Tips on Making Employee Survey Initiatives Successful (Part 2 of 5)

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Steps in the Employee Survey Process

With the Feedback-Action Planning Model (covered in last week’s post) as our basis, let’s quickly dive into the process in more detail…

Here are a few tips for each of the eight basic steps in the employee survey process:

1.  Project planning. Employee survey projects often become bigger and more complex than is necessary, and they take longer than they should. We've seen few employee survey projects fail because they were too simple, but many fail because they became too complex. Keep things as simple and streamlined as possible. A sound project plan can help keep tasks within scope, and on schedule. Another thing that can help is to have one internal project manager for the employee survey, and not a committee. However, that project manager must still get input and buy-in from all the key stakeholder groups. The project plan should also specify which tasks will be performed by the consultant, if one is involved, versus internal resources.

2.  Employee survey development. Censeo’s white paper titled Developing an Effective Employee Survey provides a more in-depth discussion on this topic. The main points we'll reiterate here are to make sure the employee survey content is linked to what's important to the business, write items and the response scale that meet sound psychometric criteria, and keep the employee survey relatively short and focused.

3.  Prior communications. Communicate the employee survey objectives, and how the results will be used, well in advance of survey administration. Encourage the employees to participate, assure them that their responses will be anonymous, and state that the results will be shared with them (and, of course, you'll have to then do so!). It's more impactful if employee survey related communications come from a senior line executive than from HR; use multiple communications, not just a single memo or announcement. Good communications prior to the employee survey are the best way to increase the response rate.

If line managers will be expected to play a key role in using the employee survey results to make improvements (and that normally will be the case), then those expectations should be clearly communicated in advance. This will lay a good foundation for accountability later.

4.  Employee survey administration. These days, most companies are using technology in some fashion (e.g., Internet-based survey platforms) for reasons of speed, cost and ease of implementation, and they usually use a vendor for employee survey administration and report generation. Our main tip for this step is to select an employee survey vendor whose platform can fully meet your needs. If paper-based administration will also be required for some employees, make sure the vendor can efficiently and quickly process the off-line surveys, and create an integrated database at the end of the campaign.

5.  Report generation. Good survey reports are absolutely critical to a successful employee survey initiative. Because of the importance of this step, our tips are covered in a little more detail in next week's post. The only point we'll make here is that the survey reports should be generated within 1-3 days after the survey closeout date, not weeks or months. "Old data" don't have credibility, and the whole initiative loses momentum.

6.  Feedback and communications. Once the employee survey has been administered, and reports generated, feedback and communications often occur in two ways. First, a summary of the overall company results is shared with employees via the company newsletter or some other media. Second, and this is an enormously powerful method leading to change, line managers conduct feedback meetings with their employees. Tips for this step are also discussed in more detail in part 4.

7.  Action planning. Improvements in some survey areas are best addressed systemically on a company-wide basis (e.g., the need to improve medical claims processing). However, most areas surfaced by the employee survey are best addressed by line managers at various levels in the organization, hopefully with a high degree of employee involvement. There are many tips one could give line managers regarding this step (which are covered in training), but probably the most important is to focus on the 2-4 improvement opportunities that are most important, and not try to take on too many actions at the same time.

It's helpful to document action plans because it increases the likelihood that the actions will be taken, it makes it easier to monitor progress, and the plans can be shared with others (e.g., line managers with their bosses). The format for the documentation isn't particularly important, as long as it includes goals (areas to be addressed), tasks, responsibilities and target dates.

8.  Implementation. Action plans are of no benefit if they aren't implemented. Managers should be held accountable for making change happen based on the survey results, and be given the support and resources they need. A perennial problem in this phase of survey initiatives is that line managers don't have enough time for survey-related tasks because they're too busy meeting the demands of their "real jobs." The solution is to integrate the survey actions with their other responsibilities, and make them just as important as other areas where the managers are accountable.

We've already given you the most important tip, and here's the second most important, which is actually just another way of thinking about the first: strive to get every manager in your company to make at least two positive changes based on the survey results. Even if you're only 50% successful on this goal, the survey initiative will have profound and long lasting benefits to the organization. It really doesn't matter whether the actions are primarily aimed at organizational effectiveness issues or employee commitment/engagement issues — actions in either domain will have a significant bottom line impact.

OK – a lot of ground covered this week.  Next week we’ll shift our attention to the reporting of survey results.