3 Ways to Build an Employee Survey Manager

What are employee feedback surveys and how do they help?

Employee feedback surveys are anonymous surveys that are shared with all employees in the company. These can contain questions regarding:

• The work environment
• Their workload and if they’re able to manage it easily
• Learning opportunities
• Feedback for manager
• Personal goals
• Ways to improve current working experience.

Employees are encouraged to be candid and as descriptive as they can be. The results allow the HR department to identify possible causes for employee turnover and areas of improvement. They can then prioritize each of these based on how many employees are being affected and work towards creating a healthy and productive work environment.

Employee feedback surveys allow you to:

• Understand problems faced by employees and gauge sentiment in a secure and easy way.
• Help improve processes backed by data, without just shooting in the dark.
• Helps prevent work disruptions and labor shortages.
• Reduces the cost and time spent in hiring and training new employees.

Also, employee feedback surveys cannot be a one-time check-in with your employees. They need to be periodic so any new problems are quickly highlighted and nipped in the bud.

But, hold on. How do you deploy these surveys, especially if you’re working with remote or deskless employees? Here are a few ways to tackle the problem:

1. Printed surveys, handed to employees in person or mailed. Collected later on.
2. Excel sheets with quizzes, sent to employees, and compiled in one later on.
3. Survey software, sent to employees, and automated results are shared with the management.

Each of these approaches has its pros and cons. Let’s explore these in depth.

3 Different ways to deploy employee feedback surveys

1. Pen and Paper

Pen and paper is the traditional route to go and how many organizations still deploy feedback surveys. They’re also simple to create.

Here’s the quick process. You write out a survey on your computer and print several copies. These are attached to a clipboard and handed to each member of the staff. Once they’re all filled out, surveys are collected and stored in a binder or filing cabinet.

Later on, the HR team will go ahead and go over these responses. You can analyze them one by one and find out the key concerns pointed out. You can also copy this data into an excel sheet and get

Want a pre-built employee feedback survey for print? Download now.

Now, let’s explore the pros and cons of this approach.

Pros

• Easy for old-school staff to understand
• Fast to get started
• Doesn’t require tech or electronics

Cons

• Hard to analyze and process data later on. Each assessment must be manually reviewed.
• Can be tough to interpret different handwriting.
• High risk of getting lost or damaged.
• High risk of getting accessed by unauthorized personnel.
• Hard to share and collect from remote and deskless teams.
• Does not prepare for the future.

2. Custom Excel Tool

The second option is to keep things online via an Excel sheet. This helps create a secure database of responses online and lets you conveniently review them later on.

HR teams build feedback surveys on excel and share the file with employees across the organization via email.

Since this isn’t administered in person, you need to share a deadline. This allows employees to complete the form and send it back to you in a timely manner. You’ll also have to carefully track the total survey responses and keep checking your inbox to make sure everyone has responded on the form.

You’ll also need a different excel sheet for every respondent to ensure anonymity. Once all the responses are in, HR has to compile them into one and start the analysis.

Want a employee feedback survey template for excel? Download now.

Pros

• Digital and secure. Responses are saved in an online database.
• Fast to get started, create online and email to staff.
• Responses can be printed or saved as PDF.
• Free forever and can be re-used easily.

Cons

• Better than paper but responses still need to be verified and compiled manually.
• Requires basic excel knowledge to create and analyze.
• Difficult to use on mobile. Excel isn’t mobile-friendly.
• Does not scale with multiple types of forms.
• Less functional for team operations.

3. Dedicated Survey Software

The third option is to use a dedicated survey tool. These are also digital tools but are especially designed for surveys and help make data compilation and analysis easier.

Survey tools often contain pre-built templates for employee feedback surveys so your team doesn’t have to spend hours finding the right questions. And that doesn’t mean you can’t customize them. You can always add your own questions, remove things you don’t need, and create a personalized survey experience for your employees.

Another thing that makes these superior to both Excel sheets and paper surveys is the convenience they offer. They’re easy to access online, can be filled out on the go from any device, and respondents can easily pick up from where they left off. Many such tools will also have several other forms that you can also use, such as an exit interview questionnaire and checklist.

Pros

• Easy to create and share surveys.
• Enables fast and wide survey distribution.
• Offers flexibility and data security.
• Easy to analyze responses.
• Easy to fill forms on the go.

