Businesses need employees to trust them. Without trust, it’s both tricky to retain talented team members, and tough to attract the right people to roles as they become available.
Luckily the rise of third-party employee surveys and the platforms that host and promote them is helping to highlight trustworthy employers, and empower job seekers to find businesses that will value and nurture them.
Let’s look at how this is achieved by the burgeoning employee survey ecosystem, and why this matters where employer trust ratings are concerned.
Impartiality is important
Businesses cannot afford to be hostile to platforms that let trusted employees review their operations and give their honest opinions about their experiences while working as part of a given organization.
The simple fact is that people have the means and the motive to speak their minds freely thanks to the internet, and so attempting to quash conversations about your brand is effectively impossible.
Furthermore, prospective employees will appreciate being able to find reviews of businesses that are found on impartial third-party platforms.
Rather than having to accept that cherry-picked feedback found on your own website or job listings is accurate, they can see a range of unfettered overviews at a glance.
In turn, if you actively encourage current employees to take surveys and leave ratings on respected external platforms, this will indicate that you are open to constructive criticism.
Recognizing that no business is perfect, and there is always room for improvement, will build trust from the get-go.
Responding to survey findings is essential
It is all well and good to leverage third-party survey solutions to find out how employees feel about your business, and potentially share the positive vibes with others. However, this could backfire if you don’t take any action based on the issues that the surveys bring to light.
In fact, trust could deteriorate rapidly if it seems like you are only conducting surveys to placate employees and make them feel like they are being listened to, when in fact it is just an exercise in hollow reputation management.
So in order to establish a trusting relationship with current team members, and hope that this trust is maintained even after they move on to greener pastures, survey findings have to be given plenty of attention.
Ideally, you will be able to identify problems and find solutions for them which will augment employee satisfaction and also lead to your business being more productive and profitable.
Of course some concerns may not be addressable, for whatever reason. If this is the case, you still need to provide an explanation of the reasons behind this, rather than keeping quiet.
Openness and honesty in the face of survey feedback will invariably increase trust ratings, so long as your motives are pure and your answers are well-explained, this should be within reach.
Scheduling makes a difference
Employee surveying is not a one-time process, and seeking feedback on at least an annual basis is sensible for most businesses.
Unsurprisingly, you cannot simply throw caution to the wind when picking a time to schedule surveys, even with the convenience and cost-effectiveness that third party platforms bring to the table.
Your aim should be to achieve both the greatest proportion of responses, and to secure the most realistic overview of the state of play within your organization.
As such, it is unwise to pick a time which is typically busier or more pressured, which may be more relevant to businesses in industries which have specific seasonal peaks and troughs in activity to take into account.
Customization is useful
To build trust and get better ratings for your business, it’s important to ask employees the right questions when they are being surveyed.
Outsourcing this to a third-party platform should provide you with the means to customize the questionnaire aspect, basing this on what you feel are your specific strengths or weaknesses, and looking for feedback from team members that reflects or rejects these notions.
Competitor comparisons are impactful
Lastly, with the help of a third-party employee survey package, you are not just able to compare your performance to your own internal research performed in the past, but also capable of measuring your firm’s effectiveness in relation to its nearest rivals.
This is handy for seeing how well you are doing within your industry, and is also a good way of letting employees know that your efforts to gain their trust and keep them satisfied are going above and beyond the average experience encountered elsewhere.
Concluding thoughts
Major business decisions, whether relating to internal processes or company culture, do not have to be made without employee input.
Third-party survey platforms enable this, and the knock-on benefit of building team member trust will be evidenced in the improved ratings you receive.