How to analyse your employee survey’s results

It turns out that this is my eleventh post on the subject of how to conduct an employee survey. Yet, the analysis (and reporting) is the most important part of  the survey process! This stage is central to the success of your survey, and future employee surveys…

Set Expectations for Delivering Feedback

Reviewing results is a relatively straight forward task, but a comprehensive analysis can be time consuming, and then you will still, invariably, need to prepare management reports, plans of action and feedback to staff. Often, there can be pressure from senior management to publish the results as soon as possible so set a timetable that allows you sufficient time to understand the results and prepare the report(s). (Reviewing and summarising open-ended comments can take days.)

Quick tip: Soon after the survey has closed thank everyone for their time and feedback – let them know how many took part, perhaps a very top-level finding, and – importantly – when results will be published or reviewed by management.

Take Time to Understand the Results

Start with the ‘what’ – what your staff are saying.

Use ‘Index’ scores to summarise areas and identify strengths and weaknesses. This is especially useful when reviewing or comparing results between departments/teams/regions because it reduces how many numbers you need to look at. You may still want to drill-down into some of these scores to see how the score was formed – e.g. are there lots of strongly agree/disagree answers?

Quick tip: Sometimes, reporting the percentage answering “strongly agree” or “very satisfied” (or the other end of the scale) is more eye-catching than an Index score.

Nearly all organisations want to examine the variance across different parts of the organisation or by types of employee. You may also find it helpful to break-down the verbatim comments by departments or regions to review and/or categorise the comments in smaller, easier-to-manage chunks.

Then, look for the ‘why’.

Insight can be found by filtering results by demographics (e.g. department or job-role). The open-ended comments will also help to explain why staff have answered the way they have. A simple and quick way to get a feel for what has been written is to create a word cloud. This can help pick out the common themes, so you can then filter comments by the popular words in a more logical, faster way.

Prepare Management Reports

Once you know the what and why, you can prepare reports and share findings.

Quick tip: Employee surveys can generate huge amounts of data and it can be difficult to decide how much detail to include in management reports. Keep the management summary report short and concise.

Include a selection of (not all) the open-ended comments in your reports to support or explain the numbers.

Share Findings and Take Action!

Armed with reports and proper analysis, senior management can establish priorities, and share more findings with the workforce. At this point, employees may be involved again for recommendations and help in drawing up the action plans.

More Suggestions?

The key message is give yourself enough time necessary to do your survey justice. If you’ve conducted employee surveys before, can you share any tips? What presents the biggest challenge? Please leave a comment below  or tweet me – twitter.com/#!Dan_atSurveylab