How to Write an Employee Satisfaction Survey

Survey your employees to boost morale.

Conducting surveys on your employees can help you gauge what areas you need to improve in your organization and how happy your employees are on the job. You can find out why your employees are leaving your organization. Use an employee survey to give your employees a confidential way to give you feedback and learn how to make your business more productive.

Instructions

1. Know the purpose of your survey and design the survey around that purpose. Ask yourself what goal you hope to achieve with the survey: Are you trying to boost employee retention or are you trying to determine ways to make your employees more productive? .

2. Include instructions on how the employees should fill out the survey and have questions that capture employee demographic information. Ask about which departments they work in and how long they've been with your company.

3. The survey should be clear and easy for employees to complete. Don't write it in a way that leaves questions open for interpretation. Write with common language that everyone can understand.

4. Include some open-ended questions so that employees have freedom to comment, but keep these limited because too many open-ended questions can decrease the response rate, according to Censeo Corporation.

5. Don't use leading questions that already assume the answer. Give the employees a rating system for their answers such as "Agree"; "Strongly Agree"; "Disagree; "Strongly Disagree" and "Neutral."

Tips & Warnings

• Share the results of all employee satisfaction surveys with stakeholders; this is a critical step in building trust and increasing morale.

• Don't go into conducting a survey assuming that you already know the answers.

References

• National Business Research Institute: Employee Surveys
• Censeo: Develop an Effective Employee Survey