5 Tips For More Effective Employee Surveys

So you want to know how your staff feel about things - you want to take the pulse of your organisation and assess levels of engagement. Well, that’s easier said than done, especially if you intend to use the traditional method of an employee survey.
This article aims to sum up some of the common pitfalls and highlight best practice, by covering 5 key tips for success in running an employee survey.

Employee Satisfaction or Employee Engagement Survey?

Do you want to assess employee satisfaction or employee engagement, and do you understand the difference? While this will be an article in itself, the basic difference is that you can be satisfied but not truly engaged, however to have a chance of an engaged workforce, you need to ensure that they are satisfied.

Still confused? Let’s think of an example. You might be more than satisfied with your pay, the work conditions and how your manager treats you, but you don’t necessarily feel a devotion or loyalty to the company brand. You might actually use the products of your competitors and tell colleagues they should apply for that job they have seen in the paper. Engagement is a deeper link with the organisation and requires an extended process of assessment.

Why is this differentiation important? Partly as the name of your survey should correctly reflect what you are looking for and so you set appropriate expectations at the start, concerning what you will get from it. It will also impact the questions quite significantly, with at the very least for engagement, a far greater emphasis on ones such as “would you recommend working here, to friends and family?”

Don’t Do Your Employee Survey In-House

Now at this point you might be thinking that should have been Tip 1 as the others may now be a moot point, however you will still need to ensure that your 3rd party provider knows their stuff and receives an appropriate brief from yourself. The reasons for not recommending that you design and administer an employee survey yourself are.

• Question design is a technical skill that you might not have
• Employees often distrust the anonymity of in-house surveys
• They are time consuming and surely you are already busy?
• Interpretation of the results needs both a statistical skill and objectivity
• Surveys should always be followed up by focus groups (see Tip 5) and again, are you skilled at running them and how can you claim comments are now anonymous?

Just because you can knock up a survey online with Survey Monkey in 5 minutes, does not mean the data it provides will be meaningful and in fact the questions could cause more issues than they resolve. To see examples of employee surveys

Recently when we ran a survey for a client, the response rate went from 30% the year before (run in house) to an amazing 100% when employees heard we were external consultants. To be fair, even we were surprised by that response rate however it showed that there was a great desire to communicate, that had previously been stifled by running the survey in-house. In addition, research we have carried out in a variety of countries (to be presented at the GABC annual conference in Mexico) shows that this preference for completing an externally run survey is common around the world but particularly strong in cultures where voices are often shouted down.

Guarantee Anonymity

There is a big difference between completing an anonymous survey about what hair products you use and one where the bulk of the questions are about your boss and the comments you write, would under any other circumstance, end your career. This means that while people are often laid back about anonymity in consumer surveys, they tend to demand it, when it comes to completing an employee engagement survey.

Again our research shows that this desire for anonymity is held globally, however scepticism of anonymity varies considerably. Employees in the UK and USA were found to be the most sceptical, particularly of on-line surveys, probably due to the wealth of news each week about data breaches, hacking and how anything online can be traced to the sender.

Therefore you should always assume that people are concerned about anonymity and a little sceptical about the promise. You must clearly be seen to reinforce the message, with actions that back it up.

Employee Survey - No More Than 15 Minutes

While it is well known that people prefer short surveys and I suspect we have all fallen for the “would you please spend 2 minutes reviewing the service we have given you” only to find 10 minutes later that you are still completing questions. So if you can get your employee survey to under 10 minutes then that’s great however will you manage to find out anything meaningful? Particularly employee engagement, requires a wide range of topics to be looked at from multiple angles and you want to encourage the submission of free text comments and that all takes time.

Our research shows that in most countries, people are prepared to spend up to 15 minutes completing an online employee survey with millennials preferring under 10 minutes. Luckily, as they are employees and it’s a reasonable request to ask them to spend that sort of time, most people do, albeit you might find the questions at the end of the survey get rushed.

Run Employee Focus Groups

Imagine you have the raw statistics from your online employee satisfaction survey. 35% of employees say they do not trust their manager and 55% say they would not recommend working at your organisation. You have the quantitative data but not the rationale or motivation for those ratings. In one survey 85% of employees said they have been bullied, which at first glance would seem to indicate institutionalised bullying behaviours however at the focus group it was soon found that it was all by one manager and it was “much better now.”

Surveys give you the starting point for further discussion and well facilitated focus groups, with a representative sample of employees, turn raw data into meaningful information. Ensure managers and non-managers are not in the same focus group and similarly don’t mix timid, new employees with highly vocal informal leaders.

Follow these 5 tips and your employee surveys will be more effective however clearly there are more tips that can be provided but following the same logic as to why you keep a survey to less than 10 minutes, those tips will follow in a later article!
go to https://www.protostar-uk.com/employee-surveys