Employee Feedback You Can Depend On: Implement Employee Surveys for Sound Business Reasons

My first HRTools.com Insight discussed reasons why organizations conduct employee opinion surveys and how these surveys generally help a business plan for success. 

Now let’s get more specific and outline the steps a business can take to implement an employee opinion survey. When a management team or an executive group decides to gain a better understanding of employee viewpoints, they look to employee surveys. 

Before outlining the implementation steps, I ask my clients to consider a couple points. First, employers want to avoid making a common mistake, which is to conduct a survey just for the sake of conducting a survey. Second, if you go to all the trouble of asking employees for their feedback, it is critically important that you are prepared to: 

• Communicate the results of the survey to employees.
• Take action to address the opportunities for improvement identified by the survey. 

In order for a survey to be successful, the project must have clearly defined objectives.  Although they may seem like ‘no-brainers,’ see how you would answer the following: 

1. Can you identify what you want to accomplish with a survey?
2. Can you identify your survey goals?
3. Can you acknowledge that you are prepared to make appropriate changes, if employees tell you they want to see changes made? 

If your organization can answer the above questions with confidence, you are ready to invest in an employee survey. 

First, Find a Reliable and Trusted Professional Partner

As you might know, the Internet can often overwhelm us with marketing pitches for various sophisticated software products, tools and resources. Where employee surveys are concerned, an organization is better served by knowing that a survey has been developed by a trusted consulting group or by a behavioral or organizational psychologist with an advanced degree in his/her field. 

You want survey questions, for instance, that are written well and are psychometrically sound with a commonly used response scale. If you plan to benchmark your survey results against external sources, these factors become much more critical. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you partner with an expert to make sure your question development is sound in order to get quality results. 

Second, Determine the Best Methods for Administering the Survey

As you consider how to administer your survey, you have multiple options. Obviously Web-based surveys are popular. This method is also very attractive because it represents the most cost-effective method of conducting a survey. If you choose this option, make sure that all employees have access to the Web. If some do not, you will need to accommodate those employees. This can be done, for example, by providing temporary kiosks that also ensure privacy. Or, you can provide paper-based or phone-based administration options. 

Third, Prepare for the Analysis and Reporting Phases

These critical phases require extensive specialization and companies are best served by hiring consultants, statisticians or behavioral psychologists who have special training in statistical analysis. These professionals are trained to get the most out of your survey data. You want an in-depth analysis of your data, and they know how to “slice and dice” the data in different ways to provide the most accurate picture. 

Fourth, Gear Up for the Feedback and Action Planning Phases

Again, I take you back to what was discussed at the beginning of this Insight. If the organization isn’t willing to do something with the survey data, there can be a few unintended consequences. For one, by ignoring the feedback, a message is effectively sent to the employees that, “Hey, we heard you, but we do not care.” You also run the risk of losing credibility should you ask for their feedback again at a later date. 

So it’s really critical that the feedback and action planning phases take place. It’s also important to get employees involved, as you want their buy-in and help in implementing changes which improves employee engagement. If they are vested in the process, they are more likely to actively participate in any change efforts you want to later implement. Research also shows that engaged employees are usually more productive. 

The Bottom Line

With proper preparation and effective implementation, an employee survey is a valuable tool for soliciting employee feedback and can help your organization become more successful. 

When a management team or an executive group decides to gain a better understanding of employee viewpoints, they look to employee surveys.