How to Gain Real Value from Employee Opinion Surveys
The Employee Opinion Survey is an important tool to help the modern management team understand the views and aspirations of its workforce. Properly used, it can be a powerful instrument for performance improvement and change in an organization. Most larger companies conduct employee opinion surveys on an occasional, if not on a regular basis. The senior management in these organizations will tell you that their commitment to surveying their employees is indicative of their concern for their people. They will also tell you that they believe that the survey process should result in well-motivated employees who are productive and quality conscious. In spite of this, these managers are sometimes perplexed because, no matter how many surveys they conduct, morale, productivity and quality do not improve.

Often, this is because of some frequently repeated mistakes in the way the survey has been prepared, conducted or the results used. In this paper, we attempt to outline some of the ways companies can avoid these pitfalls and use surveys as key tools in developing real performance improvement and a well-motivated and productive workforce.

Conditions for Conducting a Survey
The conditions for conducting a survey need to be right. The only right condition for doing an employee opinion survey is when senior management (and not just the HR department) wants to find and solve the problems that employees are facing in their work environment, with the objective of addressing these, and so improving the performance or the organization.

Frequently Encountered Problems (and how you can avoid them)

Problem: Frustration in interpreting the results.
Solution: Anticipate the significance of various possible responses in advance and formulate supplementary questions as needed, to minimize any confusion that might result.
Poorly designed questions often result in data that raise more questions than they answer.

Problem: Invalid cross-group comparisons.
Solution: If you use norm data be very careful in using it for comparison purposes. Consider using an expectations-based approach. Survey results are often compared to the results of other companies in order to provide a "benchmark" for the results (i.e., to determine whether the results of the current study are better or worse than the norm.) While this sounds good in concept, the comparisons almost always fail to consider the significance of the sample differences. No database exists that allows comparisons to be controlled for industry, employee group size, and geographic area, much less the more significant variables such as the economic and political climate or the fiscal outlook for the organization. Equally, no comparative database exists that includes contemporary data from all sectors – this would require a concurrent survey of all sectors /countries each year and there is no survey organization doing this in the real world.

Problem: Biased survey questions
Solution: Try to be as independent as possible to improve the neutrality of the survey; you need to adopt a dispassionate and objective viewpoint over its preparation and analysis. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of any survey is the challenge of wording the questions in a neutral manner and putting the questions in a sequence that does not encourage biased responses.

Problem: Lack of survey consistency.
Solution: Obtain a reliable set of core questions that have been used in many different environments so their effectiveness is understood. By periodically conducting surveys that have a core set of questions in common, organizations can determine whether the changes that they are making are perceived by employees as resulting in improvements or not. Surveys that focus only on "hot topics" too often fail to monitor the overall health of the organization’s culture.

Problem: Too much focus on averages. Survey results often focus on the average response to questions. This frequently fails to identify problems (or opportunities for improvement) that become evident only in a distribution analysis. While a small percent of respondents may answer in a certain manner, their concerns may provide the key to significant organization improvements.
Solution: Ensure that care is taken to review the issues behind the statistics. Carry put a content analysis of free-test comments to understand why certain response patterns occur. Make comparisons between departments - these can often yield valuable data on why performance levels vary so widely and what the hey drivers of performance are in the organization.

Problem: Too much focus on the medium
Solution: Think through how to use "focus groups" of employees to investigate "why" employees responded in certain ways, and "what else" is a major concern that wasn't included in the survey. Focus groups can, and should, be used as a key part of the design process. While web-based or paper surveys can yield large amounts of statistical information, they can never reveal the entire story.

Problem: Too narrowly focused surveys.
Solution: Avoid "surveying with blinkers on", which can create a number of problems, including generating resentment by employees who wanted an opportunity to express their opinions about other issues. Organizations often conduct an opinion survey in preparation for a specific new program. As a result, they are interested in obtaining information that might impact the development of the new program and often limit the survey scope to just the issues they anticipate are relevant.

Problem: Lack of management commitment
Solution: You don't have to make plans to cover all of the issues arising in the survey. Employees are realistic and understand budget and time constraints. Just make sure that some of the key issues are addressed and let people know what is being done about them. Perhaps the most common problem is conducting a survey is not following through in making any changes based on the survey results. Conducting a survey raises employee expectations regarding the future. A survey with no follow through is worse than none at all, since the survey provides a sense of hope for positive reactions.

Pilat
Pilat has extensive experience of the effective use of Employee Opinion Surveys to drive performance improvement in organizations. Our consultants can help you anticipate problems, such as those above, at the design stage. They will help you to consider the merits of various survey instruments and approaches, to select the one that best fits your organization’s requirements, and with the potential to yield maximum value for you. For more information, speak with one of our consultants or business development team.