How Should You Optimise an Employee Engagement Survey?

Do you know what every successful workplace has in common? It is the culture of appreciating employee feedback, where the company listens to the employee’s concerns and takes steps to correct them at the right time. However, prioritising employee feedback has often felt the upcoming risks of employee engagement survey 2020 fatigue.

Contrary to what is going through your mind right now, employees appreciate surveys and their grievances proactively listened to and acted upon. Organisations must emphasise thoughtful and relevant feedback that helps the business grow and pinpoints its merits and demerits.

Over time, engagement surveys have a chance of causing disinterest and fatigue among the respondents. As a result, the human resources team will have distorted results. We understand that you already have a lot to do (think to-do lists, internal communications and company news) and simply do not have the time and energy to wade through overwhelming and overflowing results that do not make sense at all.

Now, let us not blame the employees for not ‘doing a good job’. Instead, what can you do to ensure that they give honest and thoughtful answers to your questionnaire?

How do you define employee survey fatigue?

In everyday language, employee survey fatigue ensues when the respondents are overwhelmed by too many surveys or questions that they must answer. Though with good intentions, they adversely impact the work culture by:

• Giving wrong feedback
• Poor impact on data and response quality
• Poor impact on metrics
• Low employee motivation
• Wastage of time, money and resources

What are the types?

Yes, there are kinds of employee survey fatigue. Employees get tired due to too-long surveys, too many questions or simply because there is no action taken. As part of the human resources, it becomes your responsibility to identify the right kind and take steps accordingly.

• Long Survey Fatigue
  After a long and busy week, the last thing that your employees want is to answer a long list of questions. This usually happens because there is no focus on the questions, making them feel disengaged and drained over time.
• Insincere Survey Fatigue
  A more severe cause is when employees are not interested in answering the questions when they think the human resources or management do not acknowledge their opinions. In such cases, the business does not work on its inadequacies.
• Over-surveying fatigue
  Too much of a good thing can ruin everything, where employees are expected to take surveys multiple times in a year. Employee surveys must be used sparingly with sufficient time between two survey sessions.
• Question fatigue
  Similar to the first point, employees do not want to answer long-winded and demanding questions when working on an employee survey – making them tiresome.

What five strategies can you apply to moderate the fatigue?

Employee feedback must be valued at all times, reflected in your survey itself. You are targeting quality responses, participation rate and taking action on the input – all of which factors boost the survey response for the insights that your company needs.

• Plan your surveys well

As part of the human resources team, you should consider these aspects before deploying the survey to the employees. Know the objective before you send the survey, as each purpose focuses on a particular series of questions. Speaking of the ideal time between surveys, the surveys must be taken every month to retain their value.

Decide upon the questions with a team, and choose precise and quality questions that merit quality answers. Though overall company surveys are common, set aside questions for specialised demographics so that their opinions are equally considered. Focus on crucial business goals, employee and steps to make the organisation a success. Also, shorter surveys are better than longer ones as they tend to get neglected between work and personal priorities.
Anonymity is key

Prioritise privacy and anonymity over everything else, and communicate that to your workforce. No employee wants to be in trouble over honest feedback, especially if it is negative. They do not want to lie yet give out the truth, contributing to employee fatigue. Enforce strict privacy during employee surveys. Only then you can promote transparent, open and genuine responses.

• Hold pulse surveys

You are part of the human resources team. That is why you know the value of an employee engagement survey. The company has spent time, money and effort to hire the present group (s), train and ensure their engagement with the company. Their priority at the workplace being work. There is little time for anything extra. That is when you must educate your employee over why an engagement survey is essential.

Employee engagement surveys are often manual, long and disorganised. Pulse surveys are short with simple questions that cover significant aspects of employee engagement and are preferred due to the flexibility in use and management. They save time, have targeted questions, reveal specific cultural issues, promote participation, are multi-platform and multi-device and offer valuable insights.

• Who is reading the responses?

Again, employees are worried about who would be reading the answers, which affects their responses. In contrast, human resources can focus on general questions, while managers can ask team-oriented questions. Surveys can be broken up into different segments. Thus employees can work on multiple short surveys over one long list of questions.

What remains your focus when you send across an employee engagement survey? Are you doing so simply as ‘one of the several jobs an HR professional has to do’ or do you want to see a positive change happening in the company’?

If you keep asking your employees the same questions without acting upon them, they will stop taking it seriously. Employees would write about too many responsibilities, the same salary and benefits over the years – do you want to read that time and again?

• Please, act upon the feedback!

Employees cannot stress enough to work through the problem and show the results. The primary reason for taking an employee survey to gain relevant information, address concerns and evaluate company culture. Employees are competent, and they would soon realise that such surveys are a waste of everyone’s time. They would become disinterested in the company’s core values and leave behind a toxic work culture due to high turnover.

Be it positive or negative feedback, take it seriously and be honest about the possible improvement techniques. Thank the employees for their positive feedback and guarantee that their concerns will be considered. Be direct, authoritative and take ownership by interacting with the managers for collective employee culture.

Employee surveys are a great idea to gain company insights, but ensuring quality responses remains challenging. Making the process more employee-friendly and using their feedback to make fundamental changes will make the agencies a better place to work at. If you are looking for an agency to help you with recruitment services, reach us at BetterPlace.