How to design an employee development survey
Best practices for gathering employee feedback to promote upskilling and foster employee engagement.
Why employee development is a critical component of employee experience (EX)
Employee development, sometimes called professional development or upskilling, refers to how organisations support their workforce to acquire new skills and competencies. It has evolved from a nice-to-have employee benefit to a key strategy for retaining, engaging and recruiting new employees. And it’s easy to see why, with more job candidates seeking growth opportunities in their next position and more companies desperate to retain job hoppers (like millennials).
How did employee development become a key focus for so many HR teams and businesses? Let’s examine the benefits to explain this phenomenon.
- Filling the skills gap: Preparing employees for roles at a rate that keeps pace with technological advancements is difficult, but it can be addressed through employee development. These programmes can also strengthen employee performance and prepare those with high potential for critical leadership roles when needed.
- Promoting employee engagement: Employees feel valued and invested when they’re given new learning pathways and opportunities to advance in their careers. It’s no wonder, therefore, that companies that invest in employee development report seeing a 58% increase in retention and a 24% increase in productivity.
- Giving an edge in recruitment: Development programmes that are made public often gain the attention of top talent looking for ways to stay competitive in their field. Training and skill development opportunities can ensure that employees and their companies remain competitive.
Life for HR professionals has become a lot more interesting in recent years. Working to support the entire employee experience (EX) means coordinating and communicating development programmes and tuition/learning benefits that can directly benefit the company’s bottom line.
The best employee development programmes are customised to the needs of the individual rather than a one-size-fits-all offering. How will you know which types of learning opportunities are valuable to employees at an individual level? Here’s where employee voices and feedback across the organisation come in.
Surveys for employee development are a natural starting point for creating a programme or learning benefit. For example, you might want to gauge how satisfied current employees are with their career development opportunities. This career development survey template can be used for that precise purpose.
Why use employee development surveys?
Employee development surveys are very useful tools for HR professionals; they’re a key way to uncover ongoing opportunities for job training or professional growth. Surveys also provide the quantitative and qualitative data that HR teams need at every stage of an employee development programme, from programme design to benchmarking progress to demonstrating ROI. Here are a few important ways in which HR teams use surveys for employee development programmes, engagement and employee experience.
- Training course evaluation surveys: Help isolate exactly which parts of your courses are most effective and where there’s room for improvement.
- Employee pulse surveys: Frequently measure employee satisfaction to close any gaps in the employee experience.
- 360-degree feedback surveys: Gain insights about behaviour, collaboration efforts and other key areas affecting productivity.
The thread connecting these types of surveys is listening. Listening to employees is the only way to provide informed responses regarding development opportunities, engagement and culture initiatives and overall EX improvements. In short, surveys provide the data backbone for insightful, employee-centric strategies.
5 tips for building impactful employee development surveys
Thoughtfully designed surveys provide the insights needed to enhance employee development and engagement. Follow these tips when creating, deploying and acting on survey results.
1. Determine goals and purpose
- Define the objectives and scope of the survey: Start your survey design process by clearly determining the specific goals that you want to achieve and the topics or areas that the survey will address. For example, if you want to evaluate a mentorship programme, the objectives could be: 1) to assess the programme’s learning value; 2) to gauge the career impact; and 3) to identify areas for improvement.
- Identify your target audience: Based on the survey’s focus, determine which employee groups are most important to gather insights from: for example, all employees, those enrolled in development programmes, managers, etc. Their feedback should directly inform decisions.
2. Determine when and how to share
- Consider when and how often to deploy the survey: Will this be a one-time or recurring survey? Recurring surveys could include before/after training programmes or quarterly pulse checks to ensure that you capture useful pre- and post-data.
- Consider how to share the survey and communicate access to it: Create a URL or QR code linking to your survey so you can send or post your survey anywhere you want: email, intranet or team social channels such as Slack.
3. Choose effective questions
- Select questions that align with your survey’s purpose and goals: The questions must track back to the stated objectives to stay focused and provide insights that drive future decisions.
- Select questions that will help you gain the right insights: Move beyond satisfaction ratings to get specifics such as programme quality, skills gained, challenges faced and recommendations.
- Avoid bias and leading questions: Use neutral language that does not influence responses and steer clear of loaded questions. When crafting questions, don’t assume the outcomes and then let that guide you, because your bias may ultimately skew your data.
- Use a mix of open- and closed-ended questions (and “why”): Closed-ended questions can provide quantitative data for analytics; open-ended questions can gather deeper qualitative insights and capture nuances to explain the “why”. Together, they provide a complete picture.
4. Analyse employee feedback
It’s important to stress the value of analysing your employee development survey results. Being thorough allows you to transform the survey data into credible insights that diagnose employee disengagement issues, validate theories, identify priorities and shape decisions.
- Look for key themes and trends: Spot employee sentiment trends, recurring themes in open comments as well as areas with unusually high/low scores, demographic differences and changes over time.
- Prioritise areas for improvement: Determine which findings indicate the biggest gaps or opportunities to drive action planning, from programme design flaws to training materials that may have missed the mark in terms of fostering the right skills.
- Share the results with stakeholders: Provide analytical reports to management and key decision-makers. Remember to be transparent about key survey findings and any subsequent decisions as this demonstrates responsive follow-through.
5. Create an action plan
- Assign responsibilities and timelines: Designate owners across teams (Learning & Development, for example) and hire managers and project leads to conduct employee development programmes.
- Determine how to implement changes and monitor progress: Detail the specific activities involved in rolling out changes, such as revised training curricula, new project management tools for managers or additional mentorship touchpoints.
Best practices for employee development surveys
Now that we’ve given you five steps for implementing and evaluating employee development surveys, let’s explore the best practices for setting expectations for employee participants while maximising their engagement.
- Be clear and concise: Keep surveys focused and scannable to respect employees’ time and maintain engagement. You should aim to build a survey that takes 5–10 minutes to complete. In addition, you’ll need to be transparent with employees about what the survey is for and how the data will be used, both in your invitation and on the Intro Page of your survey.
- Follow up on feedback: Be as quick and responsive as possible with recipients to address essential challenges or concerns highlighted by the survey. Acknowledge their feedback and let them know how you plan to address it.
- Foster honest feedback: In many cases, you may want to anonymise your survey so that employees feel comfortable sharing candid feedback without worrying about any consequences. Encourage participation by promoting the survey’s purpose and potential impact.
- Use a survey template: Use our career development template that can be personalised with your company’s brand colours, messaging, logos and other assets that reflect your company’s culture and priorities.
Build better employee development surveys
Well-designed employee development surveys are a strategic tool for gathering insights into the upskilling needs, priorities and total experiences of an organisation’s greatest assets: its people. When crafted thoughtfully, distributed regularly, analysed and acted upon, surveys supply the hard evidence to pinpoint strengths, diagnose trouble spots and spark meaningful change.
Reliable employee perspectives dispel assumptions, sharpen development investments, elevate engagement and retention and inform EX enhancement and talent strategy. In essence, organisations that consistently listen to their employees by means of recurring surveys demonstrate commitment to empowerment while shaping their futures based firmly on data-driven action.
Learn how SurveyMonkey can help you build better employee onboarding and training programmes.
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