Organizations spend enormous amounts of money on employee surveys, but they often struggle to get enough responses to make sense of the results. Thankfully, there are four steps organizations can take to enhance employee survey participation so they can make sense of the results and ensure that the actions they take will result in making impactful changes to the work setting.
The first step organizations can take is to make sure they have a relatively short survey. How short? Research I’ve been a part of identified that employee participation, and the quality of employee responses, really begins to drop off after 100 questions. Other research I’ve been a part of suggests that most participants take between 5 and 10 seconds per question, meaning that an employee survey consisting of 100 questions will take no more than 10 minutes to complete. Because most employees will give you about 10 minutes of their time, making your employee survey consist of 100 questions or less will increase the likelihood that employees will complete the survey, thus increasing employee participation.
The second step to enhance survey participation is to make certain the questions asked on the survey are relevant to the work environment. Most organizations often purchase a “pre-existing” employee survey from a consultant or vendor. Such a survey is likely to contain irrelevant questions that are simply not important to the participating organization. Further, such “pre-existing” surveys are also likely to omit questions that are important to the organization. For instance, employee safety may be incredibly important in some work settings, like hospitals and construction, but is often not included on most one-size-fits-all employee surveys. Consequently, organizations should work with their consultants to create a customized survey that contains only relevant questions for their work setting. Doing so can help to limit those employee survey questions to 100 or so items.
The third step needed to enhance survey participation is to share the survey results, and the actions to be taken based on those results, with all employees who were eligible to take the survey. This, of course, necessitates that organizations will take some action based on the survey results – otherwise, there is no need to conduct an employee survey. Sharing what actions will be taken as a result of the survey outcomes will let the employees know their voices were heard. This will not only serve to enhance employee trust, but it will also result in higher response rates in future surveys.
Finally, organizations must take steps to ensure the confidentiality of employee responses so that employees can feel safe in providing authentic answers. This can only be accomplished by having an outside entity (like an external consultant) administer the survey from start to finish. There is no doubt that many human resource departments have talented professionals who are well equipped to conduct and analyze an employee survey. But those analyses will be useless if employees do not feel their responses will be confidential. Employees must feel their identity will be protected in order to provide authentic responses. Having an external consultant conduct, analyze, and feedback the results of an employee survey is the only way all employees can be assured their responses will not be used against them if they provide honest feedback about various aspects of their organization.
Like most things in life, there is a right way to do something, and that something avoids pre-existing, one-size-fits-all solutions. Engaging in an intentional strategy that involves creating a relatively short survey consisting of relevant questions and sharing the results of that survey with all employees via an outside entity is the way organizations can be assured they will enhance participation in current and future employee surveys, making them more impactful for the organization.
