MarketTools Blog

This is the fourth in a four-part series of posts about best practices for setting up an effective employee feedback program.
•    View Part 1: Setting the Stage for Your Employee Feedback Program
•    View Part 2: Employee Feedback Survey Design: Asking the Right Questions
•    View Part 3:  Analyze and Act on Survey Results

Last month we started our series on best practices for employee feedback programs – beginning a discussion just in time for the holiday season about giving employees the gift of an open, anonymous place to provide feedback and input.

Unfortunately, many internal feedback programs are not given the same priority as external feedback programs (such as customer surveys or partner surveys), often resulting in lack of interest and low employee participation – which means more difficulty in getting the data that you need.  Getting the help and support of enterprise feedback management (EFM) experts with experience in employee surveys can help you ramp up your employee feedback program quickly and make it a success.

Here are some questions to help you determine when it’s time to seek outside help to run your employee satisfaction program:

• Do you need help designing your employee survey?  
  Many companies don’t have the internal expertise to design a survey that reflects their major areas of focus and KPIs (key performance indicators).  Even if your company has a strong market research department, your internal researchers might not have the content expertise and experience to effectively conduct an employee survey.  In these instances, you should consider using an outside vendor with a track record in employee feedback programs.
• Is the information from your employee survey a critical component of your company’s Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) program?  
  As an example, a call center organization may want to track and compare customer perceptions of service together with the perceptions of your call center employees in order to identify areas for training and improvement.  In cases like these, a vendor with broader expertise in EFM programs can help you ensure that your employee survey program maps to the content and structure found in your company’s customer and partner survey portfolio.  
• Do you have the level of employee participation that you would like?
  A low level of employee participation in your survey program could be a result of faulty communications, a sense that nothing will come of it, or a poorly executed survey.  A hastily put-together survey that is not aesthetically pleasing will give the wrong message – that the company doesn’t value its employees enough to do it right.  An outside vendor can provide advice on how to effectively convey senior management commitment and help design a survey and communications plan that will generate excitement and involvement.
• Do you need a proven method for ensuring confidentiality to your employees?
  Most ad-hoc survey solutions don’t provide the mechanisms needed to either hide identifying employee information or to delete identifying information automatically from the database. A feedback management vendor can help provide a robust survey platform that can assure this level of confidentiality.  Employees will feel even more assured if the survey is managed by a third party with the responsibility of making sure that this information is not provided to management or HR.
• Do you need to segment your employee survey findings by group or manager?  
  An experienced EFM vendor can help you set up a robust enterprise feedback management system that will enable you to ask the right questions of the right groups, slice and dice the data from survey results, and ensure that the right people get access to the right data.
• Do you need assistance in analyzing and reporting the data?  
  Handling a large dataset for a fairly complex organization can become quite overwhelming.   An outside vendor with a robust range of basic to higher-level analytical tools, augmented by researchers experienced in internal survey programs, can provide the analysis and reporting needed, with the added benefit of third-party objectivity.

Remember that throughout the process – planning your employee feedback program, designing effective surveys, communicating your goals, analyzing results, and implementing follow-up steps to promote positive change – your ultimate goal is to increase employee satisfaction and loyalty. Bringing in EFM experts to help you develop and implement your survey program can be the critical step that will allow you take your employee satisfaction program to the next level.