In my last Insight, I explained what employee opinion surveys are and how they can be used to help your company make changes.
As I mentioned in part one of this series, you need to go into conducting employee opinion surveys knowing that you are going to be making changes. If you are unwilling to make changes, do not conduct a survey because you will be wasting your time.
If, however, you are open to making changes, there are a few steps you can take to get started.
Find a Third-Party Vendor or Consultant
I would recommend that you find a qualified, trusted third-party vendor or employee opinion survey consultant to help you develop your surveys because you really need someone with a lot of background and experience in order to come up with questions that will elicit the responses you’re looking for.
You also want to choose a vendor that can help you categorize your questions appropriately. This is another important reason why you want to work with a third-party vendor, because they are trained in writing questions and categorizing them so that you get the most “bang for your buck.”
For example, when I conduct employee opinion surveys for my clients, I use an outside vendor that has 60 questions and we divide them into three categories: communication, commitment and trust, and the responses include choices of: strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree or strongly disagree. Then we have ten additional questions that are open-ended that cover everything the other questions don’t. With these questions, employees are able to write their thoughts and make comments.
Some vendors even have a list of pre-determined questions and categories you can pick from, such as growth opportunities, leadership, organizational values or practices, etc. It really just depends on what you are trying to find out from your employees or what you want to evaluate or get their opinion on.
Also, when you develop your employee opinion surveys with a vendor you want to make sure the surveys can be answered anonymously because employees are going to want to know they can answer honestly without fear of retribution.
Keeping it Anonymous
Although you want the survey respondents to remain anonymous, you do, however, want to make sure that the survey asks for some basic demographics, such as location or region, that way you can figure out how you want to read the survey responses.
For example, if your company has a few locations, you want to know which location the survey respondent works in and then keep those responses separate from the other locations.
You could also break the demographic questions down by department, position or status at the company.
For example, you may want to know if the response came from a sales employee versus an administrative employee.
Getting some basic demographic information upfront will help you know how you want the responses sorted. This is important because once the survey results are in, you can’t go back and ask people to identify themselves by demographics.
One word of caution, you need to make sure that when asking for demographic information you’re not breaking it down so narrowly that you could identify people because that will defeat the purpose of being anonymous. This can often be controlled through your vendor.
For example, with the surveys I do, we need to have at least 10 people participate in a demographic category—such as location—or the response information for that demographic category won’t show up. I still get the information in the overall report, but it’s not broken down how I wanted it to be. So you need to know you’re going to have at least a certain number of people participating in each demographic category in order to have it broken down the way you want.
In my next Insight, I’ll talk about employee participation, including how to get more employees to participate in your employee opinion surveys.