How Do You Know If Your Employees Feel Appreciated?

When  you’re implementing new employee appreciation practices or traditions, how do you know if you’re really hitting the mark? Do your employees actually look forward to these things? And do they truly make them feel appreciated?

The best way to find out is to just ask — but walking up to people and asking if they feel appreciated is a bit blunt. Instead, we recommend a systematized survey that helps you evaluate how you’re doing as a company in bolstering the morale of your employees. There are two kinds of surveys we recommend.

1. A Pulse Survey

This is a short, focused survey that helps you analyze how you’re doing in one specific area. If you’re looking to make changes or just want to get a feel for how something is working and how you can improve, this is the survey to do.
For example, if your company provides a free lunch for employees every Friday, you could conduct a pulse survey to see how that’s going. Some example questions might be:

• Do you have dietary restrictions?
• What do you love to eat?
• What do you not love to eat?
• What have we provided in the past that you want to see again?

Whatever you’re surveying about, it’s important to remember that you can’t make everyone happy. But these surveys give you a general idea of how the team as a whole is feeling about a particular topic.

2. A Comprehensive Employee Survey

This is a longer survey that you would conduct to get an overview of how your employees are feeling about their experience with your company and the culture overall. We highly recommend conducting such a survey annually and using the same questions year after year to give you a standard data set to work with. You may see certain areas that are improving, or you may see things drop off in other areas — alerting you to something you should focus on. 

At Coastal, we have a large set of questions we draw from to create these annual surveys. For our HR Elite clients, we customize them, tailoring surveys to their company culture and areas they’re trying to work on. 

Is HR Elite right for your company? Here are some scenarios we find it’s perfect for.