As of September 2021, 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs as the labor market continues to tumult.
People are now referring to this ongoing trend of people leaving their jobs as the Great Resignation or the Big Quit.
The Great Resignation is an important cultural phenomenon for every organization to become familiar with. As more opportunities change from in-office to remote work, employees have more positions and organizations to consider.
We all know employers like to ask for references, but now employees are considering asking employers for those same references to ensure a high-quality work environment. Does that sound like a tall ask?
Before thinking all hope is lost, consider turning to employee surveys with a third-party to help your organization become more competitive without falling victim to the Big Quit.
In this article, I’ll discuss the three critical pieces of an employee survey including:
- Identify what’s most important to employees
- Learn areas of success and opportunity
- Understand what drives employee satisfaction
Recommended Reading: Budgeting for Employee Engagement in 2022
Identify What’s Most Important to Employees
Employee surveys can provide leaders and HR professionals with clear, actionable answers to what drives team satisfaction.
Key satisfaction areas are measured by asking employees to rank several different aspects of their work experiences.
Here’s an employee survey question example below 👇👇
How important are each of the following when determining satisfaction with a job? Rank each from 1 “most important” to 6 “least important.”
- Career development (i.e., growth, development, training, opportunities)
- Work engagement (i.e., excitement, adapting to change, initiative)
- Relationship management (i.e., good leaders, trust, working relationships)
- Benefits (i.e., healthcare, retirement, paid leave, flexibility)
- Compensation (i.e., fair pay in comparison to market)
- Work environment (i.e., job security, social responsibility, diversity, culture)
Results of this question correspond to several different agreement rating questions.
Ultimately, this gives insight into what about the experience employees value most and helps target opportunity areas.
As a result, organizations can make improvements to increase employee retention and reduce staff turnover.
Learn Areas of Success and Opportunity
The bulk of employee satisfaction survey questions typically include several statements about the employee experience.
Employees are asked to rank their level of agreement with a series of statements from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
There are several statements that correspond to each of the six categories from the ranking question (career development, work engagement, relationship management, etc.).
After data collection is complete, the results from these questions are used to create a score from 1 to 5 where “5” is the highest score.
Scores are then put into categories such as:
- Excelling areas: Scores 4.5 or higher
- Areas performing well: Scores between 4.4 and 4.0
- Underperforming areas: Scores between 4.0 and 3.5
- Key opportunity areas: Scores 3.4 or lower
In addition to creating scores, employee survey benchmarks are also used to compare the data to similar organizations.
Benchmarks for employee survey data can be purchased based on industry, size of the organization, or country.
Understand What Drives Employee Satisfaction
One of the most essential pieces of employee pulse surveys is understanding what drives satisfaction.
More specifically, our employee survey company uses correlation and regression analysis to measure what organizational factors impact team engagement, performance, productivity, and more.
- Correlation analysis measures the presence of a relationship between two factors.
- Regression analysis identifies which factors most significantly impact eNPS positively or negatively.
Each of the employee satisfaction factors tested is compared to employees’ net promoter score (eNPS).
Here’s an example of an eNPS question.
How likely are you to recommend [insert organization] as a place to work? Select a rating from 0 to 10 where 0 is Not At All Likely and 10 is Extremely Likely.
The results identify hidden drivers of importance that impact overall job satisfaction and the likelihood to recommend the employer. Therefore, increasing agreement with these factors would directly increase eNPS.
While areas of opportunity are also important to address, the first step an organization should take with employee survey results is understanding how to improve the factors that have the most significant impact on employee satisfaction.
Learn more about employee net promoter scores in this short video.
Combat the Great Resignation with Drive Research
Drive Research is a national market research company that specializes in employee satisfaction surveys.
Our team partners with organizations across the country to design, program, field, and analyze survey results to help improve employee satisfaction and retention.
To learn more about our services, or receive the cost for outsourcing employee surveys, contact our team today!
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
Emily Taylor
As a Senior Research Analyst, Emily is approaching a decade of experience in the market research industry and loves to challenge the status quo. She is a certified VoC professional with a passion for storytelling.
Learn more about Emily, here.
