Employee surveys

Do you want to know what your staff think?  A staff survey can help:

• With strategic planning
• Encourage employee involvement
• Provide management with information they might not otherwise obtain.

Below is advice on developing and carrying out staff surveys:

• Do you need help from external organisations?
• Survey or interview?
• Formal or informal?
• Personal questions 
• Phrasing questions 
• Structure 
• Suggestions for questions 
• Schedule

Do you need help from external organisations?

Help from an outside body means survey results will be:

• Analysed thoroughly
• Independent
• Compared with other organizations, for benchmarking purposes.

There are many private companies and bodies that offer professional support to develop staff surveys - for example, NCVO's preferred supplier, Agenda Consulting.

Otherwise, academic researchers may be interested in conducting the research. Smaller organizations may find that a postgraduate student in a relevant Masters course, such as psychology, may be looking for a case study for their dissertation.

Survey or interview?

First, clarify your aims and the type of information you want to gather. Then think about the best way to get that information:

• Comprehensive survey, either online or printed questionnaire
• Sample surveys, for example of particular positions or regions
• Interviews with selected posts or focus groups.

Formal or informal?

Consider whether you wish to collect the information in a formal or informal way and the appropriate style of questions.

Accessibility

Be aware of the accessibility of the questionnaire for disabled people and staff where English is a second language. - Allow options for alternative formats.

Confidentiality

The Market Research Society has a code of conduct about confidentiality, which we would recommend you follow.

Personal questions

Questions about gender, age, ethnic origin, and length of service are helpful indicators, plus they are also useful for cross analysis. Questions about race, religion, sexual orientation, and disability will be important for implementing the forthcoming European Directives on race and discrimination.

However, keep personal questions to a minimum if you are not using an outside source to input and analyze the responses.  It enables the respondent to be identified. It may be useful to include it as a separate section/sheet at the end of the survey, to be returned separately.

The size of your organization will affect the style and content of a survey.  Personal questions may be inappropriate in smaller organizations because there is an increased concern that respondents will be easily identified.

These can be highly sensitive areas, and could easily put off people from filling in the form for fear of being too readily identified.

Phrasing questions

In framing the questions, think about whether it is clear, unambiguous, and answerable.

Questions can either be framed to be open or closed.  Open questions allow people to write their own response.  Closed questions offer fixed options.  Open questions will take longer to analyze afterwards, may make it longer to fill in, but can yield interesting results.

If you give a series of tick boxes, make sure the options for answer match the questions.  For instance, you can ask the extent with which they agree or disagree with a statement.  If you add an option to 'neither agree or disagree', think how you will analyze that response - it may prove to be meaningless.

You can also ask whether they have knowledge of a policy, or proposal - with simple "yes", "no" and "don't know".

You could ask how satisfied they are with a particular condition or function, and offer them to rank their satisfaction from the very satisfied to very dissatisfied.

You could ask them to highlight from a number of options from a drop-down list their actual and preferred methods of obtaining information/involvement in the organization.

You can get them to rank the degree of importance particular employee benefits are.

Alternatively, you can simply ask them to write in their own views.

Structure

Take care to order the questions, so that topics are fully covered and flow from one to another. Above all, make sure that the whole questionnaire is not too off-putting and boring to fill in.

Timing

Timing is crucial. If you ask staff their views immediately after a big change, such as redundancy, then the views will be reflective of that period of uncertainty. If you are tracking staff views, then a cycle of every three years is recommended.

Marketing

It pays to advertise. Advertise that the staff survey is coming and plug it at every opportunity. Staff will need every encouragement to fill it in, so make it fun too. If the survey has the involvement and support of the union or staff council, then it would be helpful if they encouraged members to respond. Make it clear why this information is needed, and how the answers will be treated. Give a realistic deadline for responses; around three weeks should be sufficient. Provide stamped addressed envelopes for the reply form.

Expectations

Manage expectations. Management may be concerned that the introduction of a staff survey will raise staff expectations. Therefore, it is important to manage these expectations from the beginning. A survey will reveal issues that need action, and not all of these will have budgetary implications.

Budget

Budget for both the survey and the action plan following the survey. Have a budget for improvements or come up with alternatives. Otherwise, cynicism will spread very quickly. If staff feel that nothing happened, it will affect the response rate and the responses of any follow-up survey.

Transparency and confidentiality

Make the results public. Staff surveys, although anonymous, should be shared. At least print a summary of the results.  If you can, meet staff to convey the results and the action plan.

However, try to ensure that there are enough respondents in each subset so comments are not attributable.

How long will it take?

Running a staff survey takes time. After the survey gets the go-ahead, the preliminary work takes about four weeks. Allow about six weeks to sending out and processing the data from questionnaires. Producing a report and then presenting the results to senior managers, and ultimately other staff, takes another month. The whole process from start to finish lasts about four months on average.

Suggestions for questions

• The organisation
  • As a place to work
  • Organization's direction and future
  • Management style
  • Staff involvement
  • Diversity
  • Degree of association with job/project
• You and your job
  • Job satisfaction
  • Importance of different job features
  • Job role and development opportunities
• Communication
  • How well informed people feel
  • Actual and preferred sources of information
  • Credibility and openness of information
  • Departmental meetings
  • Team meetings
  • Supervision
• Union or staff council
  • Levels of satisfaction and involvement
  • Preferred form of representation
• Upward communication
  • Opportunities for upward feedback
  • Confidence in airing views
  • Input into decision making
  • Listening to and acting upon views
  • Communication between departments
• Training and development
  • Induction
  • Development and training opportunities
  • Identification of needs
• Employee Benefits
  • Importance and satisfaction with benefits
• About you (separate section)
  • Monitoring questions about: gender, age, ethnic origin, disability, caring responsibilities, sexual orientation, religion, length of service, grade, type of contract and union membership
• Other comments
• Opportunities to add your own comments

Schedule

1. Establish the objectives of the survey and its issues and target population
2. Decide on a sample or census approach
3. Ensure management commitment and internal communication of the aims
4. Involve the union or staff representatives (if in place)
5. Consult a selection of staff on the focus of the study and the best means of carrying it out
6. Draw up the questionnaire, pilot and revise the questionnaire as necessary
7. Distribute it to staff in a personalized way, either at work or at home
8. Rigorously oversee completion and return
9. Organize data entry and undertake computer analysis of results
10. Produce detailed results, incorporating analysis, interpretation and comparison with normative data; present the results to staff and gather feedback
11. Make recommendations for action and follow them up

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