You’ll see your organization thriving when employees are satisfied at their workplace.
And you know, it stands true for all organizations, small or large. No matter how reputed the organization is, if they don’t care for its employees, chances are that people would resist working there in the long run.
Employee satisfaction is the core factor that breeds success in the company. They’ll only perform their best when you care and create a positive environment for them. Not this, but employees would stick to your company when all these things are taken care of.
But, even after this, there could be something that may not reduce the employee turnover rate. Or something else that is impacting employees’ productivity. What is it? And how to figure it out?
This is where Custom Survey comes into the picture!
When you want to interact and get feedback from your employees, custom surveys are the best way that can help you with it.
HuddleUp, a people-first employee experience platform, lets you create one easily. But, before jumping onto this topic, let’s first understand in detail about custom surveys. What are they and how can they help in employee satisfaction and retention?
What is a custom survey?
To understand it more thoroughly, let’s consider three situations:
- An employee joined your organization three months back. You know that she will be a great asset to your company. And, of course, you don’t want her to leave. Hence, you would like to know her feedback about the overall work experience.
- After 2 years of working in your company, an employee took resignation. No hard feelings! But still, you are wondering if there’s anything that could have bothered him or if it was due to external factors.
- Your organization has employees, that are working from the office as well as at home. You are well aware of employees who are working from the office but it gets difficult for you to communicate with the remote team. And you know, the same could be for them too. Although you don’t want to end the ‘work from home’ policy, you would like to know their feedback on how this could be better.
All the above three situations are different yet require feedback and opinion from employees. And this can only be done smoothly when the manager creates a set of questions that is related to the situation as well as to the outcome. Or you can say, a custom survey is needed to understand employees’ feedback in any of the above scenarios.
This set of questions is chosen by the HR or administration, considering the problems and circumstances. Hence, they directly address the employee’s specific needs.
And if it is done with a clear goal and the right strategy and approach, it can help in becoming effective for enhancing the employee experience. And also, to measure their engagement, satisfaction, and productivity.
In a custom survey, you can choose different types of questions, according to your employees’ convenience. Polls, pulse surveys, and descriptive answers are a few of the types that you can use in your survey.
Custom surveys are beneficial for your HR and administration in the following ways:
- Measure employees’ thoughts, opinions, and feelings at your workplace.
- Choose the audience accordingly.
- Identifying and analyzing risks and challenges.
- Gain in-depth insights about the workplace.
Let’s now understand how the HuddleUp platform lets you create one as well as look at its insights.
Custom survey and HuddleUp
HuddleUp, a human-centered platform help managers and teams to work better together. Through continuous check-ins, real-time insights, 1-on-1, and kudos, the platform help in supporting managers and boosting employee engagement and productivity. Thus, building connections and creating a positive and inclusive workplace for all.
But that’s not all! This people-first platform is constantly upgrading and intends to build an open and happy workplace for all employees. Custom Survey is one of the upgrades that have been added to the platform. The aim is simple and clear – to understand the team better.
You can find this option under the check-ins tab and in the ‘act’ category.
Steps to create Custom Survey
Just like using the HuddleUp platform, creating a custom survey is easy too.
Prerequisite knowledge to have before creating a survey:
- Your aim
- Audience
- Set of questions
- Delivery time
Following are the steps for designing a survey:
- Click on the ‘Custom Survey’ tab under the ‘Act’ category.
2. Now on the top right side of the screen, you will see ‘+ New survey’ and click on it. You will now be able to create your survey.
3. The first step is to add the title and description for your survey. After adding both, click ‘continue.’
4. Now, add the questions you would like to ask your team.
5. The next step is to select your audience and whether you want to keep the names anonymous or not.
6. You can now choose when you want to send the survey and can select your delivery channel.
7. After doing the above-mentioned steps, review them once and click on ‘publish.’
The survey is now ready and your team can now fill it up.
You can also find a few templates as well in the custom survey tab. To make your work simpler, we have attached the doc file below that includes templates that you can use for your custom survey.
Checking insights of the custom survey
The main aim of any survey is to know your employees’ feedback and work upon it. And you can only do so when you check the insights.
