Strong employee engagement is key to creating a workplace culture that facilitates high productivity and quality services or products. However, because employee engagement or satisfaction is often difficult to measure, this makes employee surveys particularly of value, but only when administered correctly.
It is crucial to look for key characteristics when choosing an employee survey vendor. You'll want a vendor that helps with survey development, administration, analyzation, recommendations, and more.
Here's a closer look at the four key things to look for when choosing an employee survey vendor.
Happy employees = happy customers. Start improving team engagement with the help of an employee survey vendor. Here are four factors to consider before choosing a partner.
1. More Than a Self-Service Platform
When looking for an employee survey company, oftentimes organizations are presented with self-service survey platforms. You are only provided with a bank of survey questions to choose from, upload an email list of employees, send the survey invitations yourself, and then left to interpret the data on your own.
Drive Research, a national employee survey vendor, acts as an extension of your team. We work one-on-one with leadership teams or human resource departments to provide end-to-end project management. This includes writing the survey based on questions specific to your research objectives, sending confidential survey invites, and analyzing team feedback in a way that is concise and actionable.
Our employee survey company also provides recommendations and department-specific insights. Your team will not be responsible for sifting through the data alone but can rely on an unbiased third-party to create employee initiatives that work.
2. Interpret Data and Create Solutions
You can have the best vendor in the world to help you create and deploy employee surveys. This vendor can use the survey results to create beautiful charts and infographics, too. But collecting and showcasing the data isn't the goal (or it at least shouldn't be).
The goal is to see where you need to improve employee engagement and then to actually make the improvement. To do this, you need an employee survey vendor that helps create and deploy the surveys as well as offers recommendations and next steps, such as employee programs that your company can start.
For example, after reading the results of an employee survey, a third-party vendor concludes there are two major issues among employees that are hindering better engagement:
- Employees want more time with their families
- Employees dislike the unpredictable on-call schedule
You now know the primary sources of low employee engagement levels in your workplace, but how do you address them? With the right employee survey vendor, you won’t only be told what areas your organization can improve, but how to improve them.
3. Third-Party Invites
To get the most honest answers from your staff, it's imperative that the survey is sent from a third-party. This means the survey vendor must support the ability to send employee survey invitations through a private platform.
The more honest your employees are in answering the survey, the more reliable the data will be, thus making it easier to pinpoint and create employee programs that provide a strong return on investment. When employee see the survey is sent from a third-party research firm, and not their boss or HR department, they are most likely to be 100% honest with their feedback. This extra level of security assures their responses are completely anonymous.
Sending third-party invites is also of benefit because it gives you more time to make use of the survey results. If employees know the survey comes straight from your HR office, they will assume some kind of immediate response.
With a third-party invite to the survey, such an immediate or direct response isn't typically assumed. With this extra time, you and your vendor can make better use of the survey results by developing deeper insights than the insights you can acquire with less time.
Learn why every successful company uses employee surveys.
4. Customizable Questions
To create a survey that helps you achieve one or more specific goals, the questions themselves must be customized, meaning you must first assess your goals.
If the goal is to create a more unified culture, then the survey questions should focus solely on aspects of the existing workplace culture as well as characteristics of the future workplace culture that the employees would like to see.
A quality vendor will help you perform an assessment that not only identifies your goals but ranks them according to priority too. It is also helpful if the employee survey vendor has worked with similar organizations in your industry. This will allow for more accurate recommendations for what type of questions should be asked in the survey.
Since no two workplaces are exactly the same, even among companies with multiple locations, this makes it all the more imperative to choose an employee survey vendor that custom tailors survey questions based on each client's goal.
Are you ready to partner with an employee survey vendor that simplifies improving employee engagement? Contact Drive Research today!