4Cs Blog: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

Justifying an Employee Survey

There are many different reasons for conducting an employee survey. Some of these reasons include:

• Providing your organization with a fresh perspective on attitudes and opinions about policies and operations,
• Measuring how well your employees are "on board” with management’s mission and strategy,
• Giving your staff members a voice in helping improve the work environment, and
• Finding out how your organization performs compared with that of similar organizations.

Keep in mind that your employees have to deal with everyday front-line problems in every corner of your business. In fact, employees at all levels are the key to effective performance improvement – they really know how things work and are best placed to identify and resolve the problems which are holding your organization back. If you can successfully engage your staff in driving performance improvement, you can create a catalyst for change across the entire organization. Their skills, knowledge, experience and creativity can be effective tools in assessing your work environment, so that your operations can become faster, cheaper, more efficient, more effective and more customer focused.

Clarity is a Cornerstone to Employee Engagement 

Let’s be clear: organizations thrive when they have a clear vision of their goals, values and principles. People need to know why their organization exists so they have a reason to give their enthusiastic support. When organizations are clear about what needs to get done, who needs to do it and how it should get done then everyone can pull together for a common cause.

Bu having a clear vision isn’t enough. It is essential that this vision is communicated clearly and regularly to the entire workforce. Ensure that goals and decisions are consistent with your vision, then remind your management team and your employees that their actions also need to be consistent with this same vision.

Workplace Action Is Critical

One of the most important components of any employee survey project is create an effective action plan (or plans) that will address the top opportunities for improvement and/or ensure that you maintain the strengths that you have. This is especially true when you lead an organization-wide survey of all employees.

Not taking action on your survey findings will communicate to your employees that you really don’t care about their attitudes and opinions. Any suggestion like this cannot but hurt employee morale and, at the very least, will likely reduce your participation rate in any future surveys,

Weak Morale Hampers Productivity

“The beatings will continue until morale improves.” I’m sure you’ve seen this sign in many workplaces – maybe even your own! Employee morale is one of those topics that most HR practitioners recognized as important but there’s not a lot of guidance on how to improve it.

Here at Insightlink, we know it’s a problem from our annual employee benchmark study of U.S. employees. Our 2014 results show that:

• Just one-half of all employees agree that their own level of morale is excellent or very good, and
• Only four in ten feel the same about the level of morale in their organization as a whole.

These findings are important because low levels of morale affect organizations in many different ways, including negatively impacting product and service quality, recruitment success, employee retention and customer relations.

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Career Advancement Contributes to Employee Engagement

Career advancement is the second ‘C’ of employee engagement. It’s impact on an employee’s attitude towards their organization cannot be underestimated and has been proven to contribute to employees feeling a deep connection to their place of work. When employees think they have a future with their current organization, that there are opportunities for career advancement or career enhancement, then they are more likely to approach their jobs with passion and pride.

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