MarketTools Blog

This is the second in a series of posts about setting up an effective employee feedback program.  You can view Part 1 in the series by clicking here. 

When it comes to designing employee feedback surveys, there’s clearly a right way and wrong way to ask questions. In my last post I talked about the initial steps in setting up an effective Employee Feedback Program. This time, we’ll get into the details of how to ask the right questions to ensure effective analysis.

Addressing the Right Topics:  Determine Content Areas
An overall employee satisfaction survey should cover all relevant topic areas associated with the employee experience.  These typically include at least the following:

Job responsibilities
Resources, training, and development
Work group experience
Feelings about manager
Compensation and benefits
Rewards and Recognition
Company strategy and direction
Assessment of senior management

Focusing on What’s Most Important: Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
The employee survey needs to be kept at a manageable level (a maximum of about 100 rating questions) to avoid burdening respondents with a lengthy survey-taking experience, and to focus on what is most relevant to the employee experience.  Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the core measures that will be tracked in each survey wave.  The typical KPIs for an employee survey include overall job satisfaction; likelihood to continue to work for the company; and likelihood to recommend the company to a friend or colleague.  In addition, the KPIs would also include overall satisfaction for the question topic areas identified above, including job responsibilities; resources, training, and development; compensation and benefits; etc.  Your Human Resources department may also have an additional set of KPIs based on standards for your industry.

Developing the Employee Survey Questions:  Keep  Relevance and Ease of Use in Mind
The content of the survey will be driven by the topic areas and the KPIs.  The questionnaire structure is generally organized by topic, with drill-down questions to measure important aspects of each content area followed by an overall satisfaction question specific to that topic. As an example, drill-down questions in the topic area of "Feelings about manager" might include questions about fairness, coaching, quality of the employee-manager relationship and quality of communications.  Here are a few parameters to consider when developing survey questions:

• Where surveys consist primarily of questions that ask the employee to give ratings on a set scale, consider some variation in question style to increase engagement and more insightful feedback.  Rating questions are best presented in a grid, so that the space for answering is economical, attractive, easy and fast to complete. The overall satisfaction question for that topic (the KPI) will follow the grid, along with an open-end question that provides an opportunity for the employee to provide comments.
• The majority of questions (typically 80% or more) should be exactly the same from wave to wave, using the same rating scale, since the purpose of the survey is to track performance over time. You can also take the opportunity to focus on “hot topics” that might be important at a particular point in time – such as a new process or a significant event such as a drastic change in strategy. These “hot topics” might be included in one or two waves of the survey and then replaced by a new set of current issues that are most relevant to employees at the time of the survey. 
• Combining an ongoing set of questions with “hot topics” provides a combination of stability and currency – in recognition that most elements of the employee experience remain stable over time, but also acknowledging that management will want to seek employee input into the issues, concerns, opportunities, and decision points that arise in a changing organization.
• Think about whether you need to develop specific sets of questions for particular employees, whether on the basis of job role, country, etc.  For example, a set of questions might be directed to client-facing employees that would not be relevant for employees who do not interact with customers.  Another example is showing employees of a specific country only questions about benefits that are available to them at their location, and not displaying the full set of benefits available companywide.  The intent is to show the right questions to the right employees, which can be accomplished via survey logic built into an effective survey design.

Determining the survey content should be a collaborative effort, driven by HR but with significant contributions by senior management in order to ensure buy-in and acceptance of the results.

Capturing the Voice of the Employee: The Importance of Open-ended Questions
It's crucial to provide employees with the opportunity to provide further input through open-ended questions asking for comments in their own words. From the employee’s point of view, it shows management’s interest in and receptiveness to whatever the employee has to say, and it’s an opportunity to provide details in their own way.  From management’s point of view, open-ended comments provide a vivid voice of the employee to help explain what’s behind the numbers. These employee comments might also provide insight into other issues and concerns that may not be included in the survey but are nevertheless important to employees – indicating topic areas that should be added to subsequent waves of the survey.

Including Key Variables to Help with Analysis
The employee survey should include specific variables that allow you to segregate employees into groups for analysis, such as their department or organization, role, region, location, etc.  It is crucial to avoid including variables that can identify the specific employee, such as employee ID number, birth date, start date, etc.  If a variable such as tenure is important, an alternative to uploading specific start date (which could identify an employee) is to set up tenure bands, such as less than one year; one year; two to three years; etc.  It is also important to ensure that combinations of particular variables cannot identify a specific employee, such as role combined with location.

Evaluate each variable to determine why it may be important for analysis. For example, the variable “age” might be important for analyzing employee satisfaction with various benefits, such as 401K benefits, since the assumption is that it becomes increasingly important to older employees. Again, it's important to set up an age band rather than specific ages, since that could identify an employee.

Knowing How to Measure: Rating Scale
Almost all the questions in the survey will be rating questions, where the respondent indicates their response to a question with a number from a set rating scale.  MarketTools CustomerSat recommends a 10-point rating scale ("rate your response on a scale of 1 to 10") for the following reasons:

• 10-point scales are becoming an industry-standard, which increases the likelihood of being able to benchmark KPI results with those of other companies.
• 10-point scales are very intuitive and understandable to employees worldwide – we live in a 10-point world.
• 10-point scales allow for granularity to track performance over time.

Stay tuned for upcoming installments, where we will continue our overview of best practices for Employee Feedback Programs with:
     • Analysis of Employee Feedback Results
     • Reporting and Action Planning.