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July 21, 2010

Are your staff getting behind you?

Nearly three quarters of last month’s survey respondents agreed that employee satisfaction surveys are a good indicator of morale.

But there are plenty of ineffective surveys doing the rounds and failing miserably to hit the mark. So how do you know your survey is giving your organisation reliable results?

One of the main reasons for failure is a perceived lack of confidentiality. If the process of conducting the surveys is not treated professionally and does not guarantee strict confidentiality, not only will your employees guard their responses, but you are likely to stir social tensions in the workplace.

One of Beilby’s HR Consultant/Psychologists, Ashani Seneviratne recommends the following steps when conducting employee satisfaction surveys in achieving an optimum response rate:

1.    Clearly outline the objectives of the survey - It is important to have a clear idea of what the purpose of the survey is and exactly what you want to achieve from it.

2.    Identify the right dimensions in your survey specific to your organisation’s needs and identify the key metrics - Know exactly what you want to measure as an indicator of employee satisfaction, e.g. pay and benefits, communications, leadership or teamwork. Then establish how you are going to measure these dimensions.

3.    Determine how to design your survey - This is where you identify what ratings to use. Ashani recommends a 1-4, or 1-5 scale as the most effective way to gain high response rates. This step also involves determining what demographics to use when splitting your data, e.g. by age or gender.

4.    Marketing the survey - Determine how you are going to communicate and market the survey to your employees. Using a third party to carry out the survey will ensure confidentiality standards are met and will encourage your employees to respond to the surveys openly and honestly.

5.    Launching the survey- Using online surveys will achieve much more effective results than hard-copy/printed versions. Online surveys have been shown to increase your employees’ sense of anonymity, as they are usually communicating directly to a third party.

6.    Processing and analysing questionnaire data - This step involves running an analysis of the results. Professional HR consultants like Beilby generally provide their own in-house custom design software, along with reporting and presentation mechanisms to feedback results to management and staff.

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