7 Things to Include in Your First Employee Survey

Question: What should I include on my first-ever employee survey and why?

Diana Goodwin, AquaMobile

“It’s important to leave space for an open-ended text question. Your employees’ responses may surprise you in terms of what is important to them and what they think is going well and not so well within the company. If enough people mention the same pain points that management didn’t even think of, these issues should be tracked for improvement.”

Adam Steele, Loganix

“This is roughly the first question sent out by a tool we use to poll our team members called TINYpulse. It, among other things, helps us gauge and track our team’s happiness levels. This can be a hard thing to do across an organization, and TINYpulse makes it much easier. Using the anonymously provided answers to the weekly questions, I can get to work on making people happier.”

John Rampton, Calendar

“Ask your employees: “If we had one month left of payroll left in the bank, what is one thing you would do for our company to make it profitable and survive?” This will help them think outside the box on what’s working and what people care about the business from an outside perspective.”

Kofi Kankam, Admit.me

“In a lot of companies, there’s so much control over the employees that employees don’t stretch. When this happens, two issues occur: first, employees become bored, unmotivated and undervalued. What’s more, your company doesn’t reach its potential. Ask employees if they feel empowered to be wrong, and correct it if not.”

Chuck Cohn, Varsity Tutors

“Keep the questions broad and open-ended. Get a feel for where their heads are without using potentially leading questions. For example, “What would improve your job?” This approach may uncover things you wouldn’t think of on your own. Finding out, say, that the ability to work from home is important during an exit interview doesn’t do much good.”

Nick Bayer, Saxbys

“Ask your employees if they have any concerns, and give them an open-ended, anonymous space to answer. It lets employees know that they’re actually being heard, and it gives you a transparent look at what’s actually going on at your company.”

Eric Mathews, Start Co.

“Business leaders are responsible for the culture of their organization. While cultural values are espoused by leaders, the true values of the organization are found in the experiences of team members. A mismatch between the values of the leaders and team members is a sign of a future problem. “

[This post first appeared on the Business Collective – an initiative of Young Entrepreneur Council, which is a free virtual mentorship programme that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.] 

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.