Employee Performance Evaluation

Rarely are we asked the question, What is a survey? Typically questions follow the path of, Why do I need a survey program? What am I going to get out of conducting online web surveys to collect customer feedback? Or How do I get started measuring employee satisfaction with online questionnaire templates?

However, sometimes it's good to define market research and what it means, and answer the rarely asked question, What is a survey?

Market Research Definition (mahr-kit-ree-surch)
The gathering and studying of data relating to consumer preferences, purchasing power, etc., especially prior to introducing a product on the market.

Survey Definition (ser-vey)
Collect quantitative information about items in a population. Surveys of human populations and institutions are common in political polling and government, health, social science and marketing research.

Chances are though, you're still wondering about those other questions. These posts may help you answer those ever burning questions about why you should create and design surveys.

Creating an evaluative tool to measure an employee's performance can be a daunting task for even the most experienced managers.

Here are some survey design tips to help you create effective performance evaluation materials that will be meaningful for both supervisors and supervisees:

1) Use titles that are less challenging for employees (e.g. calling the instrument an "evaluation" as opposed to a "test")

2) Have a place at the beginning of the job performance evaluation form to clearly delineate the employee being evaluated, such as their name, title, department, and other pertinent job related individual information, like hiring date and date of last review. Other non-job related demographics (such as employee age or eye color) should be left out.

3) Make sure the content the employee is being evaluated on always refers directly back to their position. This can include technical job-related skills, and "softer" characteristics such as courtesy to both clients and co-workers, or punctuality.

4) Employee evaluations lend themselves nicely to the use of Likert scales, but a good evaluation uses verbal measurements as opposed to numeric. For example one end of the survey rating scale would be "Needs Improvement" and the opposite end of the scale "Excellent Performance."

5) Leave plenty of room for written employee performance evaluation comments after each content area. Both the manager AND the employee should write down their thoughts about the content area discussed. This makes both parties feel like they are contributing equally to a conversation, rather than one person telling the other how to act.

6) Include space for concrete development plans and steps to be accomplished, including dates and time lines for the progress to take place. It's also a good idea to include mid-term progress review dates so manager and employee can check in with each other. This ensures both parties are still on target for a successful future review.

7) Allow both the employee and manager to sign the list of employee evaluation questions and responses after reading all parts thoroughly and together. Leave time for discussion of the evaluation. 
 
8) If your company has an HR department, have an appropriate HR supervisor review your staff evaluation form to double-check that all the right notes are hit.

Cvent offers a variety of Pre-Designed Survey Templates you can choose from for your first online web survey. These internet survey templates contain default questions, email, welcome and thank you text which you can utilize when designing a questionnaire. You can also choose from over 50 different graphical templates to suit the look and feel of your survey forms. Here’s a list of the different pre-created survey templates that you can use to build the base of your survey:


Besides this vast list of pre-designed questionnaires and graphical survey templates, Cvent also offers you a Question Library, which is filled with Customer Service, Demographics, Event, HR/Training, Marketing/Sales questions that you can utilize in your survey.

So! Go ahead and Sign up for an online web survey free trial account now and enjoy these á-la-carte features absolutely free.

The vast majority of survey research projects are studies at a single point in time of a specified population, such as employees, customers or the general public.  Fewer web survey designs track opinions over time.  This post outlines the different types of surveys carried out by researchers.

Point-in-time surveys are called cross-sectional studies.  They study a single population or sample size during a single specified time-frame, and give us a “snapshot” of opinion data.  Cross-sectional surveys comprise the largest number of projects that are undertaken. 

Longitudinal surveys, on the other hand, are those which study trends over time, and usually consist of cohorts or panel respondents.  These can be further classified into three distinct types of longitudinal designs (trend, cohort and panel).

Market researchers write survey questions for different audiences all the time. Sometimes the groups are broad, like consumers or non-consumers, and sometimes they are far narrower, like employees at a small advertising agency. When writing surveys for any audience, be sure and use the clearest and most sensible language to communicate with that audience.

For instance, if you were hired by the small advertising company to complete a 360 performance survey, you should use the correct title structure for supervisors and employees at the company. You don’t want to refer to managers, if at the agency supervisors are referred to as account executives. It would be confusing and yield improper results for your employee questionnaire.

Similarly, if you were performing a bank customer satisfaction survey, you wouldn’t want to ask survey respondents who only have standard checking accounts about their habits with their savings accounts.

