Getting started with Employee Surveys

It is always interesting to hear how H.R. professionals plan their employee surveys/feedback programmes. In 2004, our second employee survey was a very positive experience and a great example of “how to do an employee survey” because the H.R. Advisor at the organisation was well organised, experienced and confident and, with the full backing of the CEO and H.R. Director, everyone knew what they were setting out to do. We have since carried out many more employee surveys and learnt and observed from each one. So…

How do you field an employee survey for the first time?
Or improve/make the survey easier to conduct next time?

Any survey project, whether it’s an employee engagement survey, seeking customer feedback or other market research, must start with the purpose:

What do you want the (employee) survey to actually achieve?

Most often, the purpose is to improve some thing, or measure the organisation’s ability to retain talent and be an employer of choice. Sometimes the employee survey is linked to business performance. Regardless, the first step should always be: Define the purpose.

Next on the task list:

• Plan the communications,
• Decide on how you’re going to conduct the survey (in-house or outsource, paper or email) and
• Schedule time to conduct appropriate analysis – who, how and when it’s going to be done.

Now you can start on Survey Design:

Keep the survey focused (remember the purpose!), and keep in mind how you will analyse all of the data (keep it simple!). Be careful to word questions carefully, ask yourself can the respondent reasonably answer each question? Organise the questions into logical groups of questions, what scale should you use, be careful of bias … (this list could go on for a while…)

Once the questionnaire draft is written, ask a friend who has not been involved in the project to closely review the survey and proof the content. If your survey is going to be conducted online, mock-up the survey screens, including the login, “thank you” and supporting pages such as the privacy statement and ask someone else to review. The important thing here is get a third party to look at your survey, and, test, test, TEST!

When you are ready to launch, monitor the survey’s status, check which departments/regions responses are lacking from and continue to promote the survey. A typical online employee survey will be open collecting responses for three to four weeks (fielded by post will take longer).

Be prepared for feedback

Once the survey is closed there can be pressure from senior management to publish the results as soon as possible, or hide bad news and pretend the survey never happened! Analysing the results and preparing management reports will take time but this will be easier because of the preparations earlier in the project.

When the analysis is complete, managers can review and start planning follow-up action. Don’t forget to share the survey’s findings with staff – this is vital to an engaged workforce.

Continue reading …
There’s more to follow. Start with Hearing and believing: Good employee surveys need GREAT communication.

If you are planning or considering outsourcing your next employee survey, can Surveylab help? Contact us today!