Improve Your Employee Opinion Surveys

How can you get better year-on-year improvements from your employee survey? In this paper we discuss some simple steps that you can take to get the best possible benefits from this critical initiative.

We believe that the employee opinion survey process is the single most powerful organisational improvement initiative around – well at least that is its potential.

If your staff survey is working at its best it can:

• Significantly reduce unwanted staff attrition
• Help attract and retain the best and brightest in your industry
• Improve leadership at all levels
• Improve employee engagement and commitment
• Reinforce and strengthen organisational alignment and focus
• Boost sales numbers and deepen customer relationships

Your survey can also improve employee productivity and overall organisational profitability/performance.

However, over 80% of the new organisations we talk to, say they are disappointed in their existing employee survey. (The further you move down an organisation the more disappointed they become!)

The common complaint?

“NOTHING EVER HAPPENS!”

But this doesn’t have to be the case. In this paper we outline some simple steps to improve your survey’s performance.

Steps for improvement

The survey process should be considered in two integrated and seamless parts within each survey cycle.

Part 1 is concerned with everything that happens pre-survey closure.

Part 2 is concerned with everything that happens post survey closure, but before you do your next survey.

Pre- survey closure steps to improve survey performance

This is the data collection phase. There are a few things you can do to help collect the best possible data and build the platform for post survey closure success – which is where the real benefits come about. They are:

1. Make sure you are asking the day-to-day questions that matter to all employees – not just the senior executive. All constituents need to be catered for. Our database research suggests that well over 75% of an employee’s attitude (to their employer) is driven by local, team specific issues. The message is this: Your employees are likely to be less concerned about the latest acquisition being planned by the board than they are about how they can work better with their customers (both internal and external).
2. Set up your demographic questions so that you can provide data to team leaders pertaining to their team issues. Leaders want to know what their team is really thinking. If the demographics (questions relating to title, location, gender etc.) are too broad, then many leaders running small teams will not be able to use the data to work with their teams to make a difference – see post survey closure steps below. Each team must have their team data.
3. When launching your survey clearly communicate to all employees the purpose of the survey, when and how the results will be made available to all teams and their leaders and other next steps. Employees want to know what will happen after the survey data is collected. For too many employees, they don’t see anything happening after the survey closes, or if it does, the actions are so high-level and removed from their issues, that they are not really interested in them.

Post survey closure steps to improve survey performance

Through no fault of even the most passionate supporters within an organisation, this is often the part where survey momentum falls away.

It is however, the most important part of the survey process.

Obviously an organisation can collect the best data in the world, but if it is not made widely available to leaders and their teams at al levels for them to analyse and action, the data collection actually offers very little benefit bottomline benefit.

Whilst clearly all survey processes are different, a typical post survey process might be as follows:

1. Report tabled by survey provider highlighting key issues and suggested actions
2. Perhaps a series of focus groups
3. Perhaps some consulting services to run some targeted workshops
4. Perhaps, if the budget can warrant it, an ongoing contract with a consultancy firm to help implement agreed actions
5. There may even be a request to business leaders to develop and implement team based improvement plans.

The problems with this approach are numbered in the many:

1. It is top down and not bottom up
2. It is high level and often misses the day-to-day details that make a real difference
3. It fails to engage all employees
4. It is very expensive – consultants tend to cost a lot of money
5. It doesn’t necessarily build internal capability and capacity
6. It is externally lead rather being driven from within
7. It relies heavily on HR to resource this process – particularly for larger organisations, this is simply not possible
8. It is often inconsistent, with some leaders following through and some not.

As a result the survey process falls away – it doesn’t build a bottom up continuous improvement culture, or a consistency of best practice, or provide the leaders with the tools and data they need to lead most effectively.

Here are some steps you can consider as an alternative

1. Move fast after survey closure – keep the momentum going – don’t’ suffer from what we call survey lag!
2. Distribute organisation wide and team specific data to all leaders as fast as possible after survey closure – if possible within 3-4 weeks
3. Provide leaders with an easy to use and standardised process for data analysis and action planning – software such as our Survey Action Planning Software (SAPS) can help here
4. Set up a clear governance structure to manage the process, oversee progress and deal with barriers – keep this simple and time efficient – no more than 1 - 2 hours per month
5. Ensure the most senior person available chairs this committee (CEO, HR Director, Senior Line Manager etc.)
6. Capture actions and priorities from the bottom up, before agreeing highlevel actions. The survey might for example give low scores to employee training. This can mean different things to different people and different teams. The response to this low score needs to be tailored to the specific needs of each team – you need to hear from them first before you start actioning this issue
7. Quickly communicate successes and progress back to the business
8. Install a feedback loop to ensure these actions are well received by the employees – you may have misunderstood their needs or priorities or miss formulated the action
9. Encourage and reward success, link to performance management systems
10. Deal quickly with barriers – missed deadlines etc.
11. Frequently carry out small, targeted pulse checks – you don’t have to wait for an entire year (if that is your survey cycle) before finding out whether you are making progress. Most survey providers will set up a small low cost pulse check, or even better include a free pulse check tool within their offering
12. Use software to help keep your post survey improvement process on track cost effectively and easily. Software such as our own Survey Action Planning Software can provide all the tools in one bundle to help you.