Employee surveys are a common tool often used to collect feedback from your workforce. They’re easy to compile and conduct, and can be used to collect data on just about anything.

But are they a good use of time and resources? Are they useful for gathering comprehensive and truthful data from employees? Here are some of their good and bad points.

Good

Surveys are used by many companies to gather feedback, so your team will be used to filling them in, and there are many companies willing to conduct them for you. This makes them efficient and cost-effective. You can collect a huge amount of data by using a simple formula with employee surveys, just make sure to ask the right questions. Once collected, the data is easy to use to form an idea of the concerns of your workforce and act quickly on them, and you can easily use follow-up surveys to check in on how your employees think things have improved.

Bad

On the downside, surveys can sometimes only show part of the picture. Multiple choice surveys are the most common type, and they are the best for corroborating the data to make a picture of what needs to be done. This also means that you might miss out on some important feedback that’s not covered by the questions.

There is also the problem with employees giving truthful answers. If they believe that the company will have access to their response, they may be more reluctant to include negative answers if they believe it could impact their position with the company.

The opposite is also true, with some employees deliberately inflating their praise of the company in the hope of increasing their prospects. As a result, anonymous surveys are better for guarding against both of these problems, as they keep employees’ data private.

Final Verdict

So, are employee surveys worth it? Yes. Surveys can help collect important data from your workforce, and help you make decisions and changes to the workplace and culture. But don’t rely solely on them. Use other tools such as suggestion boxes to get a broader picture, and use follow up surveys to narrow down problems and keep up to date with your team’s concerns.

If you decide to conduct a survey, then Protostar Leadership can help as they can provide a high-quality employee survey service.