Employees Value Surveys But Many Companies Don’t Use Them AND Employees Don’t Trust Their Confidentiality
We recently ran a survey through LinkedIn to see if we could gather feedback on how employees feel about the process of providing feedback to their employers. What we found was confirming - lets take a look.
Do your employer run a survey?
The first thing we wanted to know was if their company ran regular employee feedback surveys.
60% of respondents said their company ran employee surveys. This was one of the more surprising elements of the data. However when we dug in a little more we can see this is fairly concentrated on the smaller company side of the scale:
This makes sense, as smaller organizations often forgo running employee feedback surveys due to limited resources and the misconception that formal feedback processes are better suited for larger companies. However, smaller organizations can greatly benefit from implementing regular feedback mechanisms. Engaging in safe, confidential, communication channels through third party surveys fosters a culture of transparency, trust, and continuous improvement. By actively seeking and responding to employee input, smaller organizations can identify and address issues more efficiently, leading to higher levels of employee satisfaction and retention. Additionally, surveys provide valuable insights that can inform strategic decisions and promote organizational growth.
However, even though most of the companies not running surveys were small, almost 20% of companies with 100 to 5000 employees were not running surveys. This was shocking, we would have guessed this group would almost all be asking their employees what they think.
On to the next finding - is this valuable?
We asked employees if they felt their voice was heard through the surveys and changes were made in the workplace to make the company better. The answer here was a resounding YES!
Nearly 74% of respondents told us their feedback was being used to improve the workplace. This is really good news as it tells us employees not only value the process of providing feedback, but it is empowering to feel that the feedback you are providing is valued enough to be used to improve the workplace. Also, the results are consistent across all company sizes (see below). There is a slight drop off as the company size increases as it can be harder to implement changes in very large organizations.
Confidential?
The last thing we wanted to know was if the employees felt the survey was 100% confidential so they could provide completely transparent feedback without fear of retaliation. This result surprised us the most as only 56% of the respondents felt they could be honest in the survey. This is obviously a huge concern because without confidentiality and transparency there will not only be a significant drop in participation, but the results of the survey will be flawed.
When we look at this by company size we can see the problem exists at all size companies but is even more pronounced in smaller companies.
Conclusion
What we can see above is:
Surveys are valued by employees as a safe space to provide feedback to leadership and when done right the employees can see the impact they are having on the organization which leads to better engagement and retention.
Smaller companies can find huge value in providing a feedback mechanism to their employees.
It is essential to find a means to provide a 100% confidential feedback mechanism for your employees. Generally this means a trusted third party provider, but other avenues exist.