Considering that increased staff turnover rates can cost companies a lot of money, the only key to long-term success is represented by employee retention. The basic component which guarantees that employee retention rates are maintained at a superior level involves identifying the right opportunities of letting your employees know that they can express their ideas and opinions freely. There are several strategies to employ – so your company won’t have to use the services of a recruiting or headhunting service.
Most people feel good when they know that their opinion counts. Therefore, listening skills are essential a current business environment where the main objective of a good CEO is that of retaining top talent. Since costs involved by staff attrition are often seen as the greatest expenses of a business, all you have to do is pity the company that ignores the need of collecting feedback by acting like they don’t care about what their employees have to say.
The best thing is that feedback can be very easily obtained nowadays, when everybody is connected to the internet. Even though traditional face-to-face feedback is not very easy to replace, there are several other feedback mechanisms that can be very effective, including organized focus groups and phone feedback. The easiest way of understanding what your staff values and thinks is by conducting online feedback on a regular basis.
The benefits of online feedback are various, most of them being described in the following lines.
Lower Costs: according to several studies, web-based surveys cost 80% less than other alternatives based on paper, including direct costs such as postage, printing, and paper, as well as labor costs such as report generation and data entry.
Faster Decision Making: A rightly built web survey can be delivered using a professional e-mail in a certain day of the week. Most of the time, the results of these surveys will arrive in less than 48 after you’ve sent the initial invite. Paper surveys cannot provide results in such a short period of time, as they usually return from the recipients in a couple of months. Besides, the reports cannot be generated in less than a month.
Greater Accuracy: When it comes to web-based surveys, there are several tools that can tell you exactly what options were selected by the respondent or what he/she typed. Besides, you don’t have to spend impressive amounts of time reading handwritten responses of employees who write like doctors.
Higher Response Rates: Even though the response rate is influenced by certain factors such as survey timing and length, your relationship with the responder, and subject matter, web-based surveys usually attract higher response rates compared to the paper ones. If you want to make sure that the response rates will be maximized, all you have to do is send e-mail reminders to the employees who haven’t completed the survey yet.
More flexible distribution, filtering of reports, and storing: If you have ever submitted your employees to a paper-based survey, you definitely know that nothing lasts more than getting familiar to the data entry, analyzing the results, and reporting them. A well-made web-based survey tool remarkably reduces this amount of time because it generates instant graphs and charts, featuring data filtering by name, region, or date. Besides, it also distributes the report on the internet, which means that you will get to see the results in no time.
If you want to remove your staff retention rate, you can always turn to one of the following types of surveys:
- Satisfaction/ Staff Climate surveys: This survey is usually conducted once per year, and the internet is the easiest way of delivering it. Besides, it can help you reduce your time and costs remarkably.
- New Starter Feedback: This type of feedback is usually used to require feedback from new employees who have just started to work for the company. The results will basically provide you with more details related to what your employees think about the induction and recruitment processes to which they have been submitted.
- Remove Exit Interviews: Exit interviews seldom take place face-to-face if employees leave suddenly. That’s why web-based exit interviews are used: they provide good response rates which usually help you improve your employment practices.
- Training Needs Analysis: Have you been trying to plan your training budget for the following year? This implies that you need to know exactly which training opportunities are valued by your employees. If you happen to be in this situation, the best way of collecting this type of data is by creating an online forum.
All in all, web-based surveys represent the easiest way of increasing staff retention and receive useful feedback. Knowing these things can help improve your strategy as a business leader, which means that you should definitely know what your employees think in order to maximize production and satisfy their requirements as well.