When you run a small business, it is easy to think you know how your staff are feeling.
After all, you might only have five, ten or twenty employees. You see them regularly. You talk to them. If something was wrong, surely someone would say something?
Not necessarily.
One of the things we regularly see when working with businesses is that what an employer thinks is happening in the workplace and what employees are actually experiencing can be quite different.
That doesn’t automatically mean there is a bad culture or that management is doing something wrong. People simply don’t always tell their employer exactly what they think.
Sometimes they don’t want to create an issue. They might be worried about how their comments will be received, or they don’t want to be seen as a complainer. Sometimes they think nothing will change anyway.
And sometimes the first real indication an employer gets that there is a problem is when a good employee resigns.
This is where a staff satisfaction or employee engagement survey can be extremely useful — even if you only employ a handful of people.
What’s the difference?
Staff satisfaction and employee engagement are related, but they aren’t quite the same thing.
A staff satisfaction survey is generally looking at how people feel about working in your business.
Are they happy with communication? Do they feel supported by their manager? Do they have the equipment and resources they need? How are workloads? Do people feel recognised for the work they do? Are there frustrations that keep coming up?
An employee engagement survey goes a little further.
It looks at how connected people are to the business and their work. Do they understand where the business is going? Do they know what is expected of them? Do they feel that their work matters? Would they recommend the business as somewhere to work? Can they see themselves still being there in the future?
There is value in looking at both.
Someone can be reasonably satisfied with their job without being particularly engaged in the business. They come to work, do what is required and go home.
On the other hand, you might have an employee who really cares about the business but is becoming frustrated by workload, poor communication or something that has never been addressed.
As an employer, both are worth knowing.
My business only has a few employees. Is it really necessary?
We would argue that the smaller the business, the more important it can be to know what is happening.
If you have 100 employees and one person leaves, it can cause disruption.
If you have six employees and one person leaves, you have just lost a significant part of your workforce.
They may also take years of knowledge and experience with them. Someone else has to cover their work. You then have recruitment costs, training, lost productivity and the time involved in getting a new person up to speed.
The same applies to workplace culture.
In a small team, one unresolved problem between two people can quickly affect everyone else. A communication issue with a manager doesn’t just affect one department when the whole business works closely together.
Finding out about these things earlier gives you an opportunity to do something about them.
Why use someone outside the business?
You can certainly ask your staff how things are going, and you should.
Good employers should be having regular conversations with their people.
But there is a difference between having those conversations and giving employees an opportunity to provide feedback independently.
Think about being asked directly by your employer:
“Do you think I’m a good manager?”
Most people are probably going to choose their words fairly carefully.
Even when the employer genuinely wants honest feedback, there is still a power imbalance in the relationship. This is the person who manages their employment, performance, hours, leave and potentially their future with the business.
Using an independent third party gives employees some separation from that.
It can also help the employer because the information can be looked at objectively. Rather than concentrating on one comment or trying to work out who said what, we can look for patterns.
Perhaps communication is coming through as an issue across several responses. Maybe people are unclear about their responsibilities. There could be concerns about workload or management.
Equally, the survey might show that employees are highly satisfied and there are a lot of things the business is doing well.
That’s useful information too.
What happens after the survey matters
This is probably the most important part.
There isn’t much point asking employees what they think, producing a report and putting it in a drawer.
In fact, asking for feedback and then appearing to ignore it can create its own problems.
A survey should give you information you can actually use.
At Assurance HR Management (AHR), we can develop a survey specifically for your workplace rather than simply sending every business the same generic questionnaire.
Depending on what you want to understand, we can look at things such as communication, management, workplace relationships, workloads, recognition, training, role clarity, workplace culture, confidence in raising concerns and whether employees see themselves staying with the business.
AHR can independently conduct the survey, review the responses and provide you with a clear summary of what your employees are telling you.
Where appropriate, we can also make practical recommendations about what you might want to address.
That doesn’t mean changing everything employees don’t like. Running a business still involves making decisions that won’t always please everyone.
The point is to have better information when making those decisions.
Sometimes you just need to ask
You don’t need to wait until people start resigning, complaints are being made or workplace relationships have broken down before checking how your team is going.
For a small business, a staff survey can be a relatively simple way of finding out what’s working, what isn’t and whether there are things developing that you should know about.
And you may be pleasantly surprised by the results.
If you would like to get a better understanding of how your employees feel about working in your business, Assurance HR Management can conduct an independent Staff Satisfaction Survey, Employee Engagement Survey, or a combination of both.
We’ll work with you on what you want to find out, independently gather the feedback and, importantly, help you understand what the results are actually telling you.
Sometimes the simplest way to find out what’s happening in your workplace is to ask the people working in it.
Assurance HR Management – The Workplace Problem Solvers!
