Matt Vaadi explains how to run an employee survey to uncover what staff actually value. His own survey revealed employees felt they were "drinking from a fire hose" and underappreciated during busy periods. Keep it anonymous, aim for 50% participation, and treat a 3 rating as a 2 to read sentiment conservatively.
Like a lot of companies, we thought we had a great company culture until we did an employee survey. Turns out our team had some different feedback than we were ready for. Employee surveys are critical to understanding where your team is at, how they feel about your culture today, and identifying what they may want or need to better perform their job. Don't worry, our culture is actually awesome, but we received some feedback that we weren't quite ready for. Things like, we heard terms like drinking from a fire hose and not getting appreciated during our busiest times of the year. So here's some things we did to take action on that, along with the importance of an employee survey and a great template you can follow to roll out a survey at your organization in less than a half hour. Thanks for tuning in. I look forward to sharing more with you in this quick video. So why are employee surveys important? Well, the biggest thing I see with small businesses is that too often employers make decisions based on what they think their employees want or need rather than simply asking them. I see companies waste a ton of money on benefits and other things for their employees that really don't move the needle. And oftentimes they're either over-insuring or over-indexing on things that people don't even care about. Sometimes your employees don't care about that happy hour that you just went and spent $1,000 on. They would have rather had some time at home alone and maybe a gift card to get dinner with their spouse, which would, would have been much less expensive for you than taking that time away and adding that expense. So going through an employee survey is a fairly low-cost and straightforward way of gaining insights into what your team cares about and how you can meet their needs. This is a great forum for employees to give suggestions that they might not otherwise provide, particularly if you allow the survey to be anonymous, which I highly suggest. It's a great place where they can share issues that they're not comfortable sharing with you face-to-face. Now, the most important thing after you go through and gather the responses to these questions is that you take action. Don't just roll out a survey and then not do anything about it. For example, when we started to hear that our team felt like they were drinking from a fire hose and that they weren't being appreciated, we made sure we take that time to have conversations with employees, both at a team level and an individual level, to make sure they understand that we appreciate their efforts all year, not just during our busiest times, but we certainly understand that during the busy times, how stressful it can be. And we've made the mistake of rolling out our survey during the busiest time of year, which I actually suggest because you're gonna get raw feedback during your busiest times. People are gonna share how they really feel 'cause they're probably a little bit on edge. And this is a great opportunity to really get that feedback that you want and need to improve as an organization. And here's another thing. So you're gonna look at the survey template, which you can find below in the comments, and you're gonna see some questions in there that are based on a scale of 1 through 5. I take everything at 1 above what it actually is. So if somebody puts a 3 on something, to me, they actually mean a 2, And so I'm really concerned anytime I see a 2, a 3, or a 4, 'cause I wanna know what's actually driving that and where the concerns are. We wanna create a safe place for our employees. We wanna make sure that they understand how valued they are. We wanna help them to grow in their career. One of the best ways we can do that is by asking them what resources they need to accomplish all those things. Without doing an employee survey, you're flying blind and you're navigating based off what you think is right, versus what is actually right for your team. So take the time, click on the link below. There's a great option to just copy our Google Form that we use, and you can simply deploy it on your own. You can take the questions off of the— I put in the public-facing Google Form, which you can use as well. You can just take the questions and put them into your own survey tool or put them into a Word doc or whatever your preference is, but just make sure you do it. It's a very easy thing to do. Try to aim for, if you have a larger team, at a minimum 50% participation. If you have a smaller team, we want to get 100% participation. But just make sure you execute on it. And once again, follow up after you get those results and view it as an opportunity to learn and improve. And don't take the feedback too, too negatively if you get any negative feedback. Thanks for doing this. We always appreciate it when you invest in your employees. We're here to support you in any way we can. Check out our website, guhroo.co, for more resources to help improve the culture at your organization. Thanks for tuning in.
