An employee satisfaction survey can help you measure employees’ level of contentment with their job and organization. In turn, if you take effective action to address their concerns, these efforts can improve retention and productivity. Conducting regular satisfaction surveys should be part of every organization’s people strategy to create a great place to work.
Table of Contents
- What Is Employee Satisfaction?
- Setting Goals for an Employee Satisfaction Survey
- Measuring Employee Satisfaction
- Topics to Cover in an Employee Satisfaction Survey
- Analyzing and Acting on the Results
- Download Your Free Employee Satisfaction Survey Template
What Is Employee Satisfaction?
Employee satisfaction is people’s degree of fulfillment with their job. Their satisfaction shapes their loyalty to the organization, meaning higher satisfaction brings greater retention and lower satisfaction predicts turnover. So, increasing job satisfaction saves the substantial costs associated with higher turnover. This also improves organizational effectiveness by allowing team members to collaborate over a longer period of time.
Various elements of the work experience affect employee satisfaction. Here are a few key factors:
- Relationship with manager and team
- Engagement in work
- Fairness of compensation and benefits
- Work-life balance
- Degree of recognition they experience
- Inclusivity of the culture
- Developmental opportunities
- Work environment
- Opportunities for advancement
Now, let’s look at what distinguishes a satisfaction survey from other employee surveys, such as a motivation survey.
Satisfaction Survey vs. Motivation Survey
An employee motivation survey will focus more strongly on employees’ engagement in their role. Questions address topics like these:
- How interesting or enjoyable their work is
- Alignment with company mission and vision
- Sense of accomplishment in their role
- How energized they feel about their work
- Sense of pride in their work
- Ability to exercise creativity
While a satisfaction survey will often touch upon employee engagement, it will look at a broader range of elements affecting satisfaction, like culture and work-life balance.
Setting Goals for an Employee Satisfaction Survey
Let’s examine how to start planning a great employee satisfaction survey by identifying goals and priorities.
Identifying Objectives
First, clearly define the objectives for conducting your employee satisfaction survey. What are the desired outcomes? Identify pain points and areas for improvement. If you use people analytics or performance management software, it can help spot such opportunities.
You might also be seeking feedback on how specific initiatives or changes have affected employees. If you recently adjusted salary levels to ensure equitable pay, you can track how this has affected satisfaction.
Defining Your Audience
Next, define your target audience. Will all employees take the survey, or only certain groups or departments? For instance, you could issue an onboarding survey to assess new hires’ satisfaction with their role and the support they’ve received from the organization.
Measuring Employee Satisfaction
Based on your survey goals, establish key metrics to track. Here are some useful KPIs that creative employee satisfaction survey questions can address:
- Net promoter score
- Work-life balance
- Engagement in work
- Likelihood of departure
- Perceived value of benefits
- Perceived equity of compensation
- Satisfaction with professional development
- Perceived equity of promotions
Outside of the survey, you can also track KPIs like absenteeism and turnover rate as part of a broader assessment of employee satisfaction.
Topics to Cover in an Employee Satisfaction Survey
The following topics directly shape employee satisfaction. You don’t need to cover all of them in every survey, but aligning your employee satisfaction survey questions with these topics will provide targeted insights.
Role Clarity
Ask about how well employees understand expectations for their role. These questions can also centre on their ability to prioritize and their familiarity with company vision and goals.
Example: “Do you have a clear understanding of what priorities you should focus on this week?”
Development
Other questions can relate to growth opportunities. Ask about satisfaction with training programs and whether employees feel encouraged to pursue such development.
Example: “In the past month, have you engaged in developmental opportunities that expanded your skill set?”
Meaningfulness of Work
Ask about how meaningful, engaging, and enjoyable employees find their work. These questions can also relate to whether their work challenges them to use new skills and creativity, and whether they have autonomy in how they carry it out.
Example: “On a daily basis, do you have the opportunity to do work you find deeply meaningful?”
