Two news items recently came across our desk, providing us with some interesting figures:

• In a recent study, OfficeTeam (a division of Robert Half International, Inc.) found that 30 percent of managers said they feel more stressed at work than they did a year ago.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that employees have been in their current job an average of 4.4 years, up from an average of 4.1 years in January 2008. The increased tenure doesn’t mean that employees feel more satisfied or engaged; rather, the BLS indicates, it’s a result of less-senior workers losing their jobs (thus driving up the average) and fewer opportunities for switching employment.

This information serves as an important reminder: many employees are under pressure, and if they’re sticking around, it may not be a sign of loyalty as much as it is an indicator that they’re feeling trapped.

As an employer or an HR professional, you’re likely impacted by trends such as these, and it’s important that you get a feel for how satisfied your own employees are and how comfortable they are with the workplace environment. One approach you can take is by conducting an employee survey.

An employee survey offers many benefits. It can help you better understand the mood of your workers and identify some of the employee relations challenges you face. The information it provides can assist you with developing plans to address some of your workplace issues. In the end, you can use it as a tool to help you create a positive work environment, boost employee morale, and draw and keep top talent.

Your employee survey can take a variety of shapes:

• It can be broad and ask about a wide range of topics. (Questions might inquire about working conditions, policies and procedures, supervisors or managers, and so on.) Or it might focus in depth on a particular topic that you’re interested in learning more about (for example, compensation and benefits).
• Depending on your needs and what you hope to learn, it can be geared to the entire employee population or toward a specific group of employees (such as line workers, the purchasing department, and so on).
• It can be administered online or via paper and pencil, and it can come in the form of multiple-choice selections, open-ended questions, or a combination. When deciding format, make it as easy as possible on your employees to provide input, and also consider how much you can invest in interpreting results. If a large number of employees don’t have access to computers, for example, it might be easier to distribute hard copies of the survey—but it will also require more time for you to input and process the data.

An important point to keep in mind: if you conduct an employee survey, you must be willing to invest the time and energy to act upon it. This means you need to communicate to your employees about what you learned and how you’re going to respond. It doesn’t mean that you have to address everything the employees bring up, but you should identify at least a few things that you can speak to. Nothing looks worse than to conduct a survey and then ignore it.

Finally, after you’ve implemented your responses, it’s a good idea to go back and conduct a follow up survey within a suitable time frame (perhaps a year or two later) to see if they’ve had a measurable impact. A good example of this is a series of surveys that we at FlashPoint conducted for our client EHOB. Based on the findings of a 2006 survey, we recommended that EHOB introduce a formal performance-management program; two years later, we re-administered the survey and found that employees’ view of their supervisors had improved, in part because of the new program. (To learn more about this project, read our case study. In this example we were able to validate our approach; if results hadn’t been as favorable, we would have gone back and reexamined other solutions, perhaps digging in deeper to get more input.

The great thing about employee surveys is that they give you a level of certainty about what your employees are feeling and what you need to address. After all, it’s hard to fix things if you don’t know there’s a problem. While you might not like hearing that a third of your managers feel more under the gun than they did last year, by being aware of it you can begin thinking of solutions. And by doing so, you just might ensure that those tenure statistics go up and stay up, this time for all the right reasons.

To read another FlashPoint article on surveys, including five tips on administering them, click here.