The Benefits Of Conducting Your Employee Feedback Survey Via A Pop-up Tool

One of the most valuable ways to gather information about your organization is to conduct an employee survey.Employees are the ones at the coal-face and carry out the day-to-day activities necessary for your company to function. They know what’s working well and what isn’t, and unless you specifically ask them for their knowledge and feedback, chances are they won’t actively share it with you.

Employee surveys can help you to get feedback, gather information that your management team can follow up on later and hold more detailed discussions on, measure levels of employee satisfaction and motivation, ascertain job performance and determine key areas for improvement. They can also determine if there are issues specific to particular teams or departments, find out how well management is performing, show your employees you care about their opinions, and help you to drive change across your organization. Using an anonymous employee feedback form will help you to get more honest and relevant opinions.

Designing an employee feedback survey should include asking questions in an unambiguous way so that you can gather real, meaningful insights into the state of affairs within your organization that you can then benchmark and work towards improve. This should also involve measuring results again with future surveys.

Different ways of delivering employee feedback surveys

Delivery methods for employee surveys vary from organization to organization. In some companies, paper-based methods are still used. This can take a while to get all the forms back from employees – particularly if the organization is large and spread across different time zones, countries and even continents.

Once these paper forms are collected, the results still need to be collated and data extracted manually. Using such an employee feedback questionnaire is a labor intensive task and can take months to complete in some cases.

Digital surveys cut a lot of time out of the above process. You can design a form and send the survey to your employees to complete. The algorithms that power the software to run digital surveys mean you don’t have to manually add the data up, and can have results in real time.

Unfortunately, the results aren’t always as instantaneous as many companies would desire, particularly when they need feedback quickly on an issue.

Most employee surveys that are delivered digitally rely on a link being sent via email, with the employee then completing the survey at a time and date that suits them.

This can be problematic because of the low rate of email opens in the first place, meaning that many employees might not even see that they’ve been asked to complete a survey.  And of those who do actually open the survey, many may decide they’ll come back to it at a later time, and get distracted or side-tracked or just simply forget all about it. A third cohort of survey non-participants may just deliberately decide to ignore the survey all together.

Those conducting these surveys will either get a low update, and therefore a poor statistical sample that may not be representative of the entire workforce. Or they might end up spending a lot of time sending reminders and chasing up managers to urge their staff members to complete the survey by a specific date.

Why pop-up employee feedback surveys are the best choice

A pop-up employee feedback survey helps to solve these common problems by bypassing the email system completely and getting the attention of your staff members while they are sitting in front of their computers.

As a digital survey it still offers all the same benefits that you get from not carrying out a paper-based survey, with the added bonus that more people are likely to willingly participate in it, meaning the sample size of your data will be better.

Pop-up surveys can be as long or short as you desire. For example if you want some instant feedback on some design concepts, you can ask a few short questions and have results almost immediately, without waiting on people to open and respond to emails.  Or you can deliver more in-depth surveys, like an annual employee engagement survey, with dozens of questions.

DeskAlerts has a module that enables you to send surveys, polls and quizzes to your employees and can be as obtrusive or unobtrusive as you need in the way that it is delivered and appears on the staff members’ computer screens.

The surveys will appear regardless of what other software programs are in use at the time and can be sent in a way that can’t be ignored, skipped or paused.

Your surveys can be scheduled to deliver in advance, so you can determine the best time to send them. You can also use Active Directory integration to create custom audiences so you can send to the entire organization, or just specific groups of employees.

For example, you may want to survey all your employees on a particular topic, but you know that the finance team is busy for a few weeks with end of financial year reporting. You could send the survey to everyone else to complete first, but schedule the survey to be sent to the finance team once their deadlines are out of the way.

Other surveys may not need to go to the entire organization. For example, you may have a multinational company, with some teams based in Europe where new regulatory requirements have come in. You may want to survey those particular employees to gauge how they are going with the changes to their work.  DeskAlerts lets you target these specific team members. You can even send your surveys in different languages.

Regardless of who, what or when you are surveying, your results will always be available to you instantly, in real time, via the DeskAlerts metrics panel so you can get feedback quickly and start incorporating the results into any work you are doing that needs to be informed by research.