Conducting an Effective Job Satisfaction Survey: A Step-by-Step Guide
The evidence points out that respected employees are 63% more satisfied with their jobs. This is one of the reasons every business needs to know how many employees feel valued and satisfied with their jobs and how many are dissatisfied and looking to find a new workplace. In such a case, a job satisfaction survey is a great way to determine the potential growth areas and ways to decrease employee retention.
At this point, let's take a deeper look at the employee satisfaction survey phenomenon, explore the essential benefits employee surveys bring, and see how to conduct an employee satisfaction survey.
As a result, with an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon, it is crucial to consider factors like workplace culture, work-life balance, personal growth, job performance, satisfaction levels, and all the resources coming along with the concept.
What is a job satisfaction survey?
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A job satisfaction survey is a tool entailing a set of questions a management team uses to understand whether an employee is satisfied with their job and how likely they are to grow professionally or look for another job. Besides, with a satisfied employee, you can evaluate your workplace culture and become one of the successful companies keeping employee satisfaction levels high.
In other words, job satisfaction surveys are tightly connected to workplace culture. When done correctly, they lead toward professional growth and career development and ensure employees give a one hundred percent output.
Conducting effective job satisfaction surveys is a challenging task because you should follow specific guidelines to bring forward surveys that correctly evaluate employee attitudes and control employee turnover.
Aspects an employee satisfaction survey covers
In simple terms, employee satisfaction surveys show how satisfied or dissatisfied workers are with their jobs. A good employee satisfaction survey should cover the following:
- Work environment.
- Compensation.
- Work-life balance.
- Workload.
- Team members' relationships.
- Employer-employee relationship.
- Career development.
- Career growth.
- Job security.
- Company's culture.
Measuring job satisfaction survey grants many benefits, which will help your HR professionals take organizational performance to another level. Let’s take a look at several key advantages the phenomenon grants.
The 8 benefits of conducting an employee satisfaction survey
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With various survey trends, you can always find out how to get certain benefits. For example, with an employee satisfaction survey, there are these 8 particular upsides to obtain:
- Higher productivity levels
- Lower employee retention
- Training needs discovery
- Fewer confrontations
- Unbiased feedback
- Different from the performance review perspective
- More engaged staff
- Area of improvement
1. Higher productivity levels
The first benefit of an employee satisfaction survey is improving productivity levels by understanding them better. In short, employees who are highly dissatisfied with their job or dissatisfied with the given task will perform poorly.
Yet, with the right employee engagement survey questions and job satisfaction inquiries, you can correctly identify why an employee is unsatisfied with a task or a job and deal with that effectively. If an HR professional or management takes action in time, it will boost employee satisfaction and increase productivity.
2. Lower employee retention
Keeping talent is challenging. In turn, losing talent is costly. Companies focus on employee retention because it costs less to keep a talented employee in the ranks than go through the hiring and onboarding process. In such a case, it is worth conducting a job satisfaction survey to determine how to reduce employee retention.
Asking the right questions is a direct way to help employees express how they feel about the team, company, and workplace culture. Besides, it is a great way to determine whether a firm is moving in the right direction and has the right balance to decrease employee retention.
As a result, with this benefit, you invest time and effort to get a long-term advantage of keeping talent at your company.
3. Training needs discovery
Getting top-notch productivity and the best results depends on how invested employees are in their work and how experienced they are. At this point, an employee satisfaction survey is an excellent way to understand whether employees need to reskill, upskill, or gain new skills.
Besides, a lack of training within an organization will lead to lower satisfaction. Keeping that in mind, use surveys correctly and find out what particular skills are needed and how to provide this training. Besides, with more effective training, employees get better career goals and can get higher-level jobs faster.
4. Fewer confrontations
There is not a single company that does not need some form of a performance review. Most businesses use one-on-ones. However, employees often must be more truthful during face-to-face interaction and answer in-depth questions.
