Employee surveys are sure to be an excellent tool for understanding the workforce and the workplace. It helps find the problems that are hindering growth as well as the opportunities that can foster it. In addition, analyzing employee survey results can help improve the employee experience and organizational operations with insights derived from it. Employee survey platforms or workforce management tools with features to conduct surveys can be used for conducting these surveys and obtaining analytics and insights.
There are multiple types of surveys. You can conduct a poll or survey people about almost anything, but how can you ensure you’re obtaining useful information from these surveys or polls? This blog includes tips on conducting an employee survey efficiently to get the required information and insights from these surveys.
Tips for Creating More Effective Surveys
Along with utilizing competent workforce management tools with the right strategies, here are some of our best recommendations for conducting more effective employee surveys:
Clear objectives
Have a specific goal in mind. When creating a survey, consider what you want to accomplish with it. What do you want to measure? What outcome would be considered a success or failure? Knowing what you want to achieve ahead of time will help you build your survey and questions to generate the data you need.
Questions and answers
Think about the types of questions and responses you will choose. Are you going to ask open-ended questions? Will you employ a rating system or a sliding scale (highly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree)? Will you provide a comment section where employees can share their thoughts and/or clarify their ratings? These must be considered before creating surveys for a specific team, entire organization, or a group of people.
Explain the reasons.
Explain why the survey is being conducted. People are considerably more likely to answer and be interested in the process if they understand why the survey is being conducted and how it will help them. Work with someone on your marketing team to assist in developing the survey’s communication strategy to onboard the users so that more people respond and respond honestly.
Options to stay anonymous
Consider anonymity if you want more candid comments and honest feedback from the surveys. Employees who feel their comments will be traced back to them may fear repercussions for providing candid answers. On the other hand, if you’ve been working hard to foster trust and an inclusive environment, and knowing who said what makes following up simpler, offer them the option to stay anonymous.
Compare different teams, groups, and departments.
Compare departments, teams, and groups of people and track the results over time. For example, if employee satisfaction varies substantially between departments, this might help you discover issues or troubled areas, such as supervisors or operational problems in those departments. Use a survey or workforce management tools to reach the targeted audience and collect their responses.
Keep surveys short
Employees will respond more to short surveys that take less time, but it also must serve the purpose. So, put only the necessary questions or try to form queries so fewer questions retrieve the required information. Ideally, a survey must be completed within 20 minutes or less.
Decide the time and frequency.
Frequency is important. Over a year or even a quarter, a lot may happen. More frequent “pulse surveys” will provide more current data than merely performing the yearly survey. The frequency and time may change depending on the type and purpose of the surveys. For example, just after a new deployment, employee experience can be surveyed, but when it is comfortable for employees to answer, or they are most likely to answer should decide when to publish the survey through your workforce management tools. Also, set up how long the survey will remain for employees.
Survey language and structure
It is important how you ask questions. Avoid using passionate language or wording that may affect or distort the respondent’s response. Put the questions in the correct order and context with options for appropriate answers. Survey design, look, and feel can also impact the responses and amount of responses. Nowadays, many survey platforms or workforce management tools also offer templates for creating surveys.
Rating or words
Numbers may be more effective than words. A response scale with numbers at regular intervals allows survey respondents to provide a “score” rather than having to ponder the implications of picking “neutral” or “agree slightly” or other terms that may influence their response. It also implies that your data is more measurable. Often comments or remarks are not quantifiable and hard to measure, though these may reveal some incredible insights. So, mix both elements, such as rating a statement or question and explaining it.
Ask the right things.
Question about particular observed behaviors or topics. Employees should not be asked to comment on a peer’s or manager’s ideas or motivations. Questions that may invite subjective responses, personal conflicts, or trouble should be avoided or handled with care. To invoke desired responses, offer surveys through workforce management tools to the right receivers at the right times.
Get a clear and objective response.
Don’t leave an assumed or vague response. Use scales or ratings and combine them with other questions and methods of response to get the required information out of the surveys. If you add terms that communicate a value judgment in your questions (e.g., “What do you think of our fantastic new performance management process?”), you’re indicating what type of answer you want to hear, which contradicts the objective of the survey.
Use separate questions.
Do not attempt to address two questions with one entry. Avoid mentioning two subjects in the same question since this might lead to confusion and incorrect replies.
Break long surveys into smaller segments.
Try not to cover everything at once. Rather than attempting to cover everything in a single survey, conduct shorter/smaller questions along subject lines.
Frame questions well
Pose specific, easy-to-answer questions. If you are having difficulty answering the question, it is generally best to reframe it.
Avoid associations
Avoid using words and phrases that have significant associations. While metaphors are essential in characterizing situations and experiences, they may also cause associations that distort and influence survey responses. For example, the statement “has a strong grasp of complex problems” may imply a subconscious bias towards male managers, whereas “discusses complex problems with precision and clarity” is more neutral. Instead, create surveys on survey platforms or workforce management tools with templates to make them more effective.
Consistent messages
Make the most of consistency. For example, try to make survey sections with a comparable amount of items and questions with a similar number of words.
Use fewer questions with desired options.
Questions with desired answers often obtain positive replies from the employees or subordinates. So, keep the number of these questions down. When every question in a section has an intended positive response (e.g., “my manager is effective at resolving conflicts”) or a desired negative response (e.g., “my manager is not effective at resolving conflicts”), it’s simple for employees to skip the questions without engaging with them. Make them a third of the survey form.
Options like N/A and “I don’t know.”
Include “not applicable” and “I don’t know” responses. We recommend providing a “don’t know” or “not applicable” answer. Without that choice, respondents may feel obligated to submit meaningless replies.
Placing demographic questions
It is important to place demographic questions in the survey form strategically. The location of demographic questions can have an effect on response rates since it can generate a negative feedback loop. Workforce management tools or HR onboarding tools may be used for surveying new hires about their experience and demographic data.
Re-run the surveys
In most cases, surveys must be repeated as the need for information on specific subjects or groups of people never ends. Also, both people and the situation in the organization change with time. Also, the same survey after a specific interval help measures the impact of the organization’s changes. Save the surveys and outcomes in the workforce management tool and restart the survey from the system. Compare the analytics and reports and understand the impact you have created.
Acknowledge the outcomes and inform the actions.
If possible, share the survey’s findings with the participants and communicate the actions based on their opinions. If no actions were taken, explain why and stay accountable to the participants. Otherwise, people will find the surveys useless and a waste of time, deterring them from participating in one in the future.
Conclusion
Making surveys mandatory or offering any benefits or parks is not a good idea. However, a well-structured and designed survey distributed through the right tools, like HR software or workforce management tools, can help obtain results. These applications offer to conduct different types of surveys like onboarding surveys with HR onboarding tools or training surveys with Learning and development software and also enable organizations to control time, frequency, and the content of the surveys. Also, it offers extensive reports and real-time analytics with incredible insights.
