them know that they have an opportunity to influence their experience is super valuable and can increase survey adoption rates,” he said.
This pre-survey communication is also an excellent time to ask employees if they have questions or potential concerns. You can address what the process will look like and what leadership expects of staff.
2. Keep Employee Answers Anonymous
Picture this: Your manager walks up to you and asks if you like your job — but you don’t. Would you answer honestly?
Probably not. You might fear retaliation by getting passed up for promotions, getting the cold shoulder from your boss or maybe even termination. You don’t know what the consequences of honesty will be.
The same uncertainty is true of surveys. Most people don’t want to say something negative about their company with their name attached. In fact, nearly 75% of employees are more inclined to share feedback about their company, culture and workload if it’s truly anonymous, according to research from AllVoices.
To solve this, Anyetei recommends not only anonymizing survey responses but also ensuring staff is aware of that you're doing it. Clue them in on the survey channel they’ll use and how answers remain uncredited.
3. Celebrate Company Successes
Not every person will be keen on their employee experience, and those criticisms will be priceless when it comes to making improvements going forward. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the wins, though.
Mikaela Kiner, founder and CEO of Reverb and a 15-year HR veteran at companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks, said it’s important to celebrate successes.
“Too many people gravitate to the low scores,” she said. “Be proud of your positive results; you've earned them. Recognize where the company and particular leaders are doing well and reinforce the behaviors that got them there."
4. Communicate the Survey Results
Everyone’s completed the EX survey. Now, it’s time to share the results.
Kiner said it’s important to activate leaders, including the CEO, to “share results, take ownership and communicate with their teams” in a timely, transparent and comprehensive way.
Talk to employees about the outcomes of the survey and the actions management will take next. This step will likely include creating an action and communication plan spanning the next year.
Kiner also recommends creating a dashboard of survey actions and outcomes that employees can access independently.
Related Article: Best Practices for Employee Surveys
Worst Practices for EX Surveys
It’s not enough to brainstorm a handful of questions and push out an employee experience survey on the fly. Taking the wrong steps could lead to employee feedback that provides little value and wastes time.
Here are some worst practices to avoid when it comes to employee experience surveys.
1. Asking Too Many Questions
If you ask too many questions, you won’t be able to zero in on actionable employee insights. Instead, Anyetei said to understand the areas most important to your organization and focus on those.
He recommends using a mixture of closed and open-ended questions coupled with an employee net promoter score (eNPS), which looks at employee experience on a numerical scale.
Learning Opportunities
Kiner added that businesses should “use survey questions either by purchasing a tool or getting an expert to review your questions.” This tactic ensures you’re asking the right questions to gain the insights you need, and it helps you avoid bias.
2. Deploying Surveys Too Often
If you ask employees to take surveys too frequently, you’ll likely get unhelpful or repetitive feedback. “Employees tend to get survey fatigue when asked to record their responses often,” said Anyetei.
He recommends conducting EX surveys once a quarter. “This gives the employees enough time to conceptualize their experience, and gives you, as the employer, time to deploy any interventions based on the feedback.”
Kiner offered a slightly different suggestion, saying her company uses employee experience surveys annually, at the same time each year. “It is predictable and reliable, and we’ve found this to be a sound way to measure engagement and satisfaction, as well as seek feedback on what we can do better.”
Her company also deploys secondary surveys when it needs immediate input on something that affects the team. “For instance,” she said, “were people planning to get the Covid vaccine when it first became available? Who did (and didn't) want to return to the office once that became an option? Would people prefer we invest in one benefit vs. another?”
3. Using Surveys in Isolation
While EX surveys are a great source of insights, companies shouldn’t use survey feedback as their only source of information on how employees are feeling and doing, said Kiner. There should be more data points.
She suggests facilitating focus groups following the survey. “Numbers can only tell you so much, so it's important to involve employees who can explain what was meant by certain responses and what success would look like,” she said.
Other ways to measure EX include:
- Turnover and retention rates
- Number of internal promotions
- Number of applicant referrals from employees
- Rate of employee absenteeism
- Job training assessment scores
- One-on-one interviews
4. Not Acting on Survey Feedback
The worst thing a company can do is deploy employee experience surveys and not take action on the feedback. Inaction will tell employees that their insights are not valuable or worth consideration — and surveys aren’t worth taking the time to answer thoughtfully.
In fact, in the AllVoices survey, 37% of employees said they’d left a job because they felt feedback wasn’t taken seriously.
Kiner said companies also shouldn't focus entirely on low scores when it comes to next-step planning. “Maybe there’s a score that’s not bad, but you want to get it closer to 100%,” she said.
Once you’ve finalized your goals — after employees weigh in at post-survey focus groups — build your action plans into quarterly business reviews and senior leadership meetings, Kiner said. “This is one way to ensure continued progress and visibility.”
She also recommends providing incentives and recognition to the staff members who address survey outcomes.
Related Article: Employee Journey Mapping: How to Get Started
Using Honest Feedback to Improve EX
Who do you turn to when you want to learn about the customer experience? The customers. It should be no different with employees.
If you want to learn about and improve the employee experience, your first checkpoint should be with staff. You need their honest feedback to gain a full 360-degree view of their experiences, feelings and perceptions and make positive changes. The only way to get that honest feedback is to ensure you’re using employee experience surveys the right way.
About the Author
Michelle Hawley is an experienced journalist who specializes in reporting on the impact of technology on society. As a senior editor at Simpler Media Group and a reporter for CMSWire and Reworked, she provides in-depth coverage of a range of important topics including employee experience, leadership, customer experience, marketing and more. With an MFA in creative writing and background in inbound marketing, she offers unique insights on the topics of leadership, customer experience, marketing and employee experience. Michelle previously contributed to publications like The Press Enterprise and The Ladders. She currently resides in Pennsylvania with her two dogs.
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