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Employee Engagement, Employee experience

Clueless about employee experience surveys? This blog is here to help

Barely 13% of employees are satisfied with their experience at an organization.

What this means is a major chunk of the organizational workforce is dissatisfied and it’s important to know why, especially if you’re setting yourself up for success in a competitive market.

What’s the safest way to know why employees are this disgruntled? Ask them. And, this is where employee experience surveys come into play.

What is employee experience?

What is employee experience

Employee experience refers to an employee’s overall observations and thoughts about their entire journey, right from the hiring and till the exit, in the company. Employee experience takes into consideration three important touch points during the journey of an employee – recruitment, onboarding, and departure.

Employee experience is the summary of what the employees experience while they are a part of the organization. It directly affects engagement and productivity levels within the organization, and hence ensuring stellar employee experience becomes imperative.

Why is employee experience important?

Why employee experience matters

A company’s culture, technology, and physical space forms the core of employee experience. All these factors determine how an employee feels within the organization.

An adverse condition in any of these environments can impact the employee experience negatively. Hence, it is important to ensure that your company environment remains welcoming and warm enough to make the employees feel at home, thereby making for a positive employee experience.

Here are a few more reasons as to why a positive employee experience is important for the company.

Manages performance better

A positive employee experience ensures communication is better, in turn helping the organization achieve goals faster and more accurately. In terms of performance management, this leads to more clarity and more involvement from the employee’s side in their role.

When everyone’s jobs and responsibilities are more refined, there’s a higher chance for personal development within the roles and to grow better. Individual and team targets are aligned with that of the organization which creates a better performance management environment.

Increases employee productivity

The most basic advantage of a positive employee experience is that it increases employee productivity. A happy and satisfied employee who is growing with the company is bound to work better and be more loyal as compared to a disengaged and dissatisfied one.

Remember the day that didn’t start well and you got no work done? When employee experience is good, such days are at an all-time low and employees bring their hundred percent to work every single day.

Reduces employee turnover

Loyal and happy employees stay at an organization for a long time, working their way upwards. Thus, positive employee experience reduces the employee turnover rate which further reduces unnecessary costs incurred in recruiting and replacing current employees.

What’s more? Those who stay with you longer, start to feel more responsible for your growth, getting themselves involved more actively in achieving your organizational goals!

Elevates customer satisfaction

If yours is an industry that is based on customer feedback and interaction, satisfied and happy employees are bound to make an impression. Good and clear communication that stems from confidence increases customer satisfaction.

Also, customers aren’t always perfectly satisfied and dealing with agitated customers isn’t a pleasant experience. However, employees who get treated well and feel a sense of belonging with their workplace would work to ensure business doesn’t get affected and dealing with a disgruntled customer might not seem like such a mammoth task to them. In the long run, this would ensure not just satisfaction but also higher customer retention.

Improves employee engagement

Note that employee experience is different from employee engagement, although both are important for an organization. While an employee with a positive organizational experience will most probably be engaged, vice versa may not always hold true. Employee experience is the input required to create better employee engagement as an output.

Employee experience is imperative for the growth of an organization or for that matter, better teamwork. When an organization works towards better employee culture and experience, the engagement will increase.

But, how does one know if employee experience within the organization is showing continuous improvement? Through employee experience surveys conducted at the right frequency. 

What is an employee experience survey?

what is employee experience survey

An employee experience survey, also known as an EX survey is a tool that helps measure the experience of an employee throughout their journey in the organization. It is a tool used to identify what helps the employees grow and what hinders them, helping the organization bridge the gap.

Employee experience surveys are crisp and clear and contribute towards enhancing employee experience and reducing disengagement. It should be created after much thought and research so that you get the right insights.

Questions to ask when creating an EX survey

EX survey creation pointers

An employee experience survey is a form of communication. It should give out the message and collect feedback in the clearest way possible. Therefore, before you sit down to create one make sure you’ve got answers to the following questions.

Why is the survey being conducted?

Define the purpose of your employee experience survey. Are you doing it to get feedback from employees or do you want to measure their level of satisfaction? It is essential to know why you are doing the survey and how the results help you.

How will the survey be sent to employees?

Once you have decided the purpose of your survey, then you need to figure out the best way to communicate it to the employees. Again, keep in mind that you have to tell them the exact purpose of why you are conducting it, if you want accurate answers.

