It’s easier than ever to create and send employee feedback surveys, thanks to streamlined solutions like SurveyMonkey, Medallia, and Qualtrics. But while those tools offer lots of flexible options and advice on best practices, there’s still plenty of room for errors.
Done right, internal feedback surveys can help your management team assess morale, improve engagement, and increase employee satisfaction. You can use the response data to create strategies to motivate employees, improve workplace efficiency, and, of course, maintain or increase retention rates.
Done poorly, your employees will simply ignore your feedback surveys. They’ll become just more corporate busywork that no one — managers or employees — bothers to fill out.
To help ensure your employee feedback surveys are the best they can be, here are 13 mistakes to avoid.
READ MORE: Why We Value Every Employee Engagement Survey
You’ll get more candid feedback if employees can share how they feel anonymously. Emphasize that you will not be collecting anyone’s names on the survey to encourage honesty. Take extra measures to make sure qualitative feedback isn’t identifiable, such as grouping comments together into categories rather than showing individual ones word for word.
To get meaningful data points — even for an internal survey — you should want every employee to be heard. Consider offering an incentive reward to every employee who completes the survey to raise your response rates. This helps ensure you get feedback from team members spread out across the satisfaction spectrum, from the very engaged all the way to the very unhappy.
One of the best ways to build trust within your corporate culture is to have transparency. Share the survey results with all employees — the good and the bad. Take accountability for what you can change so employees know you value their feedback.
To increase engagement and get employees to participate, explain the purpose of the survey at the beginning. A few lines of top-level context, as well as some information about next steps after the survey is complete, should suffice. This is also a good time to showcase your brand personality internally.
If this isn’t your first employee feedback survey, be sure to compare the results to historical data so you can identify trends. Then, report any resulting improvements back to employees. If this is your first such survey, track down others within your industry to see how you compare.
An annual survey may not be enough, especially these days, when employee engagement can have a critical impact on retention. Polling your employees once a quarter will give you more valuable information and shine light on any seasonal trends. Add the survey to your employee engagement plan.
Not all survey platforms check spelling and grammar automatically. Before you hit the send button, have someone who hasn’t been working closely on the survey give it a thorough once-over. (We tend to read our own words without mistakes.)
According to SurveyMonkey, Mondays are the best time to send employee feedback surveys, with 13% more responses than average. At the beginning of the week, employees tend to feel less overwhelmed with their workload and will be more likely to set aside time to answer your questions completely.
A double-barreled question asks two questions at once, like this one: “How well do you get on with your manager and co-workers?” To get accurate data, you should create questions that address only one thing. In this example, you could separate it into two questions, one about their manager and one about their co-workers.
Open-ended questions are great for getting more nuanced insights. But because they take longer to analyze, you may want to limit how many you include in your survey, especially if it’s a large organization. Respondents are also less likely to complete a survey with too many open-ended questions. It’s all about balance here.
Don’t simply ask employees how they like working for your company. To get quantifiable, actionable insights, you need to ask specific questions about different parts of the employee experience. Wherever possible, use a rating scale of, say, 1 to 5, rather than yes/no answer choices.
An employee feedback survey is the last place you’ll want to use corporate buzzwords or company jargon. Clear, concise language leaves less room for misinterpretation that may affect your results.
Most importantly, if your survey results make it clear your employees are disgruntled, you will defeat the purpose of the survey if you ignore their feedback. Whether they disagree with a specific policy like working from home, don’t feel valued and recognized enough, are suffering from burnout, or simply aren’t engaged in their role, you should begin addressing any issues as soon as possible.
Did you know you can add incentives to your feedback surveys automatically with BHN Rewards’ integrations? Request a demo to see how it works!
BHN Rewards puts the power of digital rewards to work for marketers, researchers, and HR managers. Don't forget to check out all the great content in our Resources section!
BHN Rewards puts the power of digital rewards to work for marketers, researchers, and HR managers. Don't forget to check out all the great content in our Resources section!
