Belaboring Employees with Surveys
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Sep 01, 2008
As we in the United States celebrate Labor Day, I will rise to the defense of workers everywhere: don't oversurvey them!
About 45% of our customers survey their employees, in a myriad of different ways:
- Annual in-depth employee-satisfaction measurement
- Quarterly snapshot employee-satisfaction measurement
- Benefits satisfaction and prioritization
- Awareness of corporate initiatives
- Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
- Corporate-policy compliance
- Whistle-blower reporting
- Ethics assessments
- Event planning
- Event registration
- Product/service feedback
- Competitive assessments
- IT help-desk satisfaction
- And many more applications
Once an organization adopts a method of surveying its employees, it quickly comes up with ideas for surveys that it never would have considered before: surveys for preferences for the summer picnic, ideas for names for the company newsletter, even lunch orders! All too often, most of these surveys are done of the entire company, because it so easy to do so and it doesn't have any apparent cost.
But it does have an implicit cost: it burns out employees on providing feedback. Response rates begin to drop, and the feedback is more cursory, with fewer in-depth verbatim responses.
The cure is simple but painful at first. Just like Labor Day, give employees a rest. Use an employee community to set up profiles of employees with facts like: the department they work for, their level in the organization, and other attributes you can use to target survey invitations. Then instead of doing censuses - surveys of the entire employee base - either do censuses of specific departments (e.g., invite all sales staff and sales-engineers to complete the assessment of competitors) or do random samples (e.g., for that quarterly snapshot or "take a pulse" survey, use a random sample across the entire organization). This will help preserve the quality of feedback gathered, without belaboring your workforce!