Employee opinion surveys can be very valuable, especially if you conduct them anonymously.
When you are preparing your employee opinion surveys, you want to make sure you don’t try to conduct them during any kind of high-stress time because you don’t want to skew the answers. You want true answers.
If you were to conduct a survey during peak production times or when there are major structural changes going on, for example, this would not be a good time either.
It also would not be a good time to conduct employee opinion surveys if there’s a holiday that falls during the time you’re planning on conducting the survey because you want as many employees to participate as possible and they can’t participate if they are on vacation or out of the office.
Getting Employees to Participate
If you’re going to take the time out to plan and prepare an employee opinion survey, you want to try and get as many employees as possible to participate.
Unfortunately, you can’t force them to participate and, if your survey is anonymous like it should be, you won’t be able to look at a list and see who has participated and who hasn’t.
Although you want to try and get as many people to participate as possible, more than likely you’ll never hit 100 percent. But if you are able to get 85 percent or greater participation, you’ll get good material to work from. Eighty-five percent participation will give you a strong overall view of how your workforce really feels.
In order to coax employees into participating, management or the company might want to think about offering something to employees across the board, which includes employees who don’t participate. Since you won’t know who participated and who didn’t, you have to offer the reward to everyone.
So you could send out the survey in an e-mail and then also mention in there that if the company gets 85 percent participation or higher, they will give employees a pizza party or an ice cream celebration or maybe do a drawing for a couple gift cards.
Offering small, low-cost rewards is an easy way to increase employee participation.
Communication is Key to Participation
With everything else you do regarding employees, communication is going to be key to participation. You want to have upper management take an active roll in trying to communicate to employees that there’s going to be an employee opinion survey coming up before it actually kicks off.
- All upper management would have to do is send out an e-mail notice or mention it during a company meeting to let employees know they will be receiving an opinion survey and the company wants 100 percent participation (even though it’s unlikely you’ll get that).
- They also need to communicate that employees need to complete the survey within a designated timeframe. You’ll have to figure out ahead of time whether you want the survey to remain open for a week or two weeks, or if you want to wait and see how much participation you get in the first week to determine if it’s necessary to keep it open for an additional week.
- Once the survey is closed, employees aren’t going to be able to access it, so you need to make sure they know the timeframe it will be open.
- It’s also a good idea to let employees know how long it’s going to take them to complete the survey so they have an idea of how much time they need to set aside. Typically, an online survey with 60 questions, for example, takes about 15 minutes to 20 minutes to complete.
- You want to also make sure you communicate to employees that you don’t want them sharing their responses with coworkers because the survey is meant to be confidential and sharing responses could create a bias.
Once the survey is closed, then the third-party vendor (or yourself if you choose to take on the task within your company) will sort through all the data and put it into categories. This will help the company figure out where there are opportunities to make changes.