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Employee Survey Best Practices – 11 Lessons Learned

The current economic downturn has changed the world dramatically. It’s a new ball game for every organization. Now, more than any time in the past 60+ years, current feedback from employees and customers is essential for knowing where we are, where we need to be, and for planning our organizations’ futures. Conducting effective surveys provides information and insight for making informed decisions, driving positive change and significantly increasing profit and organizational sustainability.

If your organization conducts surveys, or if you are thinking of conducting a survey, this article will help you achieve excellent results and avoid pitfalls often encountered while conducting surveys.

To receive a PDF version of the complete survey report by e-mail, including employee survey best practices, key survey findings, survey data and verbatim comments, please send an e-mail to hdeutsch@Quantisoftdotcom requesting the “Employee Survey Best Practices Report.”

Survey Best Practices – Increasing Your Survey Expertice

As a survey company we are often asked questions about survey practices: What is the best way to conduct surveys? How can we get the highest possible response rate? Should we use a survey company, or should we try to use a self-use online survey service? The questions we receive are many and varied.

While Quantisoft has extensive survey experience and expertise, we decided to conduct a survey to identify employee survey best practices at organizations we do not conduct surveys for. The findings of the survey validated our own survey experience and produced interesting and useful information and insight about employee surveys.

This article includes the key Lessons Learned and Actions for You to Consider from Quantisoft’s Survey About Employee Survey Practices. Please contact Howard Deutsch at hdeutsch@Quantisoftdotcom to receive the full Employee Survey Best Practices Report, including the survey findings, data and verbatim comments.

Lessons Learned

1. Types of Employee Surveys – Participating organizations are using a wide range of employee surveys to gather information and insight for making better decisions and making informed changes. Types of surveys they conduct include employee satisfaction/engagement, employee benefits opinion, employee turnover, sales force opinion, IT customer satisfaction, business risk assessment and other surveys. Information about types of employee, customer and specialty surveys is presented at http://www.quantisoft.com/Industries/SurveyTypes.htm.

2. Survey Frequency – The most common frequency for conducting surveys is annually.

3. Satisfaction with Survey Companies vs. Self-use Survey Services – Organizations that primarily use survey companies are significantly more satisfied with their survey process than organizations primarily using self-service online survey services. The reasons survey companies are providing greater satisfaction and value than self-service survey services include the expertise and experience provided, receiving survey reports quickly without the need to take time to generate graphs and other reports in-house, objective analysis of survey results, more focus on implementing changes, greater support and involvement from management and other factors.    

4. Effectiveness of Survey Practices – Organizations primarily using survey companies rate the effectiveness of key survey practice significantly higher than organizations using self-service online survey services. The survey practices with the largest gaps in effectiveness ratings are receiving support from managers, producing timely useful reports, communicating survey findings, developing implementation plans, analyzing survey results and achieving results from surveys.

5. Importance of Survey Practices - Survey respondents identified the “most” important survey practices as keeping responses anonymous, conducting follow-up surveys, time taken to complete survey and analysis of survey data.

6. Survey Response Period and Rate – Responding organizations strive to achieve a high survey response rate. A 2-week survey response period is most popular.  A third week typically generates a higher response rate. 60% of responding organizations typically have a survey response rate of 60% or greater.

7. Primary Survey Approach - Online/Web surveys are the most often-used approach. Organizations are learning ways to end the use of paper surveys, even for employees that do not use computers to perform their job. 70% of responding organizations use Online/Web surveys as their primary approach, 20% use paper surveys as their primary approach and 10% use Online/Web surveys supplemented with paper surveys as their primary approach.

8. Reasons for Conducting Employee Surveys – The top reasons for conducting employee surveys include identifying performance improvement opportunities, assessing employee satisfaction and engagement levels and trends, part of ongoing measurement process and identifying causes of employee turnover.

9. Surveys Achieving Their Objectives – Some organizations are achieving very strong results from surveys while others are falling short. Key factors for achieving survey objectives include management support for conducting surveys and implementing changes, using a survey company and executing well on all of the survey practices. Surveys generate significant quantitative and qualitative results when designed and executed well, followed up by effective analysis and implementation of changes identified by surveys.

10. Using Normative Benchmarking Data – Survey respondents prefer to benchmark their survey results with survey results from other organizations. However, they are not comfortable using benchmarking data unless they can be sure the data enables “apples-to-apples” comparisons. Similarity of organizations being benchmarked, similarity of survey questions/wording, common time frame for when survey data was collected and other factors are important for making valid benchmarking comparisons.

11. Survey Best Practices – Knowing and consistently following best practices is very important for successfully conducting surveys and achieving results. Organizations that fail to follow best practices for all survey practices fail to achieve the full potential results from surveys.

Actions for You to Consider – Conducting Better Surveys

1. Share the full Employee Survey Best Practices Report with people in your organization who are responsible for conducting surveys, and with managers that can benefit from conducting surveys. Send your request for the full report to hdeutsch@Quantisoftdotcom.

2. Compare your organization’s approach for conducting surveys with the best practices, lessons learned and other information and insight included in the full report available from Quantisoft. Identify and implement changes your organization can make to achieve greater results from surveys.

