Conducting an employee survey can have an immediate feedback on any company’s operations. For the management, a survey can give them an idea on what the staff thinks about a particular issue such as benefits package, a recent HR policy, or a new product or service offered by the company. The conduct of an employee poll can also enable the management to size up the levels of engagement of the staff.
However, employees tend to shy away from surveys because of different reasons. Some are too preoccupied with their work that allotting five to 10 minutes of their time can be too much to ask for. Others are simply lukewarm to the idea of answering an employee survey because they feel that their suggestions won’t be acted upon by the management.
If you are one of those professionals asked to conduct an employee survey but concerned about the reception of your employees, here are some tips that you might want to try:
1. Make it anonymous.
One reason why a lot of employees are reluctant to answer surveys is fear that they will be reprimanded or worse, terminated for sharing their true feelings. That’s why you’d rather make your employee survey anonymous to get honest and insightful feedback, particularly when the topics are very sensitive.
According to authors Leanne Atwater and David Waldman, anonymous surveys provide managers with the opportunity to improve individual performance and increase self awareness of their staff.
By ensuring their anonymity, you can let your colleagues speak the truth, so to speak.
2. Make it short and simple.
Busy employees aren’t likely to answer your survey that can take more than five minutes to accomplish. This underlines the need for your questionnaire to be short and simple.
You can do so by making the questions precise and straight to the point. Ditch the 10 page surveys. You can look for alternative was of conducting your surveys, like sending desk alerts that can be accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse.
This way, you can increase your chances of the surveys being answered by your target audience.
3. Make it regular.
An employee survey should not only be short and simple. It should also be done regularly.
HR people call this the pulse survey because it’s not only short and quick, but regularly done. A pulse survey may give you an insight on what your colleagues think and feel about the company itself, as well as issues affecting the rest of the institution.
4. Offer rewards.
Simply put, there’s nothing wrong with giving your colleagues a prize for answering your survey. You don’t need to spend a lot for the prizes as token prizes such as gift certificates should be enough to entice your target respondent to answer your poll.
You can also offer rewards for people who have answered your polls for consecutive periods. The point is, offering rewards to employees is one proven, effective way of encouraging them to take part in a survey.
5. Act on the survey results.
As mentioned earlier, one of the reasons why some employees aren’t exactly thrilled at taking part in employee polls is because they feel that their inputs will simply be ignored by the management.
Make sure that the survey results will be acted upon by the management. This will send a message to the employees that the company is interested in their opinions, and that their inputs are valued by the leaders. Eventually, this will build employee morale especially when the employees see that their suggestions made via surveys are being implemented in their offices.