Have a think about the last dozen customer surveys you’ve been emailed and asked to complete – whether it was from your bank, supermarket, or mobile provider…
You likely just exited the email or trashed the survey immediately without a second thought, right?
So what did they get wrong? And are you making the same mistakes when you send an employee engagement survey to your staff?
Let’s dive in to discuss the most common survey mistakes and how to avoid them.
Any time you gather employee feedback through surveys, you need to understand the goal of the survey.
Clear survey goals are important because they guide the way you build your survey, and a goal gives your employees a clear incentive to participate – because they know what you’re trying to achieve.
Examples of employee survey goals:
To avoid making this mistake, ask yourself ‘why’ you need employee feedback – what is the positive change you’re hoping to create? Make your survey title and goal very specific. When sending your survey communications, put these front and centre so it’s clear for everyone.
Possibly the only thing as bad as not having a goal at all, is having a goal that isn’t aligned to your employees’ needs.
Without a goal aligned to employee engagement at your organisation, you risk gathering feedback for something you have no control over – and employees will view the survey as just another ‘to-do’ task, rather than an impactful workplace change that they can add value to.
An aligned goal is so important because employees will understand how their feedback will contribute to change. It also ensures the change you create is achievable and supports your people.
You know what they say about making assumptions… 😳
Surveys are a way for you to test organisational health when a workplace issue such as employee turnover starts to have a negative impact. Being able to uncover the real underlying issue relies on being able to ask the right questions.
This means approaching your survey with an open-mind, and not assuming what *could be* causing the issue without data.
As an example, if you are exploring the cause of high employee turnover, don’t just explore topics such as ‘workload’, but also ‘management’, ‘pay & rewards’ and/or ‘communication’. Use a mix of questions to allow you to test all areas of employee engagement related to the specific issue to uncover more accurate findings.
If you don’t spend time thinking about the way your questions are structured, you risk creating more questions than answers when you try to analyse your results. You’ll want to keep a neutral tone and avoid leading and loaded questions.
Examples of good and bad survey questions:
Good survey question structure ensures employees can share their feedback effectively and feel motivated to give authentic detail. It also gives you certainty when analysing data that results are genuine and free from bias.
Many senior leaders use external benchmarks to see how you ‘stack up’ against other companies.
When they learn that their survey results are about average compared to other companies, they find this reassuring, instead of striving to become one of the few companies that achieve excellent results.
There are so many factors that contribute to an organisation’s score including industry, employee size, culture, context, internal changes, demographics… and your budgets! You may score well against benchmarks… but does that mean you should take your foot off the gas and not explore or act on feedback that contributes to your employee’ specific needs? Nope.
Benchmarks are great to take with a pinch of salt – but focusing too much on them can lead to unrealistic expectations and hampered progress. Instead, focus on the needs and feedback of your employees and establish internal baseline results that allow you to work to continuously improve.
Not communicating the results and next steps after a survey will make employees feel that they aren’t being listened to and will introduce apathy towards your surveys.
Use this post-survey checklist each time you conduct an employee engagement survey:
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