Employees can see these questionnaires as a lip-service process by employers to indicate that they are communicating with and listening to their employees.  Employers often shoot themselves in the foot by using this method to gather views of the staff but then do nothing about using the information to guide change and communicating back to employees the actions taken.

Despite the potential negatives of employee surveys, when they are well briefed out, well written and the results fed-back they can fulfil several uses, namely

• Assessing the potential risk of stress amongst your employees, when 12.8 million working days were lost to stress, depression and anxiety in one year and rising claims against employers for work related stress and mental injury this is an important issue to be aware of.
• Highlighting training needs for managers through feedback on the relationship from their team.  The relationship with the line-manager is one of the key factors to labour turnover.
• Reviewing the risk of losing key members of the team to other employers by gathering information about how content and stimulated employees are.
• Checking what level of understanding employees have with regard to company policies, this can be a useful defence when an employee claims that the employer is partly responsible for the actions of another employee (vicarious responsibility).
• Assessing what additional benefits would truly be appreciated by staff and would have the impact on loyalty or motivation that you are looking for.

The list goes on, and on.  The HR Tap will work with you to prioritise what you want to gain from carrying out a survey and be sure that you have the resources to fully implement the survey, carry out the evaluation and give feedback to ensure that you gain all the benefits of this powerful tool.