Five ways to increase employee survey participation

Employee engagement surveys are a great way to get insights into how your employees are feeling, and identify areas of improvement. By giving your teams the space to use their voice and share feedback, you can make data-led decisions and create a better workplace for them. However, employee surveys only work well when the feedback and data is representative of the majority of your team. To do this you need to get a great response rate by increasing employee survey participation.

Launching employee engagement surveys with great response rates requires planning and clear communication with your teams. But it needn’t be a daunting task! We’ve broken it down into five simple steps that you can implement in your day-to-day:

1. Build your survey: How to create the best employee engagement survey
2. Pre-launch: How do you communicate an employee engagement survey?
3. Build Up: How do you promote employee engagement surveys?
4. Launch Day: How to increase employee survey participation
5. Maintaining Momentum: How do you encourage employees to take employee engagement surveys?
6. Take your employee surveys to the next level

 1. Build your survey: how to create the best employee engagement survey

Put employees first When deciding what questions to include in your employee survey, try to put yourself in your employee’s shoes. You want to help boost employee engagement, so make sure your teams are front of mind for your survey creation and launch. Get a balance between questions that focus on the organisation and on how your teams are feeling so that you can get actionable insights that create change that matters. Understanding how your employees are feeling will play a massive part in improving their engagement and making them feel valued.  

Be brave and ask specific questions It can be tempting to ask broad questions when you’re planning your employee surveys. But if you know there’s an area of employee engagement that could be improved, this is your chance to find out! By confirming how your employees feel about particular topics, you’ll have the confidence to implement change backed by their responses. The more specific your questions are, the easier it is to create an action plan from the results!

Create change that matters If you’re just getting started, link your pulse survey to change you know can be created quickly. Start small if needs be! By implementing change based on your team’s responses, they’ll see the difference their feedback can make and will be encouraged to take part in the next one!

Need some more ideas? We’ve got 70+ questions in our latest Pulse Survey Guide to get you started

 2. Pre-Launch – How to communicate an employee engagement survey

Don’t rush – The build-up to your launch is just as important as the day your employee engagement survey goes live. Your employees may be hesitant to take part if they aren’t familiar with the system you’re using for your surveys. Equally, if you haven’t explained why you’re introducing your surveys, when employees need to answer by, and how you’ll be using their feedback, your employees won’t understand how important their participation is which will affect your participation rate. By setting aside time to communicate this ahead of your survey launch, your employees will build more confidence in sharing how they really feel and will be more likely to provide feedback.

Early communication Communication is key when introducing surveys to your organisation. And it’s important to start this before launch day. By giving your employees the full picture before your first survey goes live, you’re more likely to have their trust when the survey hits their inbox. And creating a build-up will encourage more of a buzz by the time the survey launches.

• Arrange for an email to go out with a clear start and end date for your survey. This means your teams will know when it will be available until and when they must respond by. 
• Explain the purpose of the survey.  This will help your employees to understand why you’re introducing surveys and why they need to respond.
• Ensure your employees know who they can reach out to if they have any questions or concerns about their data. That way, you can solve any friction before the survey goes live.
• Make it clear that employees can complete the surveys during their work time. If your colleagues are unsure if they can participate during working hours, this may affect your response rates. 

 3. Build Up: How to promote your employee engagement surveys

Put up posters If you’re using software like Stribe to share your survey, use branded posters and visual aids to help promote the tool and your survey. This will raise awareness and reassure your teams that it’s a trusted platform, backed by your organisation. Promoting the tool will mean the survey becomes familiar to them, helping to minimise any uncertainty on launch day.

Utilise internal communications channels You can also share links to your survey via your internal channels like Teams, Slack, email – whatever platform your teams use the most! 

Incentivise the survey launch Throw a breakfast in the office to celebrate the launch and promote employee engagement. This will bring people together and help to get people talking and spread the word.

Bring managers on board Engage with your team leaders ahead of time, so that they can help to promote employee engagement surveys during meetings and address any questions their teams’ might have.

 4. Launch Day: How to increase employee survey participation

Keep up communication We’ve already mentioned this one but if there’s one thing you take away from this blog, let it be communication. Your employees are unlikely to take part in something they don’t have an awareness of. If they receive your survey and don’t understand why they should participate, you’re unlikely to receive a strong response rate. Communicating the when, where, why, and how of your survey will help you increase employee survey participation overall!

Send reminders Sometimes all it takes is one email to get the responses flowing, but if your employees are having a busy week it’s easy for your survey to slip into the depths of their inbox. Give your employees an extra nudge over the following weeks to remind them to take the time to respond. So, how do you remind someone to complete a survey? If you’re using Stribe, you can send reminders straight from the pulse tab.

Increase your outreach With more and more of our teams working away from their desks, it’s important to consider the accessibility of your surveys. Increasing accessibility to your survey will help you engage with your hard-to-reach employees. Try sharing survey links within your internal channels (like Teams) and ask managers to send them to their teams. If your teams are more likely to respond to something on their phone, encourage them to download the apps. This will ensure they have the best user experience when responding to the survey! Using Stribe, you can even share your survey using QR codes, so that you can reach everyone, even those without email addresses! 

 5. Maintaining Momentum: How to increase employee survey participation

You’ve launched your first survey and achieved the response rate you worked for! Now it’s time to look at the responses and create an action plan. Once your survey has ended, you have a window to analyse those responses and show your employees that you’ll use their insights to create meaningful change. These are just a couple more steps to making employee surveys a part of your teams’ every day!

Complete the feedback loop Once your survey has ended, keep the momentum going by sharing the results with employees and letting them know any action you’ll be taking based on their feedback! This will create a feedback loop with your teams and gain buy-in for your next survey. Make sure you do this before launching another survey. If your employees know their survey participation leads to change, they’re more likely to engage in the next one.

💛 Stribe’s You Said, We Did feature allows you to share your results and feedback based on how your employees have answered, allowing you to tailor your messaging so it’s even more effective!

Share your results and get even more responses

Create another survey Build a habit for your employees by scheduling your surveys for every month, quarter – whatever suits your organisation! By following the same steps, responding will become part of your teams’ routines.

Identify any key themes that came up in the first survey and use the next survey to find out more and dig deeper into their feedback. Using Stribe’s built-in Key Phrase Identifier, you can find these straight away without having to sieve through your text responses!

Schedule a recurring survey Consider creating a recurring survey that gives you a baseline to measure change against. By asking the same questions over a period of time, you can measure how your teams’ responses change based on the improvements you’re making!

 Take your employee engagement surveys to the next level 🚀

Pulse surveys are a great way to get deeper insights into your teams and will give you the confidence to make data-led decisions. But in order for your surveys to make an impact, you need the right software to support you. 

At Stribe we do the heavy lifting for you, making sure your launch plan works for your organisation. Our people experts are on hand to help you ask the right questions, communicate your surveys effectively and maximise your response rate. Our software is also 100% anonymous, so employees have the confidence will say how they really feel and give you detailed comments that will help you understand how they’re really feeling. 

Get in touch with our people experts here to see how Stribe can benefit your organisation!