7 Ways to Increase Your Employee Engagement Survey Response

It’s February. The madness of the holidays have passed, the New Year crunch is over, and this is the time of year many companies find themselves in a slump – whether in sales or production or just that February funk . If you look at the calendar, vacation is far, far away.

Taking this time to recharge and refocus key organization needs is both practical and inspiring, helping organizations create a roadmap to where they want to go. This is a great time of year to conduct an employee engagement survey.

Employee engagement surveys are key to diagnosing and creating action plans to better engagement and production in any organization. But how can this be effective if there’s mediocre to poor survey participation? This is a common struggle of many organizations that have decided to administer an employee engagement survey: a low response rate. Over the past twenty years of working with companies, CustomInsight has seen many survey attempts fumble because organizations just couldn’t get employees to the table to respond.

Here are 7 ways to increase your employee engagement survey response to insure the best possible results and, in turn, action plans to rev up and motivate your employees!

1. Are you prepared for a survey? Conducting a survey without strategic communication and follow-up plans is worse than doing no survey at all. Take a readiness assessment of your organization. Have a plan and timeline for implementing the engagement survey. Communicate the plans, goals, and intentions with senior management, managers, and employees. This takes time and reflection. Take the time you need before diving in.

2. Confidentiality is a top concern of employees. They want to be sure they can express how they feel without repercussions. Fear is a key reason employees will not take a survey. Guaranteeing confidentiality has to be any organization’s top priority.

3. Outsource your survey to both guarantee confidentiality, objectivity, and statistically reliable results. Most in-house surveys, moreover, do not have questions that have beenstatistically benchmarked. So in-house surveys can give information, but without the benchmarked data, it’s almost impossible to draw conclusions from them.

4. 7-10 minutes is enough!The 12-question survey just skims the surface, leaving more questions than answers. But a lengthy survey that takes 15 – 20 minutes will leave employees bored. The ideal survey is about 50 – 55 questions that should take an employee no more than 7 – 8 minutes to complete.

5. Give employees time, while on the clock, to take the survey. Provide employees with a “safe place”, with access to the media room to take the survey while at work. This, alone, can insure higher survey response. Some employees might not have access to Wifi or computers outside of work. Sometimes it’s as simple as “out of sight, out of mind.” Send reminders to keep the survey on employees’ minds.

6. Be creative and motivate teams to take the survey. Consider incentives for departments (or locations) that have the highest survey responses. A little competition can spice up the survey!

7. Communicate survey results within a week or two of closing the survey administration. This might be one of the most important things your organization does. So many companies sit on the results too long, and then the survey feels like another thing on a long list of employee demands that take time and do nothing. This initial e-mail should be candid, however general. Follow-up e-mails and communications should address specific problem areas and action plans that are being put in place because of the survey.

A successful survey has to start with getting employees to the table to take the time to respond to an employee engagement survey candidly. These are seven obstacles we’ve seen organizations run into time and again.