Tips for Conducting More Effective Staff Surveys

Staff surveys that provide a thorough understanding of staff attitudes and perceptions are the first essential step for any organisation to develop strategies that improve staff motivation, reduce staff turnover and lead to better customer retention.

9 Tips For Conducting More Effective Staff Surveys:

1. Keep It Simple: Multiple-page staff surveys that take six months to receive and analyse results and cost the equivalent of two salaries to compile may look impressive but watch that time delays don't make data irrelevant. Short, fast surveys deliver better response rates and allow you to react rapidly to issues raised. Solve one or two key problems at a time, not everything at once.
   
   
2. Get Buy In From The Top: Use a personalised cover letter sent directly from the Managing Director to reinforce the importance of completing the survey and to explain what will happen once the feedback has been received.
   
   
3. Protect The Respondent: Ensure the survey is voluntary, anonymous and confidential. This will lead to greater honesty and higher response rates.
   
   
4. Utilise Branching: Help ensure that the survey is as brief as possible by automatically branching respondents to questions that are relevant only to them.
   
   
5. Questionnaire Design: Reduce time spent analysing results and ensure the survey is quick and simple to answer by limiting your use of open text fields (eg. "Please comment on issue X") and instead utilise more defined answer options (eg. radio buttons, matrix questions, drop down boxes, etc).
   
   
6. Use Web-Based Surveys Whenever Possible: Studies show that web-based surveys are more cost effective, typically result in higher response rates, offer easy data analysis and result in faster response times.
   
   
7. Send Personalised Reminders: Ideally reminders are sent to those who are yet to commence the survey within 10 days after the survey was first sent to maximise response rates (a good online survey tool should offer 'reminder' functionality).
   
   
8. Follow Up: Make sure you quickly follow up on any promises to share survey results with respondents or to send more information requested by the respondent when completing the survey. These follow up tasks can be automated via a good online survey tool and can help to save significant time in managing feedback once it has been received.
   
   
9. It's All In The Presentation: Ensure feedback is collated and presented using a good mix of visual graphs, tables and statistics. Again, a good online survey tool will offer a myriad of charting and graphing options.
   

© 2006. Written by Paul Quinn.

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