This is a Guest Post by Andrey Zavyalov of National Business Research Institute.

You know what motivates you but as a manager, it’s important to know what motivates the people within your work environment. Human resources personnel spend a great deal of their time crafting the workplace and catering to the needs of their workforce. However, their efforts can fail when they don’t have a qualified plan to evaluate, measure, and implement changes that will improve employee morale.

Now the questions arises:


Why is Employee Morale Important?


On an average, people spend about 8 hours in the workplace. They are expected to be productive for the entire day but studies show that in most scenarios this is not true, if not impossible. There are a variety of external and internal factors that contribute to the inefficiency of the workplace. A few important ones are:

• Employee and management relations
• Workload
• Stress
• Personal relationships
• Financial burdens
• Jobs security
• Job dissatisfaction
• Workplace policies

How Does it Work?

Employee morale survey questions should be customized to your specific situation. That way a solution can easily be quantified by a list of objectives that are important to your company. Surveys are designed to engage and elicit certain responses. Their anonymous nature ensures that an employee will not be penalized for their thoughts and to promote honest feedback.

The Likert scale is a popular format for many surveys. Statements are measured either numerically or based on strongly agree to strongly disagree. The scale tends to distribute answers in a way that gives a more accurate response from the testing population.


What to do After the Data is Collected?

The point of employee morale survey questions is to gain specific insight into what makes your employees tick. Many companies fail with surveys when they don’t follow up after the survey and analysis of the data. This sends a huge signal to employees and possible outside interests that you truly don’t value the opinion of your workforce.

Because it isn’t enough to send out an employee morale survey on, you need a plan on how you want to implement the results. Companies have used their results to set more appropriate goals that include special incentives, such as:

• Birthdays off
• Performance bonuses
• Trips
• Extended vacation days
• Casual work environment
• Company paid lunches
• Gift cards
• Changes to workplace designs
• Flexible work hours

If you don’t have the resources to make your own employee morale survey questions, there are several companies who have dedicated processes to constructing and analyzing surveys. You should keep in mind that this is the time to gage the thoughts in your workplace, not single any person out for their views. You want honest responses that will lead to improvement in employee morale.