However, with a job satisfaction survey, a management team and employees get total anonymity. It means people give more truthful and objective responses. Besides, with anonymous surveys, there is no foundation for confrontation. As a result, with the anonymity factor offered by an employee satisfaction survey, you get more objective information and avoid any potential confrontation.
5. Unbiased feedback
An employee satisfaction survey is a chance to get truthful answers. Besides, it's an excellent opportunity to avoid prejudices and biases in feedback. In such a context, with an anonymous survey, management won't know who provided a negative evaluation of a company or company culture. It means no bias in future feedback.
Honesty is among the critical factors in any performance review or survey. Any prejudicial response, question, or feedback means you won't receive the viable information that can help reap the benefits. With employee satisfaction survey questions offered in anonymity, you get the most honest and unbiased insights that can be translated into tangible advantages.
6. Chance to improve work culture
There is a massive issue with performance reviews. In most cases, employees want to get more compensation and rewards. In such a case, they won't say things that can thwart their positions or put a wrong impression on the part of management.
In turn, with an employee satisfaction survey, you get more actionable commentaries and feedback on the job and workplace culture. With job performance reviews, there is no direct financial gain to a person. That is why they are more willing to care about general working conditions and are prone to tell things that will help improve the work culture.
7. More engaged staff
With the right employee satisfaction survey questions, you can get a perspective on key factors driving the company's culture and employee satisfaction. Knowing these factors grants an opportunity to implement procedures and policies that will help employees be more engaged in the long run. As a result, a more engaged staff is more likely to participate in making the company better. People can speak their minds and point out particular issues and challenges a business needs to resolve.
8. Areas of improvement
Last but not least, a job satisfaction survey gives the advantage of establishing areas for improvement. In addition, the method grants a perspective from within and allows a vast amount of valuable information and insights.
When analyzing this information, employers can evaluate potential areas for improvement to build the foundation for a better employee experience. In general, research conducted promptly is a great way to detect whether wellness programs or regular meetings are needed to improve employee job satisfaction.
Putting all the aspects together, an employee satisfaction survey brings some notable benefits. With correct employee satisfaction survey questions, you can boost employee performance, get honest feedback on workplace culture, detect training realms, and discover areas of improvement.
When and how to conduct employee satisfaction surveys
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At this point, a properly handled job satisfaction survey grants definite benefits. However, to know how to tap into these advantages, it is crucial to understand when and how to conduct employee satisfaction surveys. Knowing these details is a direct way to get the most out of the instrument.
In other words, if you choose the right time and know how to conduct the job satisfaction survey, there is a higher chance an employee under review won’t be caught off-guard and will provide answers you can later turn into actionable insights.
When to conduct a job satisfaction survey
A job satisfaction survey cannot be advantageous in any given situation. It means you must know when to use the tool to get the most effective results. Use an employee satisfaction survey when you need to:
- measure employee satisfaction levels
- assess employee engagement
- examine the workplace culture
- understand the reasons behind high employee retention
- have a holistic perspective on the workflow within an organization
If at least one of the reasons above applies to your case, there is a high chance you need to conduct a job satisfaction survey.
How to conduct a job satisfaction survey
Knowing when to use an employee satisfaction survey is a starting point. The next step is to understand how to do that. In such a case, there are several approaches to survey structure logic design:
- Set an objective. Before you create a survey, you need to understand what you want to accomplish with it. Understand what you will measure.
- Design the questionnaire. After you have your key goal, it is time to design the questions to reflect it. Be consistent with what you will ask during the survey.
- Distribute the survey. After you complete the questionnaire, send it to the employees. Use different communication channels for that to increase the participation rate.
- Analyze the data. When you get the data from the survey, it is time to analyze it. In such a context, the most common approaches are quantitive and qualitative analysis.
- Turn answers into insights. After you analyze responses, you must devise decisions and later actions to improve the organization based on the pre-set objective.
- Follow-up. Once actionable insights are implemented, conduct another survey to see whether the needed change occurred.
