Learn how to optimize company benefits using an online survey. Get inspired by plenty of concrete survey questions.
This article is useful for:
One day, there was a manager who started to notice increasing fluctuation in his company. With his HR specialist he decided to come up with some new benefits to cheer his employees up and make them stay. He offered each team a budget that the team could spend on some team building. But 60% of the employees weren’t interested. He organized some language courses but only 45% of the staff wanted to attend them. He asked the HR assistant to buy fresh fruits for the employees, he himself had new ergonomic chairs manufactured for the company, arranged supply of some spa vouchers… But all the money invested in company benefits brought neither better employee performance nor smaller fluctuation. The manager was very sad because he seemed to be in a deadlock.
What do you expect from offering benefits to your employees? Increased employee engagement? Higher personal performance? Lower fluctuation? Better professional education? All of this together? It makes sense. If you own a company or have a profit share, your main goal is to drive the revenue and maximize the market value of the company. Your employees are a precious resource enough that you desperately need to achieve this goal. That is why nurturing them is a rational behavior of a professional company owner or a perceptive manager.
Optimization in company benefits lies in finding the best way between your amount of money spendable for benefits and wishes of our employees. And if you reach a point where costs of benefits and employee satisfaction are lower than costs brought about by fluctuation (incl. costs connected to worse performance of unsatisfied employees), you have lifted the optimization to the top. This was a simplified example. There are surely other costs coming in this calculation but the bottom line is that it pays off to invest money in benefits.
The manager in the story has already shown us what the investments in benefits should not look like. How can we do this right? The thing is, employees know better than their managers what makes them feel comfortable at their workplaces. Especially in large companies where managers who decide about company benefits aren’t in contact with employees and cannot know all details about their daily work life. These managers can just assume what benefits would fit but the less they are in contact with the employees, the more likely these assumptions will miss the target.
Example: The manager buys new company t-shirts and jackets for the warehousemen. In fact, they don’t care about t-shirts and jackets, they would appreciate new high quality safety shoes to protect their knees and toes. And a new manager.
Does this bring you to a thought of what safety shoes have to do with benefits? And that’s it. If you think about benefits in terms of stereotypical items that everybody talks about (eg. team buildings, language courses or spa vouchers etc.), you will limit your own possibilities.
The question is not which benefits should a company offer but what should a company do in general to make its employees feel and perform better. And what is the easiest way to find out? Ask your employees in an online survey. It is much easier and faster than organizing one-to-one meetings with each employee individually.
Learn how you and your organization can benefit from using Survio.
It is the same here. If you ask your employees about which benefits they want to get, you will probably get a list of items you really don’t want to pay for because there is no sign of the desired effect for your company. You need to ask concrete questions related to the goals you want to achieve from your benefits. Try asking questions such as these:
As you see, these questions concentrate on both company goals as well as employee satisfaction. You can also add some people-related questions as interpersonal relations have a huge impact on employee satisfaction.
If you currently provide your employees with company benefits, test if and to what extent they are satisfied with them (so the investments pay off). Use a matrix question to make your survey shorter.
The output you get on satisfaction, however, doesn’t have to turn out as useful as you would expect. Therefore, it is advisable to divide your benefits into more matrix questions according to the goals that each benefit is to follow. Ask like this:
Only as a final question you can ask:
If a certain benefit is mentioned frequently by a number of your employees, you can think about this particular option to increase their satisfaction in bulk.
A company is a living organism. People leave and new people come and those who stay change, too. A decision you make one year does not have to meet the needs of your employees the next year. If you observe the employee satisfaction with benefits regularly, you will create a great basis for constant balance of the benefits in time. Ask the questions above quarterly and monitor the changes.
Another crucial thing is that your employees are assured about taking the surveys anonymously. The reasons are obvious: they won’t be worried to give honest answers their supervisor might not be fond of. And honest answers is what you need to collect to have relevant data, as it will determine the direction of a change to invest your money in. Thus, an anonymous survey is a must here. We'll talk more about that later.
After surveying, don’t stay quiet. Show your employees the results so they see which benefits are required. It is super easy, just share the result page via link. Communicate the outcome of the survey, which benefits you are going to introduce and which are going to drop off the list. If your employees won’t see such a reaction, they will give up on filling out surveys for you and you’ll fall into a deadlock.
First of all, define your goals and specific information that you need to find out. Then you can start creating survey questions.
Think about each question properly. Choosing an improper question type can ruin validity of the data. Be careful especially when choosing between simple choice and multiple choice questions because the data evaluation is different. Get more details on this topic in the article How to use closed-ended questions correctly on our blog.
Watch a short video and you’ll see how fast you can create your own survey.
Reach out to your employees in the most convenient way for them. There are various ways to collect responses, browse through our blog and the Help Center section. Share your surveys:
Tip: We talked about how important it is for your employees to know that the survey is anonymous. If you share the survey via individual e-mail invitations (a built-in feature), you will see the e-mail of each respondent in the results section.
Individual e-mail invitations is such a great feature when it comes to customer satisfaction surveys but when you share a company benefits evaluation survey to your employees, we recommend that you share it via link or through a QR code to allow anonymous responses.
You don’t need any other software to process the data. Survio analyzes results for you in clear and professional-looking charts and tables in real time.
Do you need to present the results to the top-management? Download Survio’s ready-to-use reports. Have them in one click in various formats (PDF, .docx, .pptx, xlsx, .csv or Google Sheets).
Remember, you invest in company benefits so it pays off to you. By investing in benefits you pursue the following goals:
You don’t want to invest in benefits like the sad manager from the story but like a smart manager that spends resources wisely, based on collected data.
When you ask about benefits in a survey, don’t ask generally but create specific questions like: Which tool or gadget would help you make your job easier and faster?
Conduct your survey regularly and monitor the situation overtime. You will be more prepared to respond to collected data in the long-term run.
You have to share an anonymous survey. Otherwise you won’t get honest answers.
After you collect your answers, define changes that come out of the survey as the result. Communicate them properly so your employees feel their voice is heard.
We hope you are now fully equipped to create your own surveys. Good luck with surveying!
