What Do They Want?

There’s no point offering your employees all these fantastic benefits if no-one really wants any of them, especially for small businesses with limited resources and money.

Designing a survey is a useful way of discovering what your employees want. It is essential to know what you want to achieve with a questionnaire and to design the questionnaire accordingly. If you just ask employees out right what benefits they want, the result is likely to be a jumbled confusing mess.

On the other hand, if you ask your employees for their views on their current benefits, how well they understand them, how important they feel they are etc this could be a good starting point for a questionnaire.

You may find that the benefits you currently offer are not well understood and you only need to re-tell your employees how they work instead of introducing something new. But if you do decide to introduce new benefits you may want to introduce two or three practical options to see which is most popular among your employees rather than just asking them what they want.

What Can You Realistically Give?

What you offer is likely to depend on a number of factors, including your budget, and how your organisation is made up demographically. If you have a lot of young mothers, childcare vouchers may be a popular choice, but if your employees are primarily young single men, gym membership is likely to be more popular.

A successful outcome is dependent on good communication at all stages of the decision making process. If people can see what they are going to get out of it, they are more likely to contribute. So feed back the results of your survey, communicate any changes that are going to happen, keep your employees involved with each step as it is for them that you are making the changes.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that if a company goes through the process of consulting their employees about changes and then does not actually do anything about their staffs opinions, you are going to be unpopular as your recruits will feel like they aren’t being listened to.

A final word of advice is to make sure any changes you wish to make are both realistic and valued by your employees so that they are as effective as possible.

What Do You Think?

Have you used this method to decide what benefits your company will offer? What questions did you ask in the questionnaire? What did you find were the most popular choices, and which were unpopular? We would love to know your thoughts and opinions. Leave your comments here.

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