Learning What Your People Think

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Using Employee Satisfaction Surveys

To get the greatest benefit from employee satisfaction surveys, recognize that you should not do these just one time or once every few years. When the environment changes, people's attitudes also change. Most organizations are motivated to conduct their first survey after a significant change or when they discover a problem with morale or staff retention. But the key to long-term success with these surveys is to follow-up and to monitor satisfaction routinely.

Surveys provide a snapshot of how people are feeling at a specific point in time. Day-to-day interactions change the way that people feel, as do the actions you take to improve the situation. To tell whether things have improved, and whether your actions have been effective, you need to repeat the survey, and you need to keep on taking action and resurveying on an ongoing basis to keep on improving people's levels of satisfaction.

And of course, any time you gather information, you actually have to do something with it. This ensures that you don't waste resources, and it shows your workers that their answers are valuable and will actually be used to make something happen. If you conduct a survey and then don't do anything, you'll just annoy people and encourage cynicism.

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_35.htm