Survey Best Practices

Overview

The employee engagement survey process is designed to achieve a clear and honest flow of communication between the top tier of management, and the rest of a business they run. Through this, the leaders aim to learn about the concerns and experience of their employees, to react to issues and reinforce praise.

The feedback comes to the leadership team anonymised. This is important so that people can have a voice without fearing they will limit their career opportunities if they raise issues. Therefore, the information in the system should be more reliable than you would receive in conversations or through a normal survey mechanism.

Objectives

The objective of the process is a continuing engagement with the issues and experiences of the staff within the company. As a leader of a business, you can't fix things you don't know about. Examples of issues can be as small as bad coffee, or as big as a bullying team leader that's driving staff churn and giving the company a bad name in the market. The results will include lower staff churn, improved employee morale, greater connection between leadership and the staff as well as high levels of staff engagement with the company.

Requirements

Aside from receiving feedback in an open and receptive manner, there really is only two requirements:

1. The survey runs consistently, weekly, and ongoing.
2. The information is fed back to the team and addressed.

For more on how to address feedback, visit the information page here.

Process

The process selected here is repeatable and tested. It has a specific timeframe selected which will suit many businesses and it offers the right cadence to present valuable, actionable information to the leadership team.

The survey is sent to members every Friday at 10am. The question asked is 'how was your week this week' with a binary response required. The binary response drives an 'on balance' response for the week and is more informative than scales or ratings are.

Collection

Collection of responses occurs over a 60 hour period (survey closes at 10pm Sunday). This gives time for people to get to responding and consider what they want to say.

Most responses will be received in the first 24 hours. They appear in real time on the results pages so leadership can get in and start thinking about how they will tackle the issues raised in the survey straight away. The good/bad rating is also reported live, but generally isn't informative until closer to survey closing time.

Analysis

Feedback should be looked at mostly in themes. Single week, single user issues can be a moment in time. Multiple users reporting similar issues speaks to a more systemic issue. It takes a few weeks of data to fully grasp the systemic issues, but generally you will also have 'quick wins' that can improve the employee experience immediately.

When looking through the responses, be sure to identify quick wins and the longer term systemic issues to be treated separately.

On Monday morning, or at your next all-team meeting, you need to present back the information. This should start with presenting the graphs showing the positive / negative scores and discussing the factors that may have driven the result.

Then discuss the issues raised in the comments. Start with the hardest ones first - the people know they have posted them, so there's no hiding the fact that leadership is now aware. Talk in generalities to sensitive topics (learning opportunities), and specifics when you can offer a quick solve to a raised problem.

You should never attempt to identify a respondent or blame anyone specifically in the meeting. Remember the maxim, praise publicly, criticise privately.

For more on how to deal with the feedback received, head over here.

Take Action!

The system only works if people see the results of their feedback. Changes made should also be fed back via chat, email or in the next meeting. People need to know and see that their time and effort to engage is rewarded through the changes being made.