If you are relying on just email to communicate with your employees, likely, many of your employees won’t get the message. Before you launch your employee survey you must create a communication plan to help boost engagement and make sure every employee is excited to take part!
The employee survey communication plan is also a great tool to help employees understand the what, when, where, and why of your employee survey. Creating it will establish trust and buy-in. This will improve your survey response rate and the quality and detail of employees’ answers. Having a detailed employee survey communication plan is also key to avoiding employee survey fatigue!
In our latest blog we’re covering every step you need to take to create the perfect employee survey launch communications plan:
Employee surveys give employees a way to share their thoughts and feedback and give you a way to identify areas of improvement. Additionally, they give you a unique perspective on your team, the company and its operations.
Employee surveys are a cost-effective way to scale up the way you gather employee feedback. They are particularly effective for dispersed, deskless, and hybrid teams. The insights they give you allow you to see changes in employee engagement over time. They will also give you a better understanding of what drives your employees’ engagement, wellbeing and retention.
Launching employee engagement surveys with great response rates requires planning and clear communication. But it needn’t be a daunting task! We’ve covered the key steps below that will help you create a fool-proof employee survey launch plan. We’ve also included a free editable download to make it easy for you to get started!
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”.
Read more about increasing 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, hard-to-reach/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.
Case-study: How Stribe supports dispersed employees
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.
Before you launch anything new it’s important to bring your managers on board so that they can support the survey and raise awareness of the importance of employees participating.
New initiatives can make people feel uneasy or reluctant about supporting them. Especially if it requires training or changes to their working pattern. Managers have a lot on their plates and finding time to start something new can be difficult for them.
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:
1. Saves them time
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.
2. Empowers them with data-led decisions
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.
3. Helps them understand the little things so they don’t become the big things
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.
4. Helps teams to be heard
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! Creating a written communications plan for your employee survey will help you keep all stakeholders on the same page. This will help you cover the essential activities for a successful launch and improve buy-in from employees by keeping everything consistent!
Need a helping hand creating your written employee survey communications plan? Use Stribe’s employee survey communications plan template as a starting point. You can use this if you’re just starting out on your employee survey journey, or are looking to refine your strategy for your next survey launch!
At Stribe we work with some of the UK’s happiest workplaces. We help them to craft perfect survey launches whilst supporting their employee surveys with our award-winning survey software.
Employee surveys are a great way to understand what your team are thinking. They will also give you the confidence to create change that matters. To achieve good survey engagement, and for your survey to make an impact, you need the right tools and strategy to support you.
Stribe’s software gives your employees the confidence to share how they really feel. And, our people experts are always on hand to help you ask the right questions, communicate your surveys and maximise your response rate.
Many organisations use pulse surveys to help them create changes based on their employees needs. Find out how to get the most out of your results in our latest blog.
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