Checking the insights is as simple as creating a custom survey. All you have to do is: Check-ins > Act > Custom Survey > Your Survey.
Under ‘Your Survey’, click on ‘View Results’ on the survey you would like to see the insights for.
In the insights section, you can see how many have answered the survey and the insight for each question.
Advantages of the custom survey
The custom survey lets you know employees’ feedback and measures and drives results.
There are various advantages while you use this approach on the HuddleUp platform. Let’s understand them one by one below:
- No complexity: The above steps have made it obvious that there are no complications involved while designing a custom survey. Hence, letting you create one without taking much of your time and effort.
Also, as everything is already set up, all you have to do is to fill in according to what is being asked.
- Anonymous: Feedback can be both anonymous and non-anonymous, depending on the situation. While non-anonymous feedback works well when there needs to be accountability and follow-ups, anonymous feedback suits those situations when you need an honest opinion about something. Hence, custom surveys have an option where you can select whether to keep the survey nameless or not.
You can find this option under the ‘Audience and Permission’ category.
- Convenience: You can send your survey via platforms such as mail, slack, or WhatsApp, as per the convenience of your employees. This will ensure that no extra burden is created on them rather they only have to take out few minutes to fill it.
What questions to be included and how long a survey should be? We will discuss the best practices in the next section.
- Real insights: Without any extra analytics and tools, you can check the outcome of the survey on the same platform itself. The steps to check those insights are simple too (We’ve already discussed this above). This will help you in letting you know about the workplace, areas of improvement, and many more. In short, anything you would like to know.
P.S: Know that how you implement them depends on you and your organization!
- Target audience: It may be a situation where you need to have feedback from a particular department only. You can effortlessly do this too!
All you need to do is select ‘Demography’ under the ‘Audience and Permissions’ category and choose accordingly. There are other options as well such as tenure, location, team, designation, etc.
Best Practices for custom survey
Various questions may arise in your mind about what to add to your custom survey. Thus, we have added the best practices for creating an engaging survey for your employees. Have a look:
- Easy to understand: The questions in the survey should be clear and easy to understand. Avoid random questions rather add only those that are relevant to your business.
Suppose, you want to ask your new employees if they are liking the work culture of the company.
So, instead of writing:
- What is your ideal work culture?
Try writing like this,
- Rate the work culture of our organization (5: excellent and 1: Poor)
- Concise: The survey should not be too lengthy. As the length is an important factor in the completion rate. Also, note that the same questions should not be rephrased in many other questions or words.
For example, if you want to ask your employees for overall feedback, try doing it with a pulse survey or polls rather than open-ended ones. And ensure, that questions are not repeated in whatever form.
- Aim of the survey: Before you come up with a clear and concise survey, ensure that you know the aim of the survey. Answer these questions in your mind to know what’s the goal for the same:
- What is the reason behind this survey?
- What are my expectations from this survey?
- What should I not expect from this survey?
- Questions should be balanced: No matter what the reason for the survey is, ensure that the questions are balanced. By this, we mean that there should be a mix of positive and negative responses. Otherwise, the feedback would rather be in-authentic.
Instead of writing responses:
- Our manager act to our feedback
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither agree or disagree
Try writing responses like this,
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither agree or disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
- Ensure confidentiality: You will only get honest answers when there is confidentiality maintained. It is because most employees fear being judged or bullied because of their opinion. Thus, try sending surveys where the identity of an employee is hidden.
- Limit open-ended questions: Open-ended questions works great when you would like to have an in-depth understanding of any situation. But not every time. Try limiting open-ended questions as it makes them inconsistent and worldly.
Checking insights through the same will be a difficult task. Also, the employees’ will resist filling up the survey.
For example, If you want to ask about the team leader, instead of asking to describe them, try using polls for the same.
In a nutshell....
Employees are the brand ambassadors of the company. How you will treat them will reflect on how they represent your organization. Hence, use the custom survey every once or twice a month to understand the work culture well.
As the HuddleUp platform allows you to create one conveniently, consider doing it without forgetting. And whatever the insights will be, ensure that you implement those too.
To know more about our software, you can check our website here.