Employee surveys… Waste of time or way to get ahead?
In 2025, the employee engagement survey can be seen as something of a cliché – For some businesses, a tired, tick-box exercise that you feel has to be done because other people do it. And for some employees, an eye-rolling experience, a chance to have a moan anonymously… “it won’t make any difference anyway!”.
If that is the feeling, the answer is definitely that they are a waste of time! But are you doing them right? Common problems for employers include formulating the surveys incorrectly and failing to act upon the data once it is collected.
What are employee surveys?
To start at the beginning, an employee survey is an information gathering exercise to measure the employee experience. It is an undertaking to find out what you are doing well, what is going wrong and how you can improve.
And when you improve the employee experience you improve important business metrics like recruitment, retention, absenteeism, workplace relations – ultimately productivity; not to mention how pleasant a place your business is to be around.
So if you treat an employee survey as an important business task, and demonstrate once it is complete that you will act upon it to your staff, it is very worthwhile.
Immediate benefits of employee surveys
Before you reap the broader business benefit of employee surveys – productivity – there are a number of tactical benefits you can enjoy first.
Open communication channel – Some workplaces are more open than others, but even in an open culture, certain things are hard to say. Having an annual employee engagement survey provides a useful (anonymous) channel in which difficult topics can be broached by employees.
Highlight areas for improvement – Without making the effort to collect hard data, it’s easy to assume everything is running smoothly; confirmation bias is the term. Your employee survey is a mechanism which can challenge established views and be the first step in making a real difference.
Enhancing employee engagement – As long as your survey is genuine, with clear action taken to address any issues it raises, the act of surveying itself is a show of goodwill: that you care about your staff. It is only one link in the chain of employee relations but is an important one for engaging staff – actions speak louder than words.
Measuring job satisfaction – Along with things like appraisals, an employee engagement survey is a good way to measure job satisfaction. Are the right people in the right roles? Is remuneration set correctly? Are the workloads well balanced? Is there a pathway for people who want to progress? You don’t really know unless you ask.
Strategic HR – The information gathered from employee surveys can be gold dust for making good strategic decisions. Tailor the questions to what you need to know, and ensure that all the relevant decision-makers in the business have access to the results.
We can help
Employee engagement surveys can be invaluable when done well. This means thinking about your driving reasons for creating a survey, designing them intelligently so that you collect the information you need, ensuring you have good participation, analysing the results correctly and acting upon your findings – including with communication back to employees.
If you would like help achieving all of this, please get in touch and we can discuss what is best for you.
