ESAT – Measure Satisfaction of Your Employees Easily With Survey Templates

You came up with a great idea – a new benefit for employees in the form of a Multisport card! You are excited and tell the team about it, but you don’t see much enthusiasm, and their smiles seem forced to you. You wonder why employees do not share your excitement and while walking down the corridor you hear how they talk to one another that instead of a Multisport card they would prefer… health care. That’s right! Now everything’s clear… but why did you have to find out this way? You almost invested a lot of money in a completely wrong idea. Such situations can be avoided so easily!

How? By asking your employees for their opinion! The largest companies in the world have already appreciated all the advantages of the Employee Satisfaction Score, i.e. carried out in the form of online surveys. Now, it’s your turn!

What are the benefits of ESAT surveys?

The Employee Satisfaction Score survey allows you to measure whether, and to what extent, a company meets or exceeds the expectations of its employees. To put it in the simplest terms, the online ESAT survey measures employee satisfaction. It allows you to get to know the opinions of employees regarding selected areas of the company’s activity – from the general level of satisfaction to specific areas of work, e.g. evaluation of incentive systems. With the help of measuring scales, the study gives quantifiable effects, and the open and in-depth responses additionally facilitate the detection of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization.

To conclude, by researching employee satisfaction, your company:

• saves money spent on bad investment decisions (e.g. benefits that do not attract new employees)
• will make decisions easier related to company management and regarding employees or the HR department,
• will quickly identify negative processes in the organization, which is crucial in preventing major crises,
• will improve communication between employees and the information flow throughout the company
• will prevent unnecessary staff rotation and learn how to keep the most valuable people in the company,
• will be able to boast a high ESAT index and create your image as a company where employees are happy and from which they do not want to leave.

Of course, the satisfaction survey is only the first step – if your company does not undertake specific actions based on its results, all your efforts will be wasted. It is therefore important that the organization has a designated team responsible for employee surveys, consisting, for example, of several people from the HR department. Their task is not only to create and disseminate surveys but also to draw conclusions and suggest specific changes to decision-makers in the organization.

How to Measure Employee Satisfaction?

The key issue in ESAT research must be ANONYMITY. Of course, you could arrange meetings or individual interviews with employees, but are you sure that their responses will be honest? Not really. Most of us don’t have the courage to tell our supervisor directly that something is wrong. Moreover, this applies not only to the relationship with the boss but also with colleagues, satisfaction with salary or even the benefits offered by the company.

Therefore an online survey is the best way to survey employee satisfaction. Thanks to it you will achieve, among others:

• full anonymity e.g. by leaving the identification codes to complete the survey in a jar in the office kitchen, the ability to complete the survey on mobile devices, not asking questions that enable identification, etc.
• access to a large group of employees – at the same time, you can only research departments or entire companies, which are sometimes composed of several hundred people,
• possibility of tracking your results on a regular basis and responding in the case of noticing negative trends or problems.

There is no clear answer to the question: how to test with the ESAT method. It all really depends on what goals the company wants to achieve thanks to the survey – what specific information it needs, to what extent it should be detailed. Therefore, the Employee Satisfaction Score method does not have precise guidelines, formulas or ready question sets to be asked in an online survey. However, what is usually common (or very similar) for all ESAT surveys is the main question. In an employee satisfaction survey created on the Startquestion platform, some questions used in your research may look as follows:

ESAT examines individual employees, but the result of the research is a collective image of team satisfaction. The scale used must therefore convey a clear message as to whether and to what extent employees are satisfied. 

By creating questions (learn how to ask survey questions in the best way) remember about their goal, which is to obtain information on the level of employee satisfaction. For example, the answer to a question may be marked on a scale where 1 means very dissatisfied and 5 means very satisfied. The analysis of the results is then simple – the higher the value, the better the rating, i.e. the greater employee satisfaction. It is also possible to use a 7-point scale (if you want to get more precise data).

You can also replace the typical scale with a question like a slider, an assessment in the form of stars, hearts, or smileys. Prepare the survey to match the company’s image as much as possible and encourage employees to participate in it. You have many possibilities – in our user guide, you will find information about all kinds of questions.

Ask ESAT Questions and Make Your Company Grow

Employee satisfaction research is not complicated, but it requires proper preparation, distribution among employees, and analysis of the results. At Startquestion, we have prepared a tool for you, thanks to which creating an ESAT survey and drawing conclusions from the results of the survey will be even faster and easier.

• We provide access to ready customer satisfaction survey templates (visit section: for the employee), including benefits, incentive system, relations with superiors or the overall level of satisfaction.
• We have prepared guides where it is explained how to analyse the results using advanced features such as, for example, crosstabs, filters, rankings and trends.
• We give you the ability to automatically generate reports that you can present in your HR departments or at meetings of your superiors.

During each stage of the survey, you can also ask our support department which will help in creating a survey and analysing the results, and together with you will create the survey best suited to your needs.

Remember that an Employee Satisfaction Survey (ESAT) may only be the beginning for more advanced research – such as Pulse Survey or Employee Engagement. You can prepare all types of research yourself using Startquestion with substantive support provided on our blog, in the Employee Insights section. Best of luck!