Are our employees satisfied? What aspects of their job do they like and dislike? How do we go about gathering this information?
Employee surveys are a great way to collect and analyze employee feedback. They provide insight into employee engagement, satisfaction, and overall well-being.
This blog post will share some of our employee survey best practices, from design to administration!
Most employee surveys measure common topics such as satisfaction, engagement, and improvements.
However, you might have had a recent event you want to gauge feedback on directly. For instance, your company had a leadership change in the past few months and you want to know how employees feel about it.
In our experience conducting employee surveys for various clients, they can cover a variety of objectives. Meet with internal stakeholders to confirm the most pressing topics you want to address. This will help narrow your focus when drafting questions.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Standard employee surveys are useful, but for targeted feedback, tailor surveys to recent events or pressing issues by collaborating with stakeholders. This ensures you gather relevant and actionable insights.
Survey questions should be easy to understand and must not come across as leading. Ensuring the questions are neutral allows employees to share their honest opinions.
It is important to consider various question types including rating scales, multiple choice, and semantic differential questions. This can lead to increased engagement and ultimately better data!
Also, open-ended questions should be a must-have for any employee survey. Qualitative feedback is very powerful and can also provide context to quantitative data. However, it is important to keep the total number of open-ends to a minimum. Depending on the length, most employee surveys have a maximum of 2 to 4 open-ends.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Effective employee surveys prioritize clear, neutral questions to encourage honest feedback, and strategically combine various question types, including a limited number of open-ended questions, to maximize engagement and gather both quantitative and valuable qualitative data.
Communicating to employees that responses will be confidential is critical to receiving substantive feedback, as well as feedback altogether.
Our employee survey company recommends treating employee privacy concerns seriously and addressed before the survey goes live. One way to ease nerves is to use a third party to administer the survey. We’ll discuss this option in more detail later.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Guaranteeing employee confidentiality and addressing privacy concerns is essential for obtaining honest and comprehensive survey feedback. Using a third-party administrator can further enhance trust and encourage participation.
There are a few different ways to collect survey data. You just need to make sure that no matter which method you deploy, all employees will be notified and have access to the survey.
Most employee surveys collect data via an email campaign since it ensures employees have equal access, can take the survey on their own time, and send reminder messages if needed.
Another popular method to consider is a QR code. Fliers or posters with the survey QR code can be posted around an office or facility. This method leans into the increase in smartphone usage and makes accessing and taking the survey more convenient.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Effective survey distribution requires ensuring all employees are notified and have access. Choose a method that maximizes participation by considering your workforce’s accessibility and technology preferences.
While the risk of poor-quality data for employee surveys is very low compared to panel surveys, it is still worth checking the data afterward to ensure responses are genuine. For example, you could review open ends to remove any inappropriate responses.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Although employee survey data is generally reliable, post-survey data review is essential to ensure response authenticity and remove any inappropriate content. Checking open-ended responses is a key step in this quality control process.
Whether the results are positive, negative, or mixed, utilize all of the data to make informed decisions. The data might not tell the whole story, but it can at the very least look into something more. We often tell our clients that research can answer a lot of questions but also lead to many more. And that’s ok!
💡 The Key Takeaway: Utilize all survey data, regardless of its nature, to inform decisions and drive further inquiry, recognizing that research often sparks new questions. Data provides valuable insights, even if it doesn’t offer complete answers.
Not sharing at least some of the findings with your employees is a critical error in establishing trust. Employee surveys are one of the few ways employees can voice concerns honestly. By taking the time to give feedback, employees expect management officials to review their opinions, acknowledge strengths and weaknesses, and work to address concerns. Sharing the results and listing action items are critical components to the ultimate success of any employee survey.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Sharing survey findings and outlining action items is crucial for building trust and demonstrating that employee feedback is valued and acted upon. Failure to communicate results undermines the purpose of the survey and damages employee trust.
Most employee surveys that are conducted internally aren’t as effective as surveys conducted by a third party because employees are less likely to respond or give honest feedback to their company directly. Employees fear that their responses could be linked back to them so they only respond with neutral or positive sentiments to avoid the risk of any retaliation.
By partnering with an independent, third-party provider like Drive Research, you can be confident that your employee survey will protect anonymity, ask customized, unique questions, produce genuine feedback, and offer the opportunity to compare results to benchmark data.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Third-party survey administration fosters honest feedback by ensuring anonymity, which is often compromised in internal surveys due to employees’ fear of retaliation. Utilizing an independent provider offers honest data, customized questions, and benchmark comparisons, leading to more effective insights.
Drive Research is a full-service market research company specializing in employee surveys and voice of employee research. We write, program, field, and analyze custom surveys to ensure you receive the highest quality feedback. Contact us today to learn more.
