When facing an economic downturn it may seem counter-intuitive to conduct an employee survey. However, a few clients are embracing the opportunity to do so. And here's why:

You always want to keep your most valuable employees engaged and committed. By conducting an engagement survey you'll know where you'll stand with your employees.

During an economic downturn, you'll want to identify and reduce unnecessary expenses. You can administer a brief survey and create a competition among employees to identify the greatest areas of waste.

During a downturn your sales people may hear "no" more often. Gathering feedback from this group about the obstacles they are hearing and how they are overcoming those obstacles can be an extremely valuable source for internal best practices.

By surveying your customer-facing employees (not only sales people) you can get a better understanding of frequent complaints and competitive intelligence by asking questions about what they are hearing about competitors.

Reinforce what is important - the old saying goes "what gets measured becomes important". What better way to demonstrate to managers that employee engagement and is important than by conducting an engagement survey.

If you are thinking about cutting costs but not sure how employees will react, you can test out these potential cut-backs with your employees through a survey.

By surveying your sales force you can identify new ways to grow sales and/or market your products and services.