Target proper and efficient investments in education of your employees. Get valuable feedback in online surveys.
Who is this article useful for?
Create a survey for free
The company is built on people. If the company's environment is pleasant at first sight, modern and open to growth, it will attract people who want to work in such an environment. An innovation center attracts innovators. Investing in the development of your employees brings qualified skills gained through courses, conferences, mentoring and innovative projects. These will enable you to successfully compete with other companies on the market by being able to adapt to changing customer needs. At the beginning of every success there is the accumulation of knowledge and experience. Will you embark on the road to success in your company?
In this article, we will discuss how to effectively identify your employees' needs for development and training, using an online survey. Once you've figured out what direction you want to develop your employees and you've run the courses and training, you need to get feedback. You need to know if you're investing in your employee development the right way. That's why this article has a second part where you will learn how to use online surveys to evaluate the courses or other development activities that have taken place.
Many companies offer education and career growth on their job offers. Some of these companies really provide training and courses for all people in general (for example language courses) and present it as a benefit. However, people in the company have different positions and because they are each a professional in a different field, they can create something progressive together. Training needs usually vary from person to person.
If you want to find out what kind of development is really helpful for employees to improve their performance, ask them and their direct team leader. If the training of employees is decided by someone who is not close to what they actually do on a daily basis (top managers or a corporate HR manager), it can easily happen that the training will not be useful and a lot of money will be wasted.
The more employees your company has, the more unrealistic it is to ask each one individually. If you use an online survey, you only need to ask once, but you will get as many answers as the number of employees you have sent the survey to. You will see the results as they arrive in real time. Survio performs the result analysis for you in clear graphs and tables. To present your results, you can download them as a report in one click (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, CSV or Google Sheets.
You'll know your employees' individual needs in no time. The money you decide to invest in employee development will then have a much more direct impact on their work skills and performance. Such an investment will pay off.
The goal is to get concrete information about how your employees want to move forward in their jobs. You also want them to get engaged and motivated - the more motivated people feel, the greater their performance is. The message you want to communicate through your survey is: “Tell us what kind of education would help you get better at your job and we will organize it for you”. By showing that you care (and then really fulfill the needs) you increase the loyalty of your employees. Get inspired by the following questions:
First of all, go back to your budget. Your budget is what your training planning will depend on. Then imagine which teams in your company bring the most value. Also think about the teams that don't directly create value in the product, but without their work, the company couldn't function at all.
Once you've mapped out in your mind where the primary focus of your company's education investments will be, dive into your employees' responses. You don't have to grant everyone's wish to come true. Try to look for similarities. Are there three people in your company who might be suited to the same course? Neither you need to schedule all trainings in the near term. Some really good conferences are worth waiting for.
On the other hand, especially with key personnel, you really need to take their specific answers into account. They know best what they need to deliver better performance for the company. Go ahead and target your investments in education like a pro!
After the education takes place, don't rest on your laurels. Use the online survey to find out if everything went as it should have.
If you've decided to invest in education on a regular basis, you'll want to know if your first investment was successful so you can repeat it the next time. You collect feedback on the training you have done so that you can possibly spot any problems or mistakes and avoid them next time. If a worker describes the course as unhelpful, you need to review the training, find the cause of dissatisfaction and choose a better option next time.
Feel free to pick questions that would perfectly fit into your survey. Or just get inspired and create your own questions. With Survio, you can choose from 19 question types.
Think about each question properly. You want to make your training satisfaction survey as easy as possible to increase the response rate. Well chosen question types will help the respondent get oriented in the survey and fill it out fast. What is more, choosing an improper question type can ruin validity of the data. Be careful especially when choosing between simple choice and multiple choice questions. The data evaluation is different. Get more details on this topic in the article How to use closed-ended questions correctly.
The less respondents you have, the more you can enjoy using open-ended questions. Their disadvantage is that you have to go through all the text answers individually, however, they are perfect when you need to find out the feeling, attitude or mood of the respondent. So if you are surveying only among your employees, give them the opportunity to express themselves in an open-ended question and get honest and in-depth feedback to each training.
You can edit all questions in the survey builder:
To be sure your survey is perfect, we highly recommend to test it in a preview. You can send it to a few colleagues to confirm the survey has no flaws. Their feedback will help you eliminate all typos and mistakes that could affect the quality of collected data.
Reach your employees on the channels they naturally use to communicate with you (for example Slack). You can share your survey:
The most suitable option for employee surveys would be probably e-mail invitations. You will love them because of the following reasons:
If you need more information about collecting responses, feel free to peek in our blog and Help center.
Your company deserves creative and innovative employees. Give them the training they need to do this and benefit from their growth and the growth of the company.
