Instant Census Blog
By Elyse Desmarais on August 27, 2015
Happy employees are a large component to a businesses’ success. High turnover rates and general employee dissatisfaction not only create an unpleasant work environment, but can hurt recruiting efforts and, ultimately, lead to a company’s downfall due to low productivity. In fact, it’s estimated it costs upwards of twice an employee’s salary to find and train a replacement.
There are many contributing factors to employee dissatisfaction, the most common being poor management, low employee engagement, compensation issues, and overall disinterest in the job itself. Luckily, employers have the chance to proactively fix these problems before they lead to excessive turnover, or an unfortunate article written about your company in the New York Times and a frustrated HR department.
Here’s our best advice on how implementing effective communication between you and your employees can help keep morale and productivity high and your business successful.
Many HR departments feature “open door” policies, meaning at any point in time an employee can stop by their HR professionals office to communicate problems, complaints, comments or suggestions. Although it is important to extend these offers to receive crucial feedback, some employees may not feel comfortable communicating face to face. This has grown even more true as Millennials, whose preferred methods of communication are email or text, begin to make up for more than half of the workforce.
Implementing alternate communication methods for your employees to provide feedback is one way employers can satisfy their workers’ desire to convey feedback beyond face to face interactions. While phone calls and emails are always less intrusive options, text messaging offers more convenience and flexibility.
Say your employee leaves work and remembers some feedback he/she meant to communicate during the workday. Instead of logging back into their email or waiting until the next day when it will likely be forgotten, the employee could simply pick up their mobile phone and send a text to a designated phone number or short code. Additionally, the employer could choose to allow the employee to remain anonymous via text message, creating an additional element of privacy.
Employers could also utilize text messages to distribute surveys to check-in with employees and solicit feedback to improve or maintain a good morale. Text message surveys, again, offer a level of convenience phone and web surveys cannot provide. These surveys can be taken outside the office, while on lunch break, or after office hours. Also, the employee will only need a mobile phone that supports SMS messaging, meaning no additional logins, etc. will be required, making the surveys easily accessible and quick to complete.
Companies who provide their employees a variety of options for their voices and opinions to be heard show workers they value feedback and want to create a pleasant work atmosphere. Implementing additional technology to collect feedback also allows employers to expand their HR open door policies and appease employees’ diverse preferred methods of communication.
Is your company looking for a better way to connect with employees and receive internal feedback? Interested in how your company can use text messaging for internal communications and surveys? Instant Census text message surveys are a great medium for employers to quickly gather feedback from their workers via SMS messaging.
Not only do we offer higher response rates and faster response times than email or phone surveys, we store all data on secure servers, and all access is carried over industry standard 2048-bit RSA SSL connections. We also provide regular updates on your participants’ activity and a basic statistical analysis report of your results at the end of each study.
Want to learn more about Instant Census text message surveys? Get in touch!