Employee surveys pay off for credit unions. Here’s how.
To serve your staff, you need to understand how they think. What motivates your employees? What incentives do they respond to? What connection (or lack thereof) do they feel to their work? All of it matters.
By far the best way to decipher your staff’s views and attitudes is—quite simply—to ask your staff about them. Employee surveys are effective for this very reason. You pose questions, your staff answers them and you learn ways to make your credit union a better place to work.
Let’s break down a few benefits of employee surveys.
- They help you increase engagement.
When you’re invested in what you’re doing, you’re likely to do better at it. You should strive to increase engagement on your staff, and employee surveys can help you do just that. The CUNA Employee Engagement Survey, for example, measures the engagement level on your team and recommends actionable strategies to raise it.
- They help you reduce turnover.
Losing an employee costs your credit union, both financially and operationally. If employees leaving becomes a trend, it’s imperative to investigate why. Surveys distill the aspects of your work culture and organizational structure that employees don’t like so you can eliminate them and increase retention.
- They show employees you care about them.
Surveys make people feel like their voices matter. Give your staff one and they will realize that you care about their input and their contribution to your credit union. Make them feel valued and raise their morale.
- They’re optimal benchmarking tools.
Planning a big change for your culture or organization? Surveys are the best possible way to quantify the results of your efforts over time. Do a survey before you launch your new initiative, then again after it’s complete. You’ll see how much you’ve improved and how you can continue to do so.
- They produce brutally honest yet necessary feedback.
Sometime employees don’t raise important issues to leadership because they’re afraid of reprisal, meaning resolvable problems persist. Offer an anonymous employee survey and your staff will feel comfortable giving you their honest view on the state of things.
What they say may not always be positive, but if you want your credit union to fulfill its performance potential, surveys tell you what you need to hear.
To learn more about CUNA’s Employee Engagement Survey, please click here.