3. Consider conducting surveys to gather information and insight for increasing your organization’s competitiveness and bottom line in this difficult economic environment. Beyond the usual employee satisfaction/engagement surveys, other types of surveys can enable your organization to identify ways to increase sales, identify and manage risks more effectively, gather feedback for reducing costs and increasing quality and customer service levels, enhance your organization’s “going green” profile, get more value from employee benefits dollars spent and much more.

4. The world has changed dramatically during the past year. The information and insight gathered from surveys conducted just a few months ago may no longer be valid. Update previous surveys now to gather current information and adjust action plans to reflect the “new reality”.

5. Make sure to focus your organization’s surveys on gathering actionable information that will positively impact employees, customers, the environment and your bottom line.

Information and tips that will help you to achieve results from surveys are presented at http://www.quantisoft.com.

 

Interview with Curt Coffman, co-author of First, Break All the Rules and Follow This Path.

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Conduct an Employee Survey to Boost Profit and Increase Competitiveness

Why Your Company Should Conduct an Employee Survey Now

The recession has driven profit at most large, mid-sized and small companies well below peak levels. Companies that have had success in boosting profit have done so by making significant reductions in staff levels. Few companies have been able to generate significantly more sales. Productivity is up on a national level and many employees are working harder, producing more output in the hours they are working. 

Many companies have reduced average work hours of the employees they have not laid off, and some companies have reduced compensation and benefits. 

This has resulted in a larger than normal number of employees that are dissatisfied and less engaged in their job. Many of our employee surveys are finding that employees are happy to have a job while at the same time they are worried they may lose their job. Larger than usual numbers of employees are commenting that they are planning to leave their company as soon as the economy improves and the job market opens up. 

Companies need to be aware that employee satisfaction, employee engagement and employee loyalty are down. This is impacting the performance of some employees. Without action, voluntary employee turnover will rise as the economy improves. 

Conducting an employee satisfaction survey or an employee engagement survey is the best way to assess employee satisfaction and employee engagement levels and to gather first-hand information, perceptions, suggestions and insight from employees about what needs to be done to earn back employee loyalty, job satisfaction and engagement. 

Tips for Conducting Effective Employee Satisfaction Surveys and Employee Engagement Surveys 

Whether you call your survey an employee satisfaction survey or an employee engagement survey, your employee survey should include questions that determine employees’ satisfaction with key drivers of satisfaction. The survey should also include questions that assess your employees’ level of engagement in their job. 

In addition to rating their level of satisfaction and engagement, every employee survey question should include a comments field that enables employees to include their perceptions, insight, suggestions and information that explains their rating answers. Comments will tell you why employees are satisfied or dissatisfied, and why they are engaged or disengaged in their job. 

Your employee survey should include demographic questions such as department, location and years of service with your organization. You may also want to ask employees to identify their gender, ethnic background and age range in order to review survey results by these demographic criteria as well as for your company overall. 

Ensure that all of your employee survey responses are kept anonymous. Employees are more likely to respond to employee surveys and to provide honest answers when they are confident that their answers will be anonymous. 

Consider using a survey company rather than self-service online survey software. While self-service survey is less expensive, a survey company will provide considerable value. While some of the largest employee survey companies and HR consulting firms that conduct employee surveys can be quite costly, some of the smaller employee survey companies have extensive experience and expertise and considerably lower pricing. 

Reasons to use a survey company include their expertise and experience designing survey questions that provide actionable information and insight, and their ability to provide extensive graphical, tabular and comments reports sorted by demographics and for your organization overall on a very timely basis, saving your organization many, many hours preparing survey reports using Excel. A good survey company will provide all of the survey reports within two to three days after the survey response period is closed. Additionally, many employees will be more confident that their survey answers will be anonymous if a survey company is used rather than self-service survey software. 

Some survey companies have the ability to readily provide trend data and graphs comparing current survey results with results from your previous surveys, as long as the same questions are used. This is a highly effective way to track progress addressing opportunities and problems identified in employee surveys. Other reasons to use a survey company rather than self-service survey software is that some survey companies can provide benchmarking data, enabling a comparison of your company’s survey results with results from other companies. Some survey companies also offer preparation of an optional executive summary report, including a summary of the survey findings and recommendations for taking action based on the survey findings. 

The Importance of Employee Engagement 

Employees at all levels of your organization are engaged when they are fully committed, involved and enthusiastic about their jobs and your company. Engaged employees are willing, able and significantly do contribute to your company’s success. Engaged employees regularly go the extra mile, putting effort into their work above and beyond what is expected of them. They eagerly and willingly work longer hours and focus their energy, inspiration, skills, intelligence and experience to achieve success for themselves and your organization. Engaged employees thrive when they are working in a supportive organizational culture. Their visible enthusiasm, energy and inspiration in turn enhance the organizational culture and encourage other employees to become more engaged in their jobs. 

A final thought 

If your company needs to increase its performance, competitiveness and profit, and guard against employee turnover as the economy improves, conducting employee satisfaction surveys / employee engagement surveys will provide important actionable information and insight for making better decisions, increasing employee engagement and loyalty, and becoming more competitive and profitable.

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