What to do after your staff survey

Any business runs better when staff are happy and satisfied with all aspects of their roles.

An employee satisfaction survey is a great way to find out how your team members really feel about both their positions and your company.

By targeting questions to specific satisfaction pressure points – such as salary, communication with management, or office culture – you can build up a bigger picture of your staff's satisfaction levels.

This can be invaluable information in allowing you to adjust your practice in ways that can promote a better environment for staff.

It can also help you to locate areas of greater staff dissatisfaction which require immediate action.

Getting all your staff on board for the survey is important so that you can get a snapshot of satisfaction across the entire company – or team, or department, depending on the scale you are operating on.

So what happens once the survey is complete and you now have a whole bunch of data?

Apart from the obvious, which is to use the information to learn more about your staff, one idea that can work very well is to stage a presentation to your staff about the results.

This could be on a Friday afternoon when you allow staff to knock off half an hour early and have some drinks and nibbles in recognition of a good week's work.

You can then present the survey results in an easy to understand way on a projector or TV screen – just a general picture of course, no individual results.     

In addition to the results, explain to staff what you will be doing to proactively address some of the key areas for improvement that the survey has uncovered, and outline who will be responsible for actioning each initiative. This will help your survey participation rates the next time you survey your staff, and will also reinforce that employee surveys aren't just a token gesture but part of a real commitment to improve staff satisfaction levels.