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By: Andy West

Your employees are the backbone of your business. If they are unhappy, under trained, or unable to do their job correctly, your company's success suffers. Therefore an employee satisfaction survey can help you to stay on track with your employees and your business.

Here are some of the ways an employee satisfaction survey can benefit your business.

Ensure your employees know their jobs. A survey can help you keep tabs on your employees' attitude about their work. For example, a survey helps you make sure that your employees feel like they have been well trained in their jobs. There is nothing more frustrating for an employee than feeling like they don't know what they are supposed to be doing. Therefore, an under trained employee is an unhappy employee. And of course, this ultimately results in unhappy customers.

Improve customer satisfaction rates. Making sure your employees feel like they are well trained helps in another way: It ensures that your customers are able to enjoy the standards that you have established for your company with as few frustrations as possible while doing business with you. While it may not be immediately obvious, an employee satisfaction survey ensures that your customers are happier, as well as ensuring your employees are happy and confident in their jobs.

Ensure employees are happy. Happy employees make good employees, but happy employees also make devoted employees. This is important because fewer resignations mean fewer positions to fill with new hires. Not having to go through the process of hiring and training new employees saves your business both time and money, as you will see below.

Save money spent on hiring and training new employees. There are no two ways about it: A business that has high turnover will spend a lot more money on hiring and training new employees than a business that has low turnover. First there is the cost of running the ads and paying somebody to go through applications and conduct interviews; even if that person is already on your payroll, it's time you're paying them when they could do something else more productive.

Even after you have spent money on running ads, interviewing, and hiring a new employee, you have to spend more money on training. If you have a high turnover rate, you probably have a trainer, or even a training department, on staff. But even if you don't, you are paying somebody for time that could be spent on work that is more directly conducive to your company's success.

Eliminate time wasted on hiring and training new employees. All of the processes described above take a lot of time, and you know the saying: Time is money. When you have your experienced senior employees spending time on training new hires, you are potentially costing yourself money by diverting resources away from activities that would be more beneficial to your business, both financially and in terms of long term success. I cannot stress more, training and hiring is expensive!

Find out how to keep your employees. If you are noticing high or increasing turnover rates, an employee satisfaction survey may give you suggestions to keep more of your employees. Perhaps long-time employees feel that their pay does not accurately reflect their experience and devotion to your company; perhaps there is something you could do to make employees feel more at home with your company. Whatever the problem is, a survey can help shed light on the subject.

Many business owners don't realize the powerful connection between your employees' happiness and your business's success. You can't have a successful business without happy, competent employees, so it makes sense to use an employee satisfaction survey to keep tabs on your employees' attitudes about their work and their workplace.

Andy West writes for NBRI, a reputable company helping business owners explore venues to enhance employee relationships through an employee satisfaction survey. For more information visit NBRII.com.

Tags: Business/Human Resources/Employee Relations employee satisfaction survey

How an Employee Satisfaction Survey Benefits Your Business