Every step you need to take to create a foolproof employee survey launch communication plan.
If you’re only relying email to communicate with your employees, it’s highly likely many of them won’t get the message. Before you launch an employee survey you must first create a multi-channel communication plan to encourage every employee take part. We’ll show you how!
An employee survey launch communication plan is a great tool to help employees understand the what, when, where, and why of a survey.
Creating one will establish trust and buy-in – which will boost your survey response rates, improve the quality and detail of employees’ answers and avoid employee survey fatigue.
Reviewing your previous employee survey launches will help you understand what has worked in the past. It also helps you identify opportunities for improvement. Without this, you will be treading in the dark and will have no certainty over what will help you achieve your objectives for your next survey.
Here are a few essential questions you can ask yourself and your team to review where you’re at. The answers will help you build an effective communications strategy for your next employee survey launch.
Creating a set of objectives and key messages for your employee survey communication plan will help your stakeholders manage communications during the planning and launch of your survey.
Remember – your goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based. For example, a goal for your first survey launch may be: “We aim to achieve an employee response rate of 65% in the first two weeks of survey launch”.
How to increase survey participation
Central to a successful communication survey is your ability to know and understand your audience. In this case, your employees. For your survey launch plan, you will need to consider the different groups of employees throughout your organisation. For these groups, we recommend thinking about the different environments employees are working in. This will help you shape your communications plan. Groups you may wish to consider are; hybrid employees, part-time employees, deskless employees, employees on parental leave, and new starters.
Use the questions listed below to help you build an awareness of their day-to-day working lives that will help you engage with them.
Managers take an active role in encouraging the culture and engagement of their team. This means they have a huge influence on their team and will play a key role in the launch of your survey.
To help you gain buy-in from managers, we’ve listed below the benefits of surveys for managers. Use these when communicating with managers about your employee survey:
Employee surveys will give managers feedback that will help them solve current problems on their list. Employees who are working in the detail of specific areas can provide solutions but don’t often have channels to feedback to management. This can be wide-ranging areas from project prioritisation and customer support to product development.
At times it can be difficult for managers to know whether they’re making the right decisions for their team. Employee surveys can give them that feedback. They will help them understand what their team are thinking so that they can be confident they’re making the best decision possible.
Gathering insights using employee surveys helps managers to surface anything that might be affecting their team before it becomes a bigger concern. This gives them the ability to manage the problem earlier before it starts to affect the team’s engagement and productivity.
Employees that work in teams that have the opportunity to share their voices are more productive, more engaged, and more likely to succeed in their roles. This supports the work managers’ objectives and makes it easier for them to work towards their team’s objectives.
This is particularly true if you are using survey software that maintains employees’ anonymity. The anonymity empowers your employees to speak up and give honest, detailed answers. Giving managers confidence that the data they are working with is accurate and tells the true story.
Creating a clear set of key messages will help you be consistent throughout the survey launch. Key messages are important, particularly if you have more than one stakeholder working on the launch communications. Or you are in a large, complex organisation where employees may only receive communications through one channel.
Once you have agreed on your key messages, use the table in our survey launch communications template to help you structure them. If you have the resource, you could work with key groups or employee representatives to help you shape the key messages.
Confirming the points below will create a structure for employees and ensure that your communications effectively engage them.
The channels you choose to communicate with your employees will depend on your audience and how your employees can access and interact with your communications. It is also a good idea to consider who owns the management of the channels, and how long it takes them to action changes, so you can keep them in the loop when you begin putting everything live.
Examples of internal communications channels you may wish to include are:
Agreeing on survey launch timelines is key to ensuring everything you need for a successful launch is ready on time! You should work with stakeholders across your communication channels to understand their timelines. For example, how long items such as posters take to produce, will help you build your launch timeline. It’s also good to understand how long your approval process takes and include that in any timelines. Working forwards using the elements that will take the longest will give you your earliest potential launch date for the survey.
Agreeing on the key stakeholders for your survey launch will ensure it meets its objectives. It is important that you identify and maintain relationships with the people who can influence the success of your survey launch. They will also be the people to help you improve its effectiveness when the time comes.
If you are from a larger organisation key stakeholders may include folk from senior management, IT, HR, marketing and communications, employee representatives and trade unions. It is important to ensure your stakeholders feel involved in the survey process as early as possible. Identifying them in your employee survey communications plan will help you keep them front and centre as you move through planning to launch.
The final step is to put your communications plan down in writing. Need a helping hand? Use Stribe’s employee survey communications plan template as a starting point. You can download it via the form at the top of this article.
About the author
Lucy Harvey, COO at Stribe, has 11+ years’ experience in purpose-driven leadership roles across health, wellbeing, internal communications, employee engagement, and marketing. She is passionate about creating workplaces where people are happy, fulfilled, and feel comfortable and safe to talk.
