When done correctly, employee opinion surveys are the organisation’s management tools that allow the management team to recruit and retain talented employees who are competitive enough in the market place and can help the organisation reach its financial goals by delivering results. The human resources department is most often the team in the driving seat of this crucial and critical management tool. The employee opinion survey is conducted within mid-to-large organisations on a regular basis. This means that about 80% of these organisations conduct these surveys annually or biannually.
Conducting employee opinion surveys regularly offers a number of benefits and advantages, ranging from identifying the areas of concern and strength within the organisation to getting a clear idea about where the workplace stands. However, effective execution of the surveys is an uncommon task for many organisations, and putting the final data to good use in order to try and drive business outcomes is even more uncommon. Stated below, we find various ways in which the process of employee opinion surveys can be executed effectively, how analytics can be used to build the business case for systemic action and how organisations can ensure that the surveys stay business-focused.
• Survey Research
Research has provided a number of useful and practical guidelines that can be followed when constructing a survey. The construction and execution of employee opinion surveys is an art as much as it is a science. The idea behind the employee opinion surveys was for the organisation to understand the unique needs of the employees. Although these surveys can help organisations identify trends and benchmark performances, the approach often distracts the management from understanding the unique factors revolving around employee satisfaction and engagement within an organisation.
There is also constant confusion revolving around the topics that the survey covers. While some speculate that it covers topics such as satisfaction and commitment, others have suggested it is about loyalty and engagement of the employees. But, while there are different labels by the survey vendors’ marketing departments, the concepts are focused more on the role of the employees. Hence, research suggests that a survey should measure engagement, loyalty, commitment and satisfaction. With various ideas about the survey, applied research suggests that companies should focus more on implementing a valid and practical survey. To get the best out of the survey process, organisations must determine which employee attitudes are driving work satisfaction among the organisation.
Listed below are a few ways to do so:
Effective Design and Execution
All the items included on an employee survey are extremely significant. Hence, here are certain practices that will help maximise the effectiveness of the process:
⁃ Items must be single-barreled, that is, the questionnaire must be designed so employees have to answer only one question at a time. Single-barreled questions are framed to ask for only one rating per item. Effectively answering a double-barreled survey item will not give the desired results. The number of items included in the survey should be around 35 to 60 for an annual, organisation-wide survey. A survey lengthier than that would lead to fatigue and distractions setting in. Shorter surveys are not successful in comprehending enough information, making the results less actionable.
⁃ Although short surveys are aimed at giving leaders a brief idea about how engaged their organisation is, it fails to give the managers enough data to create a specific, goal oriented action plan with the help of those results. Also, making an effort to use a short survey to capture a sufficient section of the work environment in an organisation along with the work experience of the employees is close to impossible.
Open ended items must be used on employee opinion surveys. Allowing employees to include comments on a survey provides rich data that managers are in search of, but open-ended items require a longer time period for employees to complete so the data can be interpreted and reported correctly. However, the open-ended items should be limited to three. Also, if managers wish to receive frank objectives, they must make sure to keep the surveys strictly confidential, especially the open-ended items on the survey, which can be broad and very specific in nature. Generally, organisations tend to keep both, broad and specific items in the survey to encourage employees to freely express their feelings, and also to keep them focused on a particular topic that needs direct answers. Once the HR department receives the results, they should make it a point to scrub or hide the employee’s names before presenting the results. This would help safeguard the confidentiality of those individuals who participated in the survey.
The response/rating scale used for survey items is an essential element of surveys and must be constructed in the right way. The preferred approach is to use the 5-point Likert scale format which has ratings ranging from Strongly Agree through Strongly Disagree. Although a 7-point response scale provides equally valid and responsible results, no additional variance is noticed when more than five points are included on the rating scale.
Managers have on-going concerns about introducing the neutral rating option in the rating scale. This is because they want to encourage the employees to take sides to help get clearer results. However, research suggests that the N/A option or the neutral rating option must be included in the rating scale for the following reasons:
• Giving employees no option but to pick a side often leads to artificially high or artificially low scores instead of accurate scores.
• There may be new employees who have not yet dealt with the managers in the organization and therefore cannot make any type of rating.
• In a case where certain managers have not been up to the mark in their behavior towards their employees and have just recently begun to make positive changes, employees might not be totally convinced on the positive rating and might need an N/A option to make answering the item easier.
The items included in the survey should have valid content. This means that the survey constructed should include only the items that effectively cover all the aspects of the work environment in an organization. Thus, the survey must include questions about the managers, the organization as a whole entity, various business issues, and so on. In order to discover any organization-specific problems that must be included on the survey, organizations must schedule stakeholder interviews with senior leaders, managers and employees from across the organization.
Rates of Response
While there isn’t a particular response rate number that every organization must achieve, there are a few guidelines that must be taken into consideration:
• Assessing the number of responses
Assessing the number of responses needed in order to have a representative or valid sample. The average response rate is usually 60 to 70 percent. Lower response rates tend to undercut not only the statistical validity of the results but also their organizational credibility. Making the survey mandatory could be an option that organizations could explore in order to help raise the response rates, but this might not go down too well with the employees. Alternatively, the organizational leaders could motivate employees to participate in the survey with prizes and awards.
• Taking action on the results at all organizational levels
A verified way to get employees to participate in surveys is to take action on the results and make appropriate changes accordingly. If very little or no effort is taken once the results are out in the open, employees will not be motivated enough to take the survey and even when they do, they will not take it seriously. Ensuring that the senior leaders convey to the employees their commitment to the survey process by emphasizing the value of receiving employee feedback is a vital part of the process.
• Avoiding over-surveying the employees
HR leaders must overview the surveys before they are passed on to the employees in the organization. Limiting the number of surveys employees are asked to take will ensure a high response rate.
The approach taken to report the survey data across the organisation must be considered. Most often, an organisation takes a top-down approach where the senior leaders are the first ones to view the overall survey results followed by the local managers. The simultaneous approach where the senior leaders and local managers receive their results at the same time is also a go-to approach in some organisations.
Employ surveys have now become a fast process since most surveys are done electronically.
Taking Action
This is the most important part. Research suggests that not only must the organization act on the survey results by taking appropriate action, but the organisational leaders should also communicate the same to the employees so that they are convinced the company cares and they can then look forward to an honest change based on the action taken after employee grievances are taken into consideration.
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