Answer employee queries regarding anonymity and retaliation, and make sure that you keep all the channels of communication open. Also, you have to take into account the previous surveys and what actions have been taken on the basis of those.

Once you’re done answering these two crucial questions, here are a few other factors to keep in mind when building a survey:

  • Keep it crisp and simple and avoid ambiguity
  • Try keeping questions separate from each other
  • Ensure that there is a clause of anonymity in these surveys
  • Use a balanced and neutral tone while creating these surveys
  • Make sure there are no personal questions in an employee experience survey

Lastly, it is essential to involve your employees in the process of survey creation. From start to finish, they should know the purpose and need for the survey and should know that this is not just any chore – it is a chance for them to improve their experience and grow in the organization. 

When HR and the management convey this to everyone, the survey is bound to bring back results that are closer to reality.

What are the different types of EX surveys?

Types of employee surveys

There is no one type of employee experience survey and it changes as per the purpose and the goal. Let’s take a look at few.

Employee engagement survey

As the name suggests, an employee engagement survey establishes a direct link between employee experience and employee engagement. This survey helps understand the relationship between work culture and environment and how it affects the employee’s productivity and professional conduct.

Conducting this survey and acting on the insights it gives helps identify what keeps your employees engaged. Increasing employee engagement can lead to better performance, higher productivity, and a lower attrition rate, in turn helping to generate better revenues and achieve business goals.

Training feedback survey

This employee experience survey is directed towards extracting employee feedback after a particular training or development session. The clear measure of a development plan’s success can only be seen when the employees understand, internalize, and implement it.

This survey will map an individual employee’s growth from a training program and also help you identify what needs to be improved.

Onboarding survey

It is important to understand what the new hires think of your organization, and the best way to find out is by conducting employee experience surveys that include questions specific to the onboarding process.

Collecting feedback at such an initial stage sets the tone right for the remainder of the employee journey in the organization and also helps enhance the employee experience. This kind of a survey ensures that the employees know their organization cares about them, their mental health, and their growth.

Candidate reaction survey

This is another important employee experience survey, though it is not essentially conducted on the employees. Rather, it is conducted on potential employees and the ones that didn’t make it to becoming an employee.

A candidate reaction survey is a great way to figure out the gaps in your recruitment process and how you can bridge those. This is a great way to establish your reputation as an organization that truly cares for everyone and not just the candidates that are hired. Such surveys pave the way for future hires and also get your organization reviewed more positively.

Always on survey

These are general surveys that can be conducted at regular intervals. The questions can be around day-to-day activities, directed towards increasing employee morale and satisfaction. 

These surveys do not need much preparation. A classic example of such a survey would be a simple set of questions with respect to the team’s low morale on a certain day can point towards a management issue.

360-degree survey

Everyone conducts performance reviews or peer reviews, but a 360 degree employee experience survey or review is something that can review an employee in the complete sense. Such a survey includes self appraisal, as well as reviews by seniors, juniors and peers, completing a 360 degree circle of reviews. These reviews are mainly directed towards improving team performance and not rating individual performance for appraisal.

Regular 360 degree employee experience surveys ensure that managers and subordinates both are in check and no one suffers due to power plays and biased opinions. It is the most transparent way of helping the organization grow and making the employees feel safe and heard.

Performance review

This is the most common employee experience survey, and is linked to an employee’s salary and benefits, even designation. It is conducted once every six months or year, depending on the company policy.

Performance reviews nowadays are not only directed towards assessing the performance of an employee, but is also to gauge an employee’s feedback and to hear anything an employee might have to say about their stint with the organization.

Exit survey

These employee experience surveys are one of the most important ones. However, if handled tactfully and protected against bias, an exit survey can serve as the most brutally honest feedback that you can extract from an outgoing employee.

However, such surveys can sometimes be a little far from the truth and ridden with bias, especially in cases where there is a termination or resignation under pressure. Using one’s discretion when analyzing the results of such surveys is advised.

Employee experience surveys are many and this is by no means an exhaustive list. The type of survey changes as per the need and purpose and should be crafted accordingly to get the best answers that can contribute towards employee and overall growth.

Employee experience surveys are important to know how employees’ feelings are linked to their performances. However, these surveys need to be conducted quite frequently and might end up taking up a lot of bandwidth of the HR department. Automation of surveys is the smart answer to this issue and our experts are waiting to walk you through the process. Get in touch for an insightful session. 

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