We’re thinking about conducting an employee survey in our agency to gauge satisfaction levels. We’ve never done this before. We have just under two hundred employees. Any tips?

I’m a big fan of employee surveys. They’re a great way to unearth workplace issues that might otherwise never become known, and by remaining covert, cause problems whose roots would remain hidden.

Yes, I have some tips. These suggestions are based on my experience in managing employee surveys as an internal consultant, and on my recent and ongoing experience with helping organizations to conduct engagement surveys.

1. The results of the survey must be acted on. It’s really demoralizing and disengaging for employees to complete the survey, only to have it gather dust.
2. Your agency is big enough for you to hire an external consultant to help with communication and administration. Using an external partner will also help your employees to feel confident that their confidentiality is protected. It will cost money, but it’s money well spent.
3. Communicate frequently with employees about the survey, beginning with what the survey is for, and what it’s not for. Give them the key dates of the rollout. Commit to acting on the results.
4. If possible, give employees the option of completing the survey electronically or on paper.
5. The more completed surveys you get, the more reliable the results will be. In your communication plan provide regular updates on the completion rate. Employees should be encouraged to submit completed surveys, but not coerced.
6. If employees repeatedly express concerns about confidentiality, treat this as a survey finding. You now have some information about trust.
7. For an agency of your size, I would allow a three-week window of opportunity for completion.
8. Expect surprises in the results, some pleasant, some not. This is why you’re doing the survey, after all. Your external partner will help you in analyzing the data and understanding the results.
9. Act on the results. Yes, I’m saying this again. One of the items on the survey should be: “I am confident that management will act on the results of this survey.” It’s easy to prove the people who respond negatively wrong just by acting on the results.
10. If there are several areas that require attention, just pick two or three for action.
11. If the results show that one or two departments have more acute issues than others, don’t expect them to fix themselves all by themselves. They’ll need outside intervention.
12. Clarify from the beginning who owns the results. The executive director owns the results for the whole agency. Individual managers own the results for their departments. Don’t hand the survey results off to Human Resources as if they owned them. They don’t. The only rightful owner of the results is the person who heads up the world that was surveyed.
13. When you and your external partner have completed the analysis, pull together a cross-functional employee team to come up with recommended actions.
14. Allow eighteen months to elapse and then administer the exact same survey again. The purpose of the first one is to establish benchmark data for your agency. The second one then allows you to chart changes, and to see how well your action plan is being implemented. I once worked for a company whose practice it was to survey employees every twelve months. Twelve months sounds like a long time, but it’s really too short to do the entire process, including acting on the results and giving the actions some time to take hold. Just as employees were getting ready to implement actions it was time to redo the survey. And that’s where all the energy went.
15. Managers need to understand that nothing bad will happen to them if their departments have unpleasant surprises in the results. But they also need to understand that, as the owners of the surprises, they’re responsible for the fixes. It might be an idea to incorporate this in their performance objectives.
16. Be careful to understand whether you’re measuring employee satisfaction or employee engagement. They’re not the same thing.

A good survey has a section at the end, usually called verbatims, in which employees are invited to write their own comments on whatever they want. In some ways these comments are the most important findings of the survey. People who take advantage of the verbatims section are saying: “Okay, I’ve filled in your survey. Now, here’s what I really want you to know.” This is powerful feedback, particularly if the same issue is raised several times.

Merely by carrying out an employee survey you can increase workplace engagement. But not acting on the results decreases engagement. (You knew that would come up again, didn’t you?) When employees see that you’re making changes based on the survey, their engagement will increase, as will your completion rate the next time you conduct the survey. Employees will say: “Gee, management wasn’t kidding. I want to be sure that I get my two cents worth in next time.”

Good luck with it!

To submit a question for a future column, or to comment on a previous one, please contact editor@charityvillage.com. No identifying information will appear in this column. For paid professional advice about an urgent or complex situation, contact Tim directly.

Tim Rutledge, Ph.D., is a veteran human resources consultant and publisher of Mattanie Press. You can contact him at tim_rutledge@sympatico.ca or visit www.gettingengaged.ca.

Disclaimer: Advice and recommendations are based on limited information provided and should be used as a guideline only. Neither the author nor CharityVillage.com make any warranty, express or implied, or assume any legal liability for accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information provided in whole or in part within this article.

Please note: While we ensure that all links and e-mail addresses are accurate at their publishing date, the quick-changing nature of the web means that some links to other web sites and e-mail addresses may no longer be accurate.