In addition to doing the research necessary to communicate with your audience, you must also use clear language. There’s nothing worse than trying to respond to a survey questionnaire that is poorly written, with confusing grammar or overly long sentences.

Writing as clearly and directly as possibly will give you the answers you need. Have multiple people proofread your survey if possible. Everyone processes information differently and a variety of people may find different errors or points of confusion. Having others read the survey is beneficial, because as the survey creator it is hard not to be biased. You need to make sure it is clear to the respondents and as the survey creator, it is hard not to be biased.

The Grand Island Independent recently published the results of a survey conducted at St. Francis Medical Center in Grand Island, Nebraska.

Some of their key findings? Mentors not only help retain staff, but also increases the quality and quantity of job performance in the workplace.

Approximately one-third of all St. Francis' employees have a mentor, an unusually large number for any organization. Mentors were most likely to be an employee's direct supervisor, and were most effective for new-to-the-job employees.

What do these results mean?  In these tough economic times, utilizing the benefits of mentor-mentee relationships is a great way to improve employee retention programs through decreasing staff turnover, increasing job security and grooming more staff for leadership positions, all huge cost-savers for an organization.

Perhaps most important for both employees and their companies, having mentors in the workplace can help everyone learn to do their job better.  In other words, an increase in workplace performance.

Find out what's working well for your organization, and what may not be working by following in the footsteps of St. Francis Medical Center. Learning more about your business research needs.

Halloween is time for spooky movies, scary amounts of candy consumption and silly costumes. This holiday always ensures you'll see at least one person around the office dressed up - but what about when you do an annual Halloween costume contest? How do you poll the office to come to a fair consensus? Quickly create a web poll using your online poll creator. You wont need to worry about writing your own online poll script because the online poll software tool will take care of it for you.

Here at Cvent, we have an annual Halloween Costume Contest, as you might have guessed. In the past, we've used the clapping and cheering approach (who ever gets the most applause wins) and our web polling software. With the image gallery, it's easy to upload your costume pictures. When you're creating a poll online, you can customize the survey questions and add your own graphics and pictures, in addition to information about what the costume is of - because let's be honest, sometimes it's hard to tell. After uploading the pictures, you can quickly send a note to your employees letting them know it's time to VOTE!

When was the last time you ran a quick employee poll for a silly contest to lighten up the hum-drum of the day-to-day office life?

By the way, since I'm sure you're wondering, this year's Halloween Costume Contest winner was a Taco. Congratulations Andy, but why didn't you bring enough Taco for the rest of us?

I probably don't need to explain why creating employee surveys should be part of every HR department, but coming up with the correct employee evaluation template or employee job satisfaction survey questions isn't as as obvious as know you should do them. I recently came across a few sample workplace survey questions I thought may help when you start writing employee questionnaires:

One thing you should notice in the example employee satisfaction questions are they are different survey question types. A general online survey best practice to remember when crafting employee survey questions is to vary the question type. It helps keep the respondent engaged and lowers survey abandonment rate.

Increasing survey response rates is a major goal of most survey builders and market researchers. There's an art and a science to increasing campaign response rates whether it's an email marketing campaign or an online market research study. I wanted to share some of my tips for how to increase survey response rates:

• Make the email survey invitation from names easy to recognize. You can do this by including an individual's name within the organization that's well known (such as the CEO or if it's a client survey, the name of their sales rep). You can also use the organization's name, or both. For example, I'm subscribed to a few MarketingProf's newsletters. When they send out emails they include the same person's name and their organizations name so it looks like this: Anne, MarketingProfs. I recognize it everytime, and since I enjoy their newsletter, I made sure to open the email.

• Keep subject line's compelling, but short. The subject line and the From Name are the two most critical pieces to get your email opened. Try to keep your subject lines to 35 characters or less. You don't need to put the entire email in the subject line, but you do need to include enough information to make the recipients open the survey email.

• Create an attractive survey invitation. Studies have shown that well done HTML email messages get better response rates than plain text emails. With HTML you have the opportunity to include images, change font sizes, bold text, etc. Take advantage of this chance. It's one more way to get people to click through to your survey!

• Send personalized survey invitations. Personalizing your emails, even something as simple as including the recipient's name in the greeting, will return a higher response than a generic message. It creates a personal touch, and makes the recipient feel like someone took the time to send them a personal message (even though your email survey tool did it for you).

• Introduce the survey. Let the participants know why they should participate in your survey. If they don't understand why their opinion is important to your survey findings, why would they want to take the time to fill it out?

