5 Reasons To Do An Employee Survey

Business leaders who wonder whether they should conduct an employee survey should think about these five good reasons for conducting surveys, as recommended by John Kador and Katherine J. Armstrong in their book, Perfect Phrases for Writing Employee Surveys:

1. To discover what employees are thinking and doing – in a nonthreatening survey environment. You will learn what motivates employees and what is important to them.
2. To prioritize the organization’s actions based on objective results – rather than relying on subjective information or your best guesses.
3. To provide a benchmark – or a snapshot of your employees and their attitudes at a certain point of time that you can then compare to future surveys to spot trends.
4. To communicate the importance of key topics to employees – by communicating with employees the survey results that shows your organization is listening to employees.
5. To collect the combined brainpower and ideas of the workforce – that sometimes cannot be accessed without a survey. The knowledge you learn will likely improve your decision making and allow you to seize opportunities.

Kador and Armstrong caution leaders to NOT do employee surveys:

1. To sell employees on an idea — by using a survey to guide employees down a path to a specified conclusion.
2. To solve problems in one easy step — because a survey is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Because, a survey isolated from other communications and actions could be more detrimental than helpful. Remember, surveys generate expectations.

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