Your survey has launched – what next?

Once the invitations to your employees (or customers) have been sent, don’t just leave your survey to run its course.

I always get a sense of achievement every time we launch a survey for a client. Yes, it is a major milestone in the project, but now we also start to see something meaningful come out of all our and our client’s hard work…

At Surveylab, we monitor the first few responses coming in – and the responses will start coming in just a minute or two after you have hit send. We do this simply to check that everything is working correctly, and we also check the mailbox that the emails were sent from for out-of-office and other replies to indicate that email delivery was ok. If a customer survey has about a 3% response rate after one hour, we can expect a final response rate of about 20-30% when the survey closes. Employee surveys are typically much, much higher, although other factors do impact how quickly staff fill in their surveys.

While the survey is ‘open’ and collecting responses:

• Monitor survey responses daily
  At this stage you shouldn’t be concerned with viewing interim results – just check number of responses and completes. For employee surveys – look at the number of replies by department or location to identify where you particularly need to encourage participation!
• Monitor the survey mailbox
  Some employees may ask questions by replying to the email invitation. With customer surveys it is normal for a few customers to try communicating with your organisation by hitting reply to their survey invite. This is a good opportunity to engage with and help customers (especially the disgruntled complainers!)
• (Employee Surveys) Keep up the communications
  Continue to promote the survey once staff have access to the questionnaire. Chase heads of department and managers to pass the message on, offer a progress report (and thanks) – more than 300 of you have replied – make sure your view is counted…
• Send a reminder email to non-responders
  The quickest, most effective way to boost the survey response rate is to send another email to all the non-responders (filter out those who have already completed because it causes confusion and doubt). After about a week the responses will probably be trickling in. (Tip: we like to try and mail a reminder on a different day of the week to the initial invite, in case that day is more convenient/less busy for staff.)

Depending on how the survey is fielded*, most employee surveys are left open (collecting responses) for around three to four weeks. Printed questionnaires require longer. This usually allows sufficient time for those staff on holiday, sick leave or travelling to have an opportunity to take part.

* ‘Fielding’ is the term used to describe the period when invitations/reminders are sent out and responses are collected.

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We’ve written a  few ‘how-to’ posts about conducting an employee survey (many aspects also relate to customer surveys) – start here: Getting started with Employee Surveys – or you may like A checklist for testing your survey before you launch.

Need help with your next survey? Talk to Surveylab to pick our brains with no obligation! Learn more about our services for customer feedback and employee engagement surveys here.