• How long will the survey take? Not setting expectations in the beginning for survey length leads to low response rates and high abandonment rates. Not what you want to see. If you don't let people know how long it will take to fill out your online survey, they're going to assume you're hiding something about how long it is. Tell them it will take X minutes or the survey is only Y questions long. Definitely be honest, if you lie here, you're going to hurt your future chances of getting those respondents to complete your next online survey questionnaire.

• Remind your survey sample that their responses will be kept confidential. This is particularly important for surveys about uncomfortable topics. For example, you created a poll for a public opinion survey to see how your population feels about an emotional topic such as abortion. If you don't keep the information confidential, you probably will not get honest feedback. Same thing goes with employee questionnaires, they should always be kept confidential and anonymous. Not keeping responses confidential will definitely hurt your response rate, as well as the validity of the data.

• Offer an incentive. Offering incentives is a proven method for increasing survey response rates. But this method doesn't work if you don't let people know about it up front. Put it in your email, put it on the welcome page of the survey, then make sure to follow up. Again, if you drop the ball here, the chances of that survey respondent completing your online survey form in the future is drastically reduced.

• Always say Thank You! Remember when your mom always made you write thank you notes when you got presents or cards from people for holidays and birthdays? It was because people like to feel their effort is noticed and appreciated. Same idea here, it's nice to just get a short note thanking them for their time. After all, survey respondents are doing you a favor.

• Don't over email your contact list. This is very important. You shouldn't be inviting the same people to complete your online surveys every month. It's important to segment your list using whichever survey sampling method that works best for your surveys to avoid email list fatigue. Make sure that you're coordinating with other campaigns as well. Just because you know they're different initiatives you're emailing about, your contact's wont necessarily see it that way. If you begin sending emails too frequently, contacts are going to just delete your email and never open it, opt out or report you as a spammer.

Have a tip that I missed? I'd love to hear it!

Before you select a sample or design a single question, the first step in a survey research project is to establish your goals and objectives.  With proper planning, time and attention given to this step, all subsequent steps will flow more smoothly. 

Ask yourself--and answer, in writing--broad questions such as the ones below, and then you can drill down into more specific research questions and move on to procedural matters.

What information am I seeking to gather?  Why do I need it?  What is the “end game” regarding what I’m trying to learn?

Who (exactly) can I get this information from?  How can I contact them?  How many people do I need to contact, and do I have an exhaustive list?  Am I interested in any particular subgroups?

Has anyone else done a similar project in the past?  If so, what did they find out and how could what they did help with my current project?

What kind of data and results do I want my questions to produce?  Am I interested in public opinion, actual behaviors, satisfaction levels, employee feedback/workplace surveys, etc.?  How will I go about collecting and analyzing the data?

How will my results be reported?   What will the report format look like, and who will receive the results?  What kind of summary data do I need, and how can I design questions with response options that will provide me with actionable data?

Establishing clear, attainable objectives and goals is of the utmost importance when undertaking a research study.  Your results will likely only be as clear as your objectives, for better or worse!

Here at Cvent, we get asked for survey templates all the time. That's why we've created a bank of survey questions and pre-created questionnaires for all clients to utilize within their account. But it never seems to be enough. Sample employee motivation surveys, employee evaluation survey examples, sample employee questionnaire, employee satisfaction survey templates, the list goes on, and on, and on...

While this post may not give you all the answers or the complete employee survey template you're looking for, it definitely is a start. Below are some sample survey questions for employee questionnaires.


While not all of these questions are necessary (or appropriate) in any given employee engagement survey or job satisfaction questionnaire, you should see how some of them will fit into your next employee satisfaction survey template.

There are several things to remember when creating an employee survey. Obviously, you must ensure no one outside the company can view or take the survey. This is simple enough to do by setting the survey settings in the employee survey software to only those on a targeted list. This will guarantee that your data is not compromised by pranksters, former employees or anyone outside the company.

You must also guarantee anonymity for your employees. This is generally a standard practice but cannot be emphasized enough when you create employee questionnaires. Employees are going to be more skittish than the average survey respondent because they may be concerned about repercussions if they admit dissatisfaction in the survey. So, you cannot express anonymity enough.

