As companies around the world continue to adapt to a new workplace, as well as the economic and social realities created by the COVID-19 crisis, it’s essential that they also take a moment to touch base with their employees. Even the most steadfast and reliable workers may now be facing new challenges — lost income from a laid-off spouse, kids who now must attend school virtually, and even the recent loss of family or friends due to the pandemic.
These new stressors can factor into their willingness and ability to return to the office. It is always good to check in with your team, but it’s more than just asking them how are doing. The best way to truly gauge how your employees are doing is to conduct an employee satisfaction survey.
How Employee Satisfaction Surveys Help
Employee satisfaction surveys are particularly useful for companies that have recently switched to a work-from-home model. While the current consensus on remote work is largely (and perhaps surprisingly) positive from a productivity and cost-savings perspective, it does come with some trade-offs in terms of company culture and worker morale. Without those face-to-face meetings and coffee-break conversations, it’s hard to know how your employees actually feel about their work.
You may have employees that have concerns about returning to the office in the upcoming months, especially parents who find themselves between a rock and a hard place with kids going to school remotely. Some of your best employees may be grappling with what to do if it’s mandatory to return the office and that’s something you’d want to know before renewing leases, updating equipment, and reopening to the public.
An employee satisfaction survey allows you to learn about these concerns, and to respond to them, before making big, expensive, and hard-to-reverse decisions.
Here are five key reasons to conduct an employee satisfaction survey as part of your company’s near-term business planning strategy:
The employee satisfaction survey is really about starting an open-ended workplace safety conversation.
Most companies have an understandable urge to get things “back to normal,” but it’s important to remember that this may not be possible for large numbers of workers. Until you ask your employees to weigh in, you have no way of knowing how many of them would support major changes like returning to onsite work or extending remote options. An employee satisfaction survey can allow you to break the ice on these topics. Better yet, their responses can help to shape your overall strategies moving forward.
The existing office structures, workflows, and technology may need to be updated.
Over the last several months, many companies have started to realize that the remote-work model may actually be superior — at least in some cases — to the commuting-based onsite model. As a result, many companies are now looking to streamline their operations by reducing office space, switching to video conference-based meetings, and even rethinking the organizational structure.
These are big steps, and it’s absolutely vital that employees have a chance to weigh in on them. For instance, your employees may rightly point out that your company’s ERP, CRM, or other technology needs a serious upgrade to be reliably usable in a remote-work context. For instance, if you’ve seen user participation on your technologies reduce since employees have been home, some may assume that employees need to be in the office to be reliable. However, if the system is running slower while your workers are at home or if there is continued connectivity issues, it’s a time efficiency issue.
Flexibility is now a must-have job perk.
In the pre-pandemic days, having an onsite gym, cafeteria, or access to a company car were incredibly attractive job benefits. Today, that might not cut it. Given the overall day-to-day uncertainty that your employees are learning to manage, even those workers who like working onsite may still value the option to work remotely as needed. COVID-19 outbreaks may still close some schools until a vaccine becomes widely available, for instance, forcing working parents to stay home as well. By asking about the importance of flexibility relative to other perks in an employee satisfaction survey, your company can gain much-needed insight as you restructure compensation plans.
Some of your employees may need real help.
It’s no secret that employers are increasingly concerned about the mental health of their workers. We’re social creatures, after all, and for most people the workplace is a primary social outlet. The isolation of the last several months has resulted in an increase in feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression in almost every group that has been studied. This includes your employees. While an employee satisfaction survey isn’t the right forum to discuss these issues, survey responses may help to identify some areas of concern, and to explore ways your company can help. It also presents an opportunity to float the idea of offering mental health services as a potential perk.
The survey will help your long-term planning.
The world has changed in the last several months, and your workers have changed with it. By using an employee satisfaction survey to extract clear, meaningful data about worker sentiment on a range of topics, your company can make informed decisions as it moves forward. Things that were top-of-mind considerations at this same time last year — who gets the best parking spaces in the company lot, for instance — may now be laughably irrelevant. The insight you gain from an employee satisfaction survey will almost certainly help to shape your budget decisions for the next few years. It will help to establish the priority of essential remote-working technology like cloud-based CRMs and video conferencing. This is must-have information for any company, and the best way to collect it is through an employee satisfaction survey.
Conclusion
Understanding how your team is doing is always important, not just because of the current pandemic. However, since COVID-19 continues to present new challenges, it’s a crucial time to check in with your employees. This is a particularly important consideration for companies that are planning to return to a largely onsite model as state and local workplace restrictions begin to loosen.
When you are conducting your employee satisfaction surveys, think about the user experience. You want as many employees as possible to take it seriously. If it’s challenging to go through the survey, they will just get frustrated. Take the time to do it right.
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