With the primary part of conducting the survey done, there are several additional aspects to consider as well:
- Conduct a job satisfaction survey at least once a year. In short, you need to create a copy, attach emails, and send it to all. Repeat this once a year.
- Send short and frequent employee satisfaction surveys to get insights regularly. The contrasting approach is to send short surveys every month. It helps management to avoid overwhelming employees with numerous questions once a year.
- Each job satisfaction survey should entail five key factors: anonymity, easy comprehension, briefness, consistency, and being powered by tech. These aspects ensure employees offer honest answers, receive straightforward questions, provide data you can track, and use innovative tools to help handle vast amounts of information.
Keeping the insights above in mind, it is often best to link several approaches. For example, you send out an annual employee survey and single-question surveys. With such an approach, you will get a comprehensive annual perspective on the quality of workplace culture and an employee survey with regular intervals showing the general satisfaction levels.
The 20 examples of employee satisfaction survey questions
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Here, we present the top 20 questions to use in the survey while dividing them into three categories: the job itself, the work environment, and career development.
The job itself
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This section covers all the potential aspects suggesting how satisfied or dissatisfied employees are with their jobs. At this point, you should ask questions offering information on factors like job roles, career development, resource, and general enjoyment of a job.
- Do you enjoy your job?
- How often does the management team recognize your efforts?
- Do your job roles and responsibilities allow you to achieve your professional goals?
- Are you satisfied with the benefits and compensation for your job duties?
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the career development opportunities?
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the available tools and technologies?
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your job in general?
Work environment
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The second section correlates to the work environment. This segment shows how employees perceive workplace culture, how satisfied they are with the employer-employee relationship, and how they feel connected to others.
- Are you satisfied with the current company's culture?
- Do you feel connected to other employees?
- Do you feel valued by your coworkers and the management team members?
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with how others value employee feedback?
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the company's ability and willingness to promote change?
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with how management recognizes top performers?
Career development
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Finally, a segment should be dedicated to career development and professional growth.
- Do you have everything you need to grow professionally?
- Do your job roles and responsibilities help you develop new work skills?
- Does the job utilize your professional skills best of your ability?
- Is there a clear path to career advancement?
- Does your job role allow reaching professional goals and engaging in career advancement?
- Are there enough resources to conduct your job duties well?
- How are you satisfied with the career development opportunities in general?
These 20 job satisfaction survey questions encapsulate a general satisfaction with the job, workplace culture, and career advancement. These are the key areas driving employee performance and showing how a company, a team, and management make the firm successful or not.
Which questions to avoid in your survey
Yet, not all questions should be included in the job satisfaction survey. Avoid these:
- Questions inclining toward employee's personal life. A good employer understands the importance of work/life balance. Any personal question means this balance is thwarted.
- Work-specific questions. These can threaten the survey’s anonymity.
- Double-barreled questions. One question should touch on one issue. Otherwise, it would be difficult to offer a direct answer.
- Discriminatory questions. There is no place for discrimination in any given survey.
- Negatively phrased questions. These can be confusing.
- Too long questions. People prefer short questions, which are easy to understand and answer.
- Questions without a definite answer. Those are abstract questions that do not provide valuable information.
Keeping these insights in mind, there are particular questions to ask and certain ones to omit. Navigate between the two to conduct the most effective job satisfaction survey.
The next steps after conducting an employee job satisfaction survey
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At this point, you know all about job satisfaction surveys, their benefits, ways of conducting them, and questions to ask. Yet, you need to remember that the evaluation process does not end when an employee answers the questions presented in the survey. Respectively, there are particular next steps after conducting an employee opinion survey:
- Thank an employee or employees for participating because they invested their time in making the workplace better.
- Evaluate the data patterns among answers and determine the general trends to have a better grasp of what is going on in your organization.
- Build an action plan based on the step above to improve the work culture and other work-related factors.
- Share the action plan company-wide for everyone to be on the same page.
- Gather a team to execute an action plan to ensure a higher chance of success.