When creating a workplace employee survey, include both quantitative and qualitative questions. Provide an open-ended comment space for them to write down any concerns they felt were not covered in the survey. This is a great opportunity for employers to find out things that bother or impress employees. Employers should also share all survey results with employees once the online questionnaire is closed. It could negatively impact employee morale if the results are perceived to be kept secret. Also consider creating action items immediately, if they make sense for the company. For example, if employees express a desire for more training opportunities, look into them and offer a few on-site training classes if feasible.

You should think about employee workplace surveys as employee morale surveys.

I’ve written in the past that it’s best to use probability-based sampling techniques for your employee, market research or consumer survey samples whenever possible.  One of these techniques is called stratified sampling.  It is used when you expect that your population is heterogeneous (different) and that the survey results could vary greatly based upon certain subgroup characteristics.  If you are particularly interested in subgroup analysis within your survey sample, using a stratified sample can increase the accuracy of your results and reduce error estimates.  Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you are interested the television watching habits of American citizens, and you know (from anecdotal evidence or previous theory) that television watching varies widely by gender.  Since you know that males and females have disparate television watching habits, you want to select a sample whose results will accurately reflect the habits and responses for males and females independently.

What you do is first divide the population into mutually exclusive subgroups (or “strata”), and then take a random sample from each of the subgroups.  Using our gender example, you would divide the population into two groups (male and female), then take a random sample from your male and female subgroups, respectively.  You will be able to be more confident in what you say about your results than if you used a simple random sample from the overall population.

Private businesses tend to guard findings from their research efforts very closely.  In some instances, where significant investment dollars and time were spent on sampling frames and reporting, this makes sense.  It's nice to have proprietary research at your disposal to impress clients and customers, and internal employee survey results, for example, may be reserved for senior leaders.

But in most cases, I suggest sharing your survey results with as many people as possible.  The benefits outweigh the perceived drawbacks.  After all, most survey research comes from of a specific point-in-time sample, and whatever narrow edge you may get from keeping the results private will be short-lived.

At minimum, you should share the results of your survey with respondents themselves.  People like to know what they're a part of (and why).  In fact, offering to provide respondents with survey results has been shown to increase response rates! 

It's a great idea to set up partnerships with community leaders before you even send out your community attitude survey.  Publicize your organization and your efforts toward being proactive.  Let your community know that you value them and are interested in feedback and suggestions about the process.  Create anticipation and eagerness to both complete questionnaires and receive the results after the survey is completed.

You can also organize a press release highlighting selected findings from your survey.  This can be posted on your website and in other locations (external websites, community hotspots, etc.).   Call local news organizations if you think the results would appeal to their audiences.  Tell all who will listen how you've made original contributions to the knowledge of your industry, and how you will improve business practices based on your results.

Creating a survey is a lot like taking a trip: there's a definite start, and there's always a finish.  Before you even start to write that first question of your survey, here's a few things you might want to consider.

1) Who will see the results of this survey?  Often times, those who are expecting to see clear and concise results from your survey are not even considered when writing survey questions.  Will your data stay within a particular department, or will it be run up the flagpole to directors or C-level employees?  Perhaps the results will even be the basis of a publication or news article?

2) Who will work with the survey data?  These days, almost anyone can put an online survey together, but have you considered the person responsible for analysis of the data after it has been collected?  Do they have an understanding of charts, tables, percentages and frequencies? 

3) What is the basis for conducting this survey?  What is the survey's business driver, and how will the data be used in your business?

4) What data points will satisfy that business purpose you've identified?  Ensure that answer choices, particularly survey rating scales, are providing enough data points to clearly provide insight into your objective.

5) What are the best ways to ask about and to measure those data points?  Have you crafted the appropriate questions to collect the desired data points to satisfy your goal?

Maintaining a "begin at the end" thought process is crucial to crafting an effective survey.  If you ask yourself these five questions before, you'll see vast improvements in the performance of your surveys.

Customer care and client service novices (and professionals) often wonder: What is the best survey formula to ensure customers have the ability to share their satisfaction, concerns, evaluations, etc. of their company?

My customer service suggestion: Whenever your customer care employees speak to a new client, make sure they make that client aware that your company does quarterly (bi-annual, annual, etc.) customer satisfaction surveys, as well as surveys pertaining to satisfaction of other aspects of your company, events, product enhancements, new marketing initiatives, etc.  Let them know that data is benchmarked and used for important decisions pertaining to customer initiatives. Validate that the customer information is being assessed and acted upon.

Do you want higher response rates? Do you want data that is useful from your customers? Set the stage early with your customer service team, and your customers WILL REMEMBER to give you feedback!

