Surveys remain one of the most used tools in the employee research kitbag, but they’re often poorly designed, badly executed and fail to translate insight into action. We recently ran a webinar for The EX Space members with Nick Court and Rob Robson from the People Experience Hub, where we explored practical ways to ensure you get the most value from your survey process.
We covered loads of ground including how to choose the right survey type, getting your survey design right, ways to achieve maximum participation, best ways to analyse and share results and how to ensure your insights drive action. But one of the most important areas we covered was how to ensure you ask the right questions.
This is the most critical foundation for getting the most out of your survey and an area that is often ignored. It’s all too easy to accept the question set given to you by your survey provider, or to come up with some well-intentioned survey questions within your team. But how do you know these are the right questions to ask?
There is no universal reliable and valid definition of employee engagement or employee experience. Which means there is no single or correct way to measure these things. What constitutes a great experience in one organisation may be completely different to another organisation. For example, some surveys ask if you have a best friend at work. Now for some people this might be critical to how they feel at work, whether they’re having a great experience or if they are engaged – but for others it might not feature at all.
The starting point for any survey should be the careful design of your question set. We recommend using our ‘best experience‘ tool to find out what good looks like for your employees. And once you have had some best experience conversations, the questions you need to ask within your survey will become much clearer. Only then will you have a survey which you can be confident is measuring and tracking the right things.
At People Lab we have helped hundreds of companies develop their employee surveys over the years and given them confidence that not only they are measuring the right things, but more importantly they are then working on those areas which will have a positive impact on how people feel at work. If you’d like to find out more about our approach, why it is different from the usual survey set up and how it will make a demonstrable difference to your employee experience and employee engagement then we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch today for a no-obligation chat.
