Employee Survey Use & Design
Today, online employee surveys are becoming more common than old-fashioned pencil-and-paper questionnaires, a trend that is increasing employee participation rates, adding significantly to the accuracy and meaningfulness of survey results.
Regardless of the format, if used properly, employee surveys can be invaluable; if not, they can be a waste of time and money and can even hurt employee morale.
Purposes of Surveys
As with any management or human resources initiative, it is essential that an employee survey begin with clearly thought out goals and objectives.
General goals for employee surveys include:
- Improving employee retention.
- Lowering absenteeism.
- Improving productivity and customer service.
- Ensuring that management is getting its message across.
Specific objectives for employee surveys include:
- Identifying problems.
- Identifying gaps between the company’s goals and their execution.
- Giving employees an opportunity to communicate.
- Discerning why employees feel the way they do.
- Evaluating management effectiveness.
- Tracking the impact of organizational change (especially through periodic repetitions of the survey).
Tips & cautions
One source cautions:
While the Web has made it easier to conduct elaborate surveys, many organizations continue to struggle with the process. In some cases, companies ask the wrong questions or do not put the data to full use. In other instances, they overload workers with questions or misinterpret the meaning of results and take the wrong action–such as introducing a new benefit based solely on popularity rather than what’s best for the organization.
Employee Surveys: Ask the Right Questions, Probe the Answers For Insight
Another source offers 4 tips:
- “Be realistic about what an employee survey can and can’t do for you.” If you can´t share the outcome or take action on the results, you will only falsely raise employee expectations. The survey will be viewed as a phony expression of caring.
- “Create an atmosphere in which people feel safe giving honest answers.”
- “Be aware of broader patterns that affect all workplaces. Employers can over- or underestimate the importance of a survey result unless they have comparative norms. “
- “Be realistic about the difficulty of creating your own questionnaire.”
Getting Ready To Do an Employee Survey? Expert Offers Tips
Many options available to employers today
Employers wishing to conduct an employee survey or employee satisfaction survey have many options, as can be seen by simply googling “employee survey.” Existing survey instruments may be used as is or with customization, or customized surveys may be created from scratch to suit an employer’s particular needs.
One available option is turning to an experienced survey specialist such as the National Business Research Institute (“NBRI”).
NBRI describes itself as “an organization of business research psychologists” that “employs scientific research principles to ensure that the surveys, results, information, and recommendations provided to Clients are of the highest quality and purity.”
One advantage of working with an expert group such as NBRI is the depth of experience, which is manifested in several key areas:
- Systematic approach to survey research, starting with the exploration of objectives and determination of content areas to be covered, through selection of questions, and ending with the preparation of reports and action recommendations.
- Bank of existing survey questions to choose from in building custom surveys.
- One benefit of this is avoiding miswording that can distort results. Asking the right questions the right way is critical. As the old saying goes: garbage in, garbage out.
- Another is the availability of normative data: how employees elsewhere have responded to the same question(s).
- Ability to use survey results to identify “root causes” of problems and make recommendations for change that most effectively and efficiently improve productivity and profitability.
- Availability of various survey methods: paper, telephone, and online.
- Improved employee confidence in confidentiality when a third-party survey firm is used, as opposed to an in-house survey method.
These are some of the considerations in conducting employee surveys.
Lest you lose the forest for the trees amongst all the many “HOWS” of selecting survey tools, providers, questions, etc., I suggest keeping a sharp focus on two things:
(1) WHY are you conducting an employee survey (what do you hope to learn; what types of problems and opportunities are you looking for?) and
(2) WHAT are you going to do with the results (how will you use them to solve those problems and/or capitalize on those opportunities?)
Additional Resources
Taking the Personnel Pulse: Employee Surveys
Getting Ready To Do an Employee Survey? Expert Offers Tips
Employee Surveys: Ask the Right Questions, Probe the Answers For Insight