- Assess the post-execution progress by seeing how the trends from the second step changed.
- Repeat the abovementioned process at least once a year to help the organization constantly evolve.
- Keep in mind that any feedback must end with an action taken, or the survey conducted will be in vain.
Following these steps ensures the job satisfaction survey does not end with employees just giving answers. In turn, it ensures the insights learned from the answers are turned into actions making a real positive change within the company.
How Checkbox helps you make the most effective job satisfaction survey
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At some point, we've mentioned that using technological tools for conducting job satisfaction surveys boosts the method's effectiveness. At this point, Checkbox is the tool offering the best quality services for a reasonable price.
At the moment, the platform services over 2500 customers in 27 countries. Checkbox has been helping the industry since 2002, so the company has a well-established reputation and enough experience to bring top-notch job satisfaction surveys to life.
In a nutshell, Checkbox offers the following services:
- Custom branding. This entails adding your company's logo and name to surveys to increase brand recognition. The feature allows your company to be more recognizable. With custom branding on surveys, you can get greater brand awareness, which means more potential customers.
- Mobile responsiveness. Offer employees easy access to all the forms and surveys. If a person can access a survey anywhere and from any device, they will be more willing to provide valuable information to make your company stand out.
- Advanced survey distribution options. This means you can deliver surveys via email, QR code, SMS, and social media. The more channels you can cover, the higher the participation rate will be. The higher rate brings a more comprehensive picture of what should be changed and how.
- Reporting and exporting. Export and import data with charts, APIs, and report filtering. In short, it means you can use the data from surveys to use it across an organization. Besides, you can make your surveys more insightful.
- Best-in-class security. This means you get bank-grade security management and all the security features linked to authorization, authentication, and user access. This decreases the chance of security breaches and data leakage. Better security means a lower chance of potential litigation.
- Advanced features. You can access multi-language surveys, admin sites, question libraries, and the basic package. These features eliminate the obstacles in multilanguage workplace environments and save a great deal of time when designing questions. You just access the library, choose the right questions, and pick up in which language they should be presented.
As a result, with Checkbox, you get everything you need to conduct a top-notch and secure job satisfaction survey. The platform knows everything there is to get the most out of the employee survey to translate the insights into actions boosting organizational performance and workplace culture.
Summing Up
When a job satisfaction survey is handled properly, you can reap massive benefits and promote the growth of your business as well as your employees. Knowing when and how to conduct an employee satisfaction survey is an excellent way to tap into the benefits above.
However, if you are still unsure whether you can use a job satisfaction survey effectively, there is always a Checkbox to help out. Sign up for free and explore survey options right away.
FAQ
What are the 3 types of job satisfaction surveys?
In a nutshell, there are three key types of employee satisfaction surveys:
- A general job satisfaction survey to measure employee satisfaction on the job itself.
- A self-evaluation survey. It is one of the employee surveys focusing on employee feedback and shows the employee morale based on their own perception.
- A job retention survey directed at company culture to determine how employees feel and what can be done to keep them in the company.
What is the best measure of job satisfactionin a survey?
A degree of employee engagement is the best measure of a job satisfaction in asurvey. It is a baseline measurement showing how employees feel and how the company culture meets their needs. The method is vital for improving employee satisfaction and initiating personal growth.
What’s the difference between employee satisfaction and employee engagement?
Employee engagement is about the level of interest and connectivity an employee feels with the work environment in the course of professional interactions. In turn, employee satisfaction is the sense of fulfillment and contentment a person feels as a direct result of having a particular job.
What are the most commonly identified issues in job satisfaction surveys?
The most common issues with job satisfaction surveys are the following:
- Mishandled employee satisfaction surveys lead to the rise of mistrust
- Without proper feedback, employees feel less valued, which increases retention
- There is a potential level of subjectivity to an employee satisfaction survey
These factors pose certain challenges, which might result in an incorrect assessment of how employees feel valued and whether there are more satisfied employees than unsatisfied ones.
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