Friday 3 March marks Employee Appreciation Day. A day dedicated to acknowledging the work of employees and valuing their effort and contribution to the organisation.
The most vital act of acknowledgement is listening. By opening a conversation with your employees, you can get their feedback, which means you can identify areas to improve and make changes for the better.
Actioning changes to improve your employee’s experience will make them feel valued and appreciated.
If employees think that their HR department isn’t listening, then they can easily become isolated and lose motivation to work.
Now there are many ways to listen, but collecting feedback through employee surveys is one of the most efficient. You can create a two-way communication between HR and employees, to discover what it is that they like or dislike about work. By having an active say in their experience, employees will feel more involved and engaged.
From new hire to high flyer
At a time when competition for talent has never been tougher, and retention is a key focus for many HR teams, knowing just how you can best attract that talent and retain your best employees is an essential tool to ensure your business works profitably and efficiently.
It’s essential that surveys are not just for the month of March, or a one-off exercise that you forget about for the rest of the year. To collect effective feedback, you need to be sending surveys at every stage of the employee’s journey with your company – from new Hire to high flyer.
This could include:
- Recruitment
- Onboarding
- Development
- Retaining
- Offboarding
Mo Naser, CEO at SmartSurvey, said: “Asking for feedback from employees is vital in shaping a workplace that encourages development and sparks creativity. Each individual voice holds the power to drive substantial change and move us towards a brighter future. Prioritising and valuing this feedback cultivates a culture of empathy and understanding, which helps to make our workplace more compassionate and 'human', hopefully creating a space where every employee feels heard, valued and fulfilled.”
How to take the pulse of your organisation
Surveys can take many forms. Among these include staff satisfaction, 360 review surveys, employee benefits surveys, training and development surveys and employee pulse surveys.
There are a few metrics you should consider measuring, these include:
- Employee satisfaction (ESAT)
- Employee effort Score (EES)
- Employee net promoter score (eNPS)
From this, you could learn how motivated they are, how easy it is for them to do their job and whether they would recommend your company to others.
Among the questions you might want to ask include:
- Are you satisfied with the benefits you are receiving?
- Do you feel valued at work?
- Do you believe your feedback is taken seriously by your leadership team?
- Are there any new skills you’d like to develop?
Being seen to act on feedback is critical to show that you care. But equally, to collect feedback, you need to make it easy for employees respond, so you will want to find a way to encourage responses. One way to do this is to send the survey via an internal work channel, such as Teams or Slack, which will be accessible and visible to those in your organisation. You may also want to consider sending an email with high importance to encourage responses.
Survey to show your appreciation
No matter how many times you survey employees, there will still be new things to learn. You may ask the same type of question but receive a different answer throughout the year. Ultimately, by using surveys to understand your employee’s needs, you will improve their experience.
That’s where the value of partners such as SmartSurvey comes in. As an award-winning UK based platform, they have helped over 500,000 customers, receive one billion answers. No matter what question you want to ask, SmartSurvey will help you to collect the answers and allow you to analyse the results.
This Employee Appreciation Day, demonstrate how much you care by listening and acting on what matters to your employees. Survey, listen and act: now that shows your appreciation.
To find out how SmartSurvey can help you to collect employee feedback click here, or to get in touch with a member of their team, click here.
