Tips for Conducting Effective Surveys

Introduction:

Surveys enable businesses to gather important information, perceptions and insight from employees, customers and other groups. There is no other way to quickly gather anonymous feedback and suggestions from large numbers of people on a cost effective basis.

Some of the many types of surveys that businesses conduct include employee satisfaction/engagement surveys, employee retention surveys, employee benefits opinion surveys, training effectiveness feedback surveys, customer satisfaction/opinion surveys, IT customer satisfaction surveys, business risk assessment surveys and market research surveys.

Organizations often fail to achieve the results they should be realizing from surveys due to several reasons. These reasons include poor survey design, failure to conduct the survey effectively, inadequate analysis of survey results, failure to communicate and take action on the results and other reasons. The purpose of this article is to provide tips for optimizing value from surveys.

18 Survey tips:

Here are eighteen tips that will help your organization achieve significant value and a strong payback from surveys:

1. Surveys conducted using the Internet are the quickest and most cost-effective way to conduct surveys. More often than not, employees, customers and other recipients of business surveys have access to e-mail and the Internet, at work and at home. For employees that normally do not have access to computers and the Internet, companies can easily provide access to designated computers.

2. Do not conduct surveys if you are not prepared to take action based on survey results. Failure to take action sends a signal to employees that you cared enough to ask their opinions, but not enough to really listen to them and take appropriate action based on their feedback.

3. Only ask survey questions about issues that you really want to learn about and that you are willing to take action on if the results indicate a need to do so.

4. Use survey results as a basis for making changes that will enable your company to perform and compete more effectively. Create action plans and get managers and employees involved in making appropriate changes.

5. Share survey results with your managers and employees and communicate next steps. Share pertinent survey results based on managers' and employees' positions, and their individual need to know and act on survey results.

6. Communicate ongoing progress with survey action plans, linking actions and progress back to survey results.

7. Only ask demographic questions that will provide useful information that you can take action on.

8. Make a decision to ensure that all individual survey responses will be anonymous, with no ability to link responses to individual responders. Communicate that the survey responses are anonymous and that all individual responses will be aggregated. This encourages people to respond, and to respond honestly. People are more likely to respond to a survey and to provide honest comments when the survey is being conducted by an outside, independent survey company.

9. Let responders know that demographic questions are being asked to see if specific demographic groups feel differently about certain issues than other groups do.

10. Place demographic questions at the end of the survey and make answering demographic questions optional.

11. Organize survey questions in logical categories.

12. To the extent possible, minimize the number of rating scales used in a survey.

13. Send participants a pre-survey announcement and follow-up communications during the survey response period to increase participation.

14. Provide an opportunity to include comments and suggestions for all or most questions. Comments provide insight and identify themes and trends.

15. Be cautious about using external normative comparisons for benchmarking your survey results. While some survey companies point to their normative data as a reason to use their services, there is a very high probability that comparison of your survey results with survey benchmarking data from other companies will result in invalid comparisons due to many possible reasons including:

• Different industry

• Different products and services

• Different customers and employees

• Different customer/employee demographics

• Different business strategies and plans

• Surveys done at different points in time, reflecting different economic conditions

• Survey questions worded differently and/or in different order

John Wooden, retired UCLA Head Basketball Coach, did not believe in scouting UCLA's competition. He was by far the most successful college basketball coach ever, winning many more national championships than any other coach. His approach was to select the best possible players, coach and lead them very well, provide a game plan that uses his team's strengths, and then execute well. Using scouting/benchmarking data did not fit into his plan. He believed that he and his teams could get better results by focusing on their own strengths and plans and by executing as well as possible, rather than focusing on competing teams that had a different plan, coach and players. Memorable quotes from John Wooden and other highly successful people can be viewed at http://www.quantisoft.com/Articles/Quotes.htm.

16. Conduct follow-up surveys to monitor progress on actions taken as a result of previous surveys and to identify pertinent changes since the last survey.

17. Include survey measurements as part of your company's ongoing metrics. Survey results can be an important part of a balanced scorecard or other companywide measurement process, providing critical employee and customer data. Surveys measure how well the company is learning and executing.

18. Consider using a survey company to conduct cost-effective surveys:

• Survey companies experience and expertise well beyond that available in most organizations, and they provide credibility.

• Most employees and customers prefer to have their survey responses handled on an anonymous basis. They are much more likely to respond and they will provide more honest answers when they are assured that their survey answers will be anonymous. Employees and customers are more likely to believe that their answers will be anonymous when a survey company conducts surveys rather than conducting surveys in-house.

• Survey companies often have reporting capabilities that are much more powerful and flexible than the survey reports available from using self-service survey software and self-service web surveys.

• Some survey companies charge much more than others without adding more value. Larger, well known survey companies usually have the highest pricing.

Sample surveys can be viewed at http://www.quantisoft.com/Surveys/Samples.htm.

The bottom line: Surveys are a powerful and cost-effective tool for gathering important information and for identifying and diagnosing problems and opportunities, but only if surveys are designed well, conducted effectively and the survey results are acted on. For more information about surveys please visit http://www.Quantisoft.com.