Compensation and Benefits
Find out whether employees perceive their salary as competitive. Also ask about perceived fairness, as well as their satisfaction with their benefits package, including their retirement plan, PTO, and leave policies. Remember that some benefits, like the amount of vacation time, aren’t strictly financial in nature.
Example: “Do you feel your organization provides equitable compensation for all employees?”
Work-Life Balance
Inquire about workload, stress related to work, and degree of work-life balance. Questions can relate to flexibility, working hours, and ability to leave work behind at the end of the day.
Example: “Do you often feel overwhelmed by your job duties after leaving work at the end of the day?”
Leadership and Management
Ask about employees’ relationship with their manager. Questions can relate to leadership approach, effectiveness of feedback and communication, support provided, and recognition.
Example: “Does your manager actively encourage you to share your ideas?”
Company Culture
Company culture includes communication norms, collaborative practices, and key values embodied in the organization. The degree of inclusivity and sense of belonging employees experience will strongly shape their experience at work. All of these factors will influence their trust in leadership and how they feel about their organization.
Example: “Do you have strong relationships with your colleagues?”
Workplace Environment
The work environment includes the physical space where people work, along with software, tools, and other resources. Working conditions and degree of safety at work are key elements.
Example: “Does your workspace allow you to easily focus on the task at hand?”
Asking the right employee satisfaction survey questions to cover these topics will help you create a workplace where everyone thrives. If you send out surveys fairly often (e.g., once a month), you could focus each one on a specific topic. This will help you gain in-depth input on each key area.
Analyzing and Acting on the Results
After conducting the employee satisfaction survey, take steps to understand your data and share it with employees. Then, plan initiatives to address their concerns.
Data Analysis
Quality survey software will automatically analyze your data, identifying patterns affecting job satisfaction. With the help of these analytics tools, HR can focus on developing action plans to address any pain points.
Action Planning
Identify the 3–5 biggest issues highlighted by the survey. Then, create a plan to address each of them. Some might involve simpler changes, while others may require strategic initiatives or policy updates. For example, you might create a policy of offering more generous PTO or allowing employees to work flexible hours. Or, you might take broader steps to shift the organizational culture if employees feel dissatisfied with their work-life balance.
Gather key HR staff and organizational leaders to map out specific plans—particularly those that demand more extensive changes. For major issues, consider forming a cross-functional team to brainstorm solutions. For simpler fixes, HR could design solutions and briefly run them by leadership.
Make sure you can measure the success of every initiative you take. Establish clear metrics that you’ll track, such as net promoter score or absenteeism, and collect baseline data to show improvement over time.
Communication
Share the results of each survey with all employees, highlighting key conclusions. Emphasize organizational strengths as well as areas for improvement, providing a well-rounded and accurate picture of employee satisfaction in your organization. Then, announce any action plans you’ve formulated—or explain that you’re in the process of designing them. This clear and transparent communication will help all employees feel like valued members of your organization.
Follow-Up
Conduct regular surveys to monitor how satisfaction changes over time. Follow-up surveys will help you assess the effectiveness of any initiatives you’ve implemented. For example, you might decide to survey employees on company culture every 3–4 months, using similar questions to track patterns over time.
You can also use performance management tools, like goal-tracking software, to assess changes in key metrics like employee engagement. In conjunction with surveys, these tools can provide invaluable data on shifts in employee sentiment.
Download Your Free Employee Satisfaction Survey Template!
This free employee satisfaction template includes 32 employee satisfaction survey questions.
Conducting regular employee satisfaction surveys will help you understand patterns in job fulfillment and engagement. Over time, you’ll see how certain initiatives, policies, and leadership approaches affect the employee experience. Continue developing and refining your action plans for responding to employee feedback, which will strengthen trust and ensure they feel happy and content at work.
Demo our employee survey tools to learn how Primalogik can help you measure and strengthen employee satisfaction in your organization.
