If you are a leader in a professional services firm and you truly want to know what your employees think, consider providing a quarterly or annual anonymous employee survey. Anonymity gives employees the freedom to respond candidly (and sometimes harshly). While some of the feedback might be tough to hear, as a leader, you need to assess the raw sentiment of the team and develop a plan for improvement.

One of the better ways to survey employees is via questions that require a scored response. For example, answers can fall on a scale from 0 to 5 with 0 meaning “Strongly Disagree” and 5 meaning “Strongly Agree”. After each question, there should be an optional comments box where the employee can go into detail regarding the provided score. The scored response for each question is valuable because it allows for an average score for each survey question across the workforce. The average score helps quickly identify areas where the employees are consistently happy and areas where they are consistently unhappy.

A few good rules for an annual employee survey process are:

• The survey must be truly anonymous. There should be no IP address tracking, distinct URLs, or any other identifying tactic. Everyone in the company should be able to access the same URL from any device on the company’s network.
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• Commit to sharing the scored answers. Employees won’t trust a survey process if they aren’t allowed to see the results. Transparency is important – especially in professional services companies. Publish the average score of each survey question for all employees to see within a week or two of the survey closing.
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• Do not share any of the comments. It should be very clear to employees that any commentary provided will remain confidential. This gives employees the freedom to respond with more specific detail regarding areas (or coworkers) of concern.
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• Commit to action items. Identify specific areas of employee dissatisfaction and commit to improving two or three pressing areas over the coming year (or quarter). Some improvements can take months to fully execute, and thus, you want to commit to an achievable number.
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Employees need to understand that they have a voice in the direction of the firm and that their voice truly matters. The best way to do this is through honesty and transparency. When employees see that real improvements are being made based on survey results, satisfaction and loyalty will increase.