Cons

• Some options are paid.
• Requires teams to learn a new tool.

Now, let’s explore a few options for survey tools online that we recommend using.

First Pick: Xenia - The No.1 Employee Survey Manager

Xenia is a complete operations and maintenance management tool that offers survey tools and a checklist library. You can use an employee feedback survey from the public templates or create your own version from the checklist builder. And of course, both are fully customizable.

Another key benefit of using this tool is that you’re able to track each employee’s progress within Xenia, rather than running after your workforce to ask them where they’re at.

A complete operations management tool lets you track all your employee data in one place. You’re able to monitor availability, tasks assigned, leaves taken, time clocked, and much more, all in one app. You can also save their form and checklist responses in the same tool and review later. This also means that you can overview productivity data to put employee feedback into context.

With so many different use cases, how do you run employee survey feedback on Xenia?

• Creating a survey: the checklist builder lets you create your own personalized forms. You can add headers to create multiple sections and use text fields to record responses. Xenia also offers the option to request additional comments and notes.
• Using a template: you can access the public template library within Xenia to use the employee feedback survey or choose from hundreds of other templates for every use case.
• Share the survey: assign the survey to all employees and track progress from the task manager. You can assign a deadline and also a set priority.
• Analyze the results: use log reports to track survey completion and view each individual result easily. You can also download the report in a PDF or CSV for further analysis.

Why is Xenia our pick for the best digital survey tool?

• Helps to act on employee feedback with the frontline tools to optimize operations.
• Provides employee productivity data to put employee feedback into context.
• No form limits, submission limits, or storage limits.
• Easy to track progress.
• Notify employees when the deadline is close with push notifications.
• No form limits, submission limits or storage limits
• Digitizes all paper logs and processes
• Offers 100s of pre-built templates to choose from
• Reports can be printed or saved to PDF
• Solve many other business problems all in one place.
• Map locations for facilities-based teams.
• Comes with a competitive cost of $10/month per user.

Xenia features & use cases:

• Work order management
• Preventive maintenance
• Task management
• Checklist, inspection and SOP builder
• Digital logs for any process
• Free ready to use toolbox library
• Instant chats with team

Second Pick: Google Forms

Google Forms also offer templates for employee feedback surveys. This is a free form builder that’s a good option for teams looking for a clean and simple survey tool and don’t want any other features in the pack.

Google Forms are easy to create and share with your teams. These are again easy to build and share.

Key features

• Form templates so you can get started right away.
• Basic customization options for styling.
• Reliable and free.

Third Pick: Jotform

Similar to Google Forms, Jotform is a dedicated online form builder. What differentiates this from Google Forms though is its superior customization options and for that reason, this is a paid tool. It’s a lot more flexible and offers various types of questions that you can add to your survey.

If you want to create aesthetically pleasing surveys with multiple options for question types, Jotform might be a good choice.

Key features:

• Powerful platform for surveys and forms.
• Several customization and styling options.
• Less team functionality unless an enterprise customer
• Not built for the deskless workforce, no tools to act on feedback
• Starts at $34 per month for bronze plan with a 25-form limit and 1000 monthly submissions. Options available for bigger plans.

Fourth Pick: Connecteam

Connecteam is another employee management app that lets you create employee feedback surveys. It allows you to access key tools for your team such as onboarding features, employee acknowledgment tools, and HR document storage.

These make up for a complete employee management experience to help your HR teams get work done fast.

Key features:

• Built for teams and has great functionality with quizzes and polls as well as surveys
• Contains tools to act on feedback via task management & checklists (comes with an extra charge but available in the same app)
• No form or submission limits.
• Cannot map locations for facilities based teams.
• Cheap if you’re just looking for basic employee management tools, starts at $35 per month for 30 users.

Conclusion

Feedback surveys help you understand how your employees are currently feeling and where your management is lacking. They’re a critical part of the continual effort required to improve the working environment at any organization.

While they may seem straightforward to conduct, organizations need to start taking them more seriously. These assessments can’t be one-off exercises that don’t result in change. If you don’t take employee feedback seriously, the entire process becomes counterproductive. Team members feel that their opinions aren’t valued by the company so they give 40 hours a week to. That’s even worse than them not sharing feedback.

So, be sure to diligently take employee feedback. The best way to do so is with a dedicated survey tool that also houses employee data across functions.