Employee Satisfaction Score

Sometimes you don’t want to run a full employee engagement survey, but you just want to do a quick check to see how things are going. Call it a “mood meter” or a high level check to see if you can catch some underlying issues that may require further investigation.

Of course it is understood that a quick check is not meant for applications where the correlation between questions and outcomes require a statistically defensible position. HR folks and OD folks sometimes just need a quick tool that would help you see if there may be a trend that is worth looking into further at your location. Sometimes the trend you see can be as simple as a low level of responses to your quick check.

A few watch-outs:

1. Don’t make this the ONLY tool you use to determine how happy your employees are. There are some very affordable and good tools available to drive a more in-depth look at your company culture or employee engagement. This is just for spotting any trends you may need to be aware of or take a look at.
2. Don’t survey your poor employees to death. Don’t run this any more than once every other month – at most. Even that. If you do that too often, people will lose interest and you will lose credibility.
3. You can plan to take some actions based on what comes out of this quick check, but if you really want to determine change management initiatives that will most likely take a while to implement and cost more than a few pennies – this is not enough. You would have to follow-up with something more solid for that purpose. Focus groups, a full employee engagement survey etc.
4. Don’t give them too much time to respond or they won’t take you serious on the deadline and put things off until they forget. Don’t give them too little time either – be aware of their workload and other priorities when you decide how much time to allow. I would recommend 7 to 10 days as an average, but it does depend on factors such as whether it is a small group, are they all based at one location or spread around the globe/region?
5. Be sure to be clear on why you are running it and what can be expected from the outcomes when you introduce the tool. People who are in some way distrustful or feel unhappy could easily read negative motivations into your introduction of this tool plus management and leaders whom you are trying to support by doing this could easily expect too much from this.

I am sure I could come up with more watch-outs, but for now, I will just post this tool for your use and wish you good outcomes! Feel free to let me know what your thoughts and experiences are/were with these kinds of quick tools.