Don't be frustrated with survey data after the fact. Deal with client expectations up front so your customers give you data time and time again.

Yes! You read it right! You can use Cvent’s survey tool to conduct online quizzes and tests. What makes it possible is our fantastic feature called "Scoring."

The online survey scoring feature allows you to assign scores to individual questions and answers within the online poll. As a survey designer or quiz builder, you can decide the maximum score you want to assign to a particular question and further divide it to different answer options. 

 
That’s not all! Within the Cvent online survey platform you can also run reports to pull up average or individual survey respondent scores. We have two reports dedicated solely to Scoring.

1. Scoring Details by Respondents: This report returns scoring details by respondent for completed responses within the specified date range. Each online survey response is on its own page and identified by response number, name, and email address. For anonymous surveys, only the response number is displayed. The total score of the response and the total possible score for the survey is listed at the top. For each respondent, the question, answer, and score is listed.

2. Scoring Details for All Respondents: This report returns scoring details and a list of all responses for selected questions within the specified date range. The question number and the survey question text are listed at the top. The average score for each column is displayed at the bottom. Each response is identified by number, name, total score, and the score for each selected question.

This feature is equally useful for educational institutions as well as business institutions. In today’s times, all organizations want to retain the best and most efficient man power; and constantly conducting training surveys and course evaluation tests for employees. I do not recommend any different. But why waste paper, when the same can be achieved online!

According to The Center for an Accessible Society there are over 49 million Americans living with a disability of some type, with over 30 million between the ages of 21 and 64. That's nearly 20% of the population or 1 out of every 5 people.

Cvent Web Surveys provides federal, state and local government entities with an on demand, feedback management solution. As a web based survey company, our online polling tool enables government officials to quickly and easily gather feedback and analyze the opinions of constituents, while increasing survey response rates and ensuring data protection and security.

Section 508 refers to a statutory section in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (found at 29 U.S.C. 794d). Congress significantly strengthened section 508 in the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. Its primary purpose is to provide access to and use of Federal executive agencies’ electronic and information technology (EIT) by individuals with disabilities. The statutory language of section 508 can be found at www.section508.gov.

Section 508 requirements are separate from, but complementary to, requirements in sections 501 and 504 of the Rehabilitation Act that require, among other things, that agencies provide reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities, provide program access to members of the public with disabilities, and take other actions necessary to prevent discrimination on the basis of disability in their programs.

Why should you use Cvent's online survey application?

“Well, you see… I just don’t have the time.” A frustrating excuse heard every day all over the world, because everyone knows that you can and will make the time for anything important enough. Obviously time is valuable, but you choose to spend your time as you see it benefiting you most, or as you see yourself enjoying it most.

I hear the “time excuse” almost every day from our survey clients, especially when it pertains to uploading contacts into the Cvent Address Book and sending emails through our email survey tool. “But, we’re just really busy over here at XYZ Company, and we have an internal database where we store all of our contacts. I think I’m just going to use the website link to distribute my survey.” At this point, I usually make one last attempt to showcase the benefits of emailing through Cvent, and then I give up.

I’m not going to give up this time though. Because I do recognize the many benefits of sending emails through Cvent, my goal in this post is to convince you that you should make the time to take the necessary steps to do this. I will make my argument in two simple points below. As you read through it, hopefully I will change some of your minds, especially those of you who are constantly “too busy.”

1) One word: Pre-Population. People are selfish. If they feel like an email has been personally written to them, they are much more likely to read it and respond than if they realize it is a mass email that has gone out to 50,000 recipients. If you upload your contacts into the Cvent Address Book and send your survey invitations through Cvent, you can pre-populate various contact fields in the email. For example, instead of opening with “Dear Valued Employee,” you can send personalized email surve invitations that say “Dear Suzie.” This makes people feel good and will thus increase your survey response rates!

2) I bet you didn’t know taking the time to upload your contacts into Cvent's online survey management software application will ultimately save you time in the future! As you know, you can display whichever contact fields you like in the Contact Profile for any given survey. If your respondents are accessing the survey from a Cvent email, this information will be pre-populated for them. However, they can update it if something changes. For example, if one of your contacts get a promotion (and their title changes), when they update this in the Contact Profile for one of your surveys, this change will be reflected in your Address Book as well!

As you can see, sending your survey emails through the Cvent survey application will increase your survey response rates, and it will also ultimately save you time. If that doesn’t convince you this is the best way to distribute your surveys, I don’t know what will!