Collecting feedback from employees at different stages of their life-cycle is very important to gauge the level of engagement and satisfaction with their role and organization. Organizations of multiple size and shape deploy a plethora of tools from F2F interviews, online surveys, pulse surveys, engagement surveys, and so on to collect employee feedback. The usage of freely available standard online and mobile platforms has helped organizations roll out many more surveys frequently, faster, and cheaper but more often than not the survey remains a check-in-the-box exercise and doesn't help organizations meet the objective of the survey.
48% of employees think surveys are not an accurate reflection of reality. The average survey response rate is only 30%. Only 20% of employees think their manager will act on survey results.
This suggests that all may not be good with the standard survey platforms.
Based on our experience of serving 100+ customers over last 10 years, we believe these are the biggest challenges we have seen in administering employee surveys through standard platforms.
- 1. Lack of expertise in survey and questionnaire design
Designing a survey is a science. Even with all right intentions, HR teams dont have the time or expertise to design the survey in a scientific manner to achieve optimum results and the standard online platforms don't offer these services to the organizations.
The most important part of the survey process is the creation of questions that accurately measure the opinions, experiences and behaviors of the employees. It involves not only writing good questions and but also putting them in the right sequence to form the questionnaire.
The choice of type of questions between open-ended and close-ended also determines the response rates and the kind of insights one will be able to draw from the survey results. The choice of words and phrases in a question is also very critical in ensuring that all respondents interpret the question the same way. Even small wording differences can substantially affect the answers employees will provide.
Ambiguity in rating scales is also an important factor impacting success of surveys. For example, organizations use the Likert scale to rate the experiences of the respondents on a scale of 1-10 or 1-5. But the disparity in intention comes when the respondents rate their experiences on certain variable factors and the organization has a different set to measure each experience. A respondent's rating of 8 might be good for an organization, but from the respondent's end it might be an unidentified scope of improvement. Ambiguity in rating scales is also an important factor impacting success of surveys. For example, organizations use the Likert scale to rate the experiences of the respondents on a scale of 1-10 or 1-5. But the disparity in intention comes when the respondents rate their experiences on certain variable factors and the organization has a different set to measure each experience. A respondent's rating of 8 might be good for an organization, but from the respondent's end it might be an unidentified scope of improvement.
2. Lack of mobile experience and easy integrations
A lot of survey platforms lack mobile experience and thus limits the reach and engagement with the employees. The standard platform only allows a limited amount of custom branding and minimizes a rich web or mobile based survey experience. The limitation to use standard pre-built templates restricts the creativity, interactivity, and the overall survey experience.
The standard platforms also do not allow easy integrations to existing HRIS and other employee centric-tools for easy hierarchy driven authentication, reminder processes, and flow of data. Thus, forcing already burdened HR teams with more non-strategic manual administrative follow-up work for surveys.
3. Time consuming management of surveys
Surveys launched at scales at multiple geographical locations are very difficult to manage. The pandemic and the continued work-from-home scenarios has only increased the level of difficulty.
With the huge skill and talent gap facing the industry and ever-increasing focus and pressures to retain good employees, time is the last thing available on HR's hand. Employee surveys typically becomes one more activity vying for precious HR time.
To manage the end-to-end activities including preparation, conducting the survey, review, analysis, and debrief HR needs a huge bandwidth. There are also challenges to support employees through real-time technology glitches or the employees' facing challenges during login. Lack of prompt resolution often leads to low response rates and lack of confidence in survey objectives.
4. Missing insights and analytics to take actions
Standard survey platforms typically provide either raw-data or just few pre-defined reports. Getting hidden insights from a myriad of data needs specialized skills. Not every HR and people manager has numerical skills and the ability and time to analyze the data and get insights out of it. And they shouldn't be expected to.
An ideal employee survey platform should provide you the tools to create and customize your reports as you need them as well as support to slice and dice the data to uncover hidden trends. on certain variable factors and the organization has a different set to measure each experience. A respondent's rating of 8 might be good for an organization, but from the respondent's end it might be an unidentified scope of improvement.
"It takes a village to raise a child" and surveys are not an exception.
It takes expertise of designing the survey, technology to roll-out, hand-holding to traverse through real-time challenges and analytical prowess to get actionable insights in a timely manner. To succeed, one should select a partner who has the expertise to help you design and launch the survey right the first time.