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

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Other Suggestions for Employee Surveys

Over the last several weeks, we've already covered several tips on ways to make employee survey initiatives successful. Here are a few more suggestions that don't fit neatly into the previous topics, but are very important nonetheless:

• Get senior management endorsement. As mentioned earlier, senior management should drive the initiative, not HR and not a consultant. But "endorsement" means more than "Okay, let's do an employee survey." It means:
  
  
• Signing off on the employee survey content as providing data important to making the business strategies a reality
• Actively encouraging employees to participate in completing the survey and helping plan improvement actions
• Serving as role models for the important events that follow the delivery of the employee survey reports
• Providing support to subordinate line managers and holding them accountable
• Don't let the process get bogged down. There are two ways this sometimes happens:
  
  
• First, it takes many months to develop the employee survey instrument, and it consumes far too many internal resources in meetings, focus groups, etc. It shouldn't be that difficult. Determine the employee survey objectives, choose an item pool from a vendor that's on target, modify the items as appropriate, and get on with it.
• Second, the feedback process becomes unduly delayed because a top-down, cascading process is used (i.e., each level in the organization has to wait until the higher levels have processed and "digested" the data). A better approach is to give each manager at every level in the organization his/her employee survey report within 1-3 days of the survey close-out date. The managers then go through the feedback-action planning process, and report their planned actions upward.
• Ensure a high response rate. A very low response rate leads to managers discounting the results (e.g., "Only half of my employees responded, and their views probably don't represent how the total group sees things."). An even worse problem with a low response rate is that it may not be possible to generate meaningful employee survey reports for subgroups at lower levels in the organizational hierarchy. In addition to good communications in advance of the employee survey, other actions to improve the response rate include keeping the survey as short as possible, ensuring employees that their responses will be confidential, telling them the results will be shared with them, and sending reminder emails to non-respondents at established intervals.

A Final Comment

This series provides only a brief overview of some of the main points in making employee survey initiatives successful. There are many other points that could be made, and a good consultant with expertise in all phases of employee survey projects can help guide you through the process to maximize the value and avoid the many pitfalls companies often get trapped by. In addition to employee survey expertise and a solid technology for collecting survey responses and generating reports, the consultant should also provide a variety of templates, processes, training programs, etc. to make the employee survey process easy, fast and value added.