How To Assess Employee Morale

If you own a business, you are likely interested in keeping track of the satisfaction levels of your employees. Gauging employee morale can be tricky because employees who are truly dissatisfied with their position might not express that out of fear of retaliation. However, there are several ways to assess employee satisfaction anonymously and accurately, leading to a higher chance of being able to learn from the experiences of employees and put new best practices into place. Here are some different ways for a business to assess employee morale. 

1. Distribute Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Surveys can be done in a variety of ways, including in-person, via pen and paper, or online. Pen and paper surveys can be distributed in a way where the answers are anonymous, as can online surveys. However, it is usually beneficial to ask for some demographic data that can later be aggregated; such data may include age, gender, length of time at the company, and job duties as long as the information can be kept anonymous. How comfortable employees will be when answering more specific demographic data largely depends on how many employees work at the company. 

One of the more common problems when it comes to surveys is the possibility of a low response rate. There are several things you can do to improve the response rates of surveys, including:

• Keeping the survey short and to the point
• Explaining up-front what the purpose of the survey is and what the company hopes to get out of the responses
• Refraining from sending out too many surveys, which can lead to survey fatigue
• Providing incentives to filling out the survey, especially if keeping responses anonymous is not a concern 

Before beginning to write a survey, have a plan in place regarding what you want to accomplish with the survey and how you plan to use the response data. This will save you from having to potentially ask follow-up questions in the future. 

2. Utilize Software

Using software to assess employee morale comes with the great benefit of gaining completely unbiased information. Workforce intelligence software helps you to gain insight into areas like hiring, workplace performance, productivity, and more. More specifically, many software systems look into these two areas of employee and business performance:

• People intelligence, which involves analyzing how well people’s skills fit with their current job as well as how well they fit within their team
• Project intelligence, which can be defined as looking at which aspects of the company you may need to allocate greater resources to and finding ways to improve the outcomes of various projects

Parsing through and analyzing data by hand is time-consuming and leads to human error. Software systems can save time and prevent these errors by automatically looking at how your employees and company are performing and providing feedback in the form of spreadsheets or dashboards. 

3. Build a Culture of Transparency

As mentioned in previous paragraphs, employees often have a tendency to not say how they truly feel about their position or work environment out of fear of retaliation or getting on the bad side of their supervisor. This fear can be mitigated by creating a culture within the company that values being open and honest with the common goal of improving the business for all employees. Designated human resource personnel are a good option to have on board when employees have concerns that they are hesitant to express to their direct supervisor. Honest feedback works both ways, so be sure to be open about if and how an employee’s concern will be handled. 

If you run a company and hope to improve employee morale, look into one or more of these methods.