Employee Performance Evaluation

There is a word in French I have always loved: mondialisation. Like many French words, there is no direct English translation for this term. To give you a rough idea though, mondialisation refers to the way that new communication technology has recently facilitated conversations between people on different continents. Companies headquartered in London are doing business deals with organizations and offices in Beijing, and American firms have clients in India. Cvent is no exception to this rule.

Since Cvent has clients literally all over the world, it makes sense that our clients want to conduct and design surveys in many languages other than English. I received an email from a web surveys client today who was wondering how she should best translate her survey into six different languages: English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi. My response was quick: I told her that she should create six separate surveys, one which was translated into each of the languages she had mentioned.

I explained to this client she could simply translate her questions in Microsoft Word and then copy and paste the translated text into the Cvent Web Surveys Question Wizard. Yes, you can even paste Chinese characters! I also explained that it would be easy for her to collapse the data from all six global surveys into one report. This is why we have made it easy for you to export your survey reports into Microsoft Excel. If you simply run the Answer Details for All Respondents report for each survey and export the results into Excel, you can copy and paste to combine the data from all six surveys into one spreadsheet.

Another great thing about conducting multilingual surveys in Cvent's online survey platform is that you can utilize the display text feature! Remember that display text allows you to specify the question text that your survey respondents will see separately from the text that you will see from inside the survey application (where you create and design surveys) or in your reports. So, it is easy for you to translate your survey questions in the display text window and leave the question text in English. This way, you don’t even need to speak the language in order to correctly interpret the electronic survey results!

I wasn’t lying when I told my client today that Cvent is also a multilingual survey software solution and is ideal for setting up multilingual surveys. Anyone who knows their right hand from their left knows that the corporate world is confined to your immediate surroundings and the world truly is one global market, so use the Cvent Web Surveys software to survey employees or clients worldwide.

Back when the economy was flourishing and consumer spending was at an all-time high, many businesses were content with customers that were merely satisfied, not truly engaged.  Today, money is much tighter across the board, and these same businesses are realizing the importance of building strong and healthy relationships with existing customers AND employees.  Research shows that an organization's health directly correlates to how well they engage these two groups.

So how do you ensure your business is retaining clients and not losing them to competitors?  Perhaps the most important facet is providing exceptional customer service, and this level of service stems from employees who are passionate about their job role and their company.  They know that employee opinions are valued when management makes decisions. They are loyal, often times reccomending their organization when asked about their job.

Because these employees are guiding the customer experience, it is critical to keep them engaged.  Passionate and dedicated employees make for passionate and dedicated customers who are willing to purchase more and promote your business.  Companies who have such an engaged workforce are constantly collecting and analyzing employee feedback about their day to day experiences on the job.

In addition to collecting feedback from employees, it is extremely important to gain customer insights about their thoughts and experiences.  This information can help you make important business decisions, but can also help you to win back the favor of clients who may have had a recent negative experience.  Keeping a pulse on your client base to ensure high customer retention is simple and easy through the use of survey forms.

The most important thing to remember is that it is not the data alone that will help you to retain your clients and employees.  Being able to synthesize the information and make the appropriate adjustments is the key to improving employee morale and client satisfaction.

Sometimes we forget we can't be everything to everyone all the time. It's just not possible. It wouldn't make sense for a shoe designer to start creating hard hats just because a customer wrote on a comment card in response to a retail survey that she wished the designer also made hard hats because the her husband worked in construction. It seems obvious to most people, going into the hard hat market would be a bad call on the shoe designer's part. So why don't organizations have the same clarity when it comes to their business?

It can be hard to say no to customers, particularly when they have good ideas. But just because an idea is a good one, it doesn't necessarily mean it's right for your business model. Take the example many organizations have to face in their life time: where do they belong? Is it in the high end of the market, the mid-market or the bottom feeders? Most people when you ask them don't want to admit to being a bottom feeder, but there's a market need there that can be very profitable. The organization that can fulfill that need is very rarely, if ever, the same organization that can fill the need at the high end of the market. This just points out, again, that we can't ever be everything to everyone. I remember my marketing classes in college always told us you could only be two of the three things: good, fast or cheap. You can never be all three. Good and fast is expensive; fast and cheap is inferior; good and cheap is slow. It's because we can't be everything to everyone.

So how do you figure out what you should be? Your organization's mission should be a start, but missions can change and transform over time. One place you can start is to ask your employees, survey staff to see what they think the organization is and where they should be going. Employees have stellar ideas, but this may sound like a trick question so make sure to follow these tips for employee opinion surveys.

You should also ask for customer feedback. Your customers will help point you in the direction you should be heading. Sure you'll have the one off cases like with the shoe designer who's customer wants her to create hard hats for construction works, but chances are, no one else will respond that way on her customer questionnaire. And then, at the end of the day, you should be armed with the information you need to support your decision. As you're reading through survey comments, you'll notice that everyone doesn't want you to be everything.

In a paper survey, a question asking for an email address or a phone number normally looks like this:

Even though respondents would not intentionally put in incorrect information here, you have no control when a respondent who just wants to get to the next page in a hurry puts in random text, which is useless to you. The problem becomes a little more real in cases when survey creators ask for figures like:

How do you make sure everyone enters numbers and currencies in the same format? Some might put the answer in words and make any calculations on the data (such as average income) extremely difficult. This is where Cvent Web Surveys software offers you a massive advantage over paper surveys. For your open ended (non-choice) questions, you can specify whether respondents put in Number/Currency/General text/Phone number/Email address. Additionally when selecting formats such as number, you can specify whether a number should be greater/less than a certain number, or even lie in a specific range.

You can even design your open ended questions to take answers in date or date and time format. Additionally, you can decide whether the date should be on or after or on or before a certain date. In other words, you ensure that respondents enter in exactly what they’re supposed to. If you decide to put in a calendar asking people what date they will attend a multi-day conference, you can make sure each respondent can only select one of those three dates. You can even make this question required so survey respondents can’t skip it and move forward. You will always get exactly the information you need and all of your responses will be meaningful.

This power of being able to control what responses you receive is not limited to open ended questions only; for multiple response questions you can determine the maximum and/or minimum number of options that respondents can choose.

Over the past year, I have run into many new Cvent Web Surveys clients with the same issues or problems with their employee satisfaction surveys.  Most of the clients have the same story: in the past, using a different online survey solution, they released an employee satisfaction survey and were not able to follow up in a timely manner. 

The workplace employee surveys were conducted in a number of different fashions: paper-based, with different online survey tools, and even website survey forms.  All of these previous methods had one tragic flaw: reporting.  The survey administrators waited untill the survey was closed to run survey reports or review the paper surveys.  The problem inherit in this approach is time.  They would wait weeks before pulling reporting and discovering an employee had a problem in the workplace or in the case of paper based methods, sometimes months before they scanned the surveys.

When they finally discovered a problem that needed attention they would act, but what they discovered was:

Both of these resolutions are horrible.  If the employee solves the problem themselves they feel the organization is powerless and does not care about their situation.  If they quit, we all know that it costs 10 times more to train a new employee than to retain the old one.

A simple solution to these problems is a feature that Cvent's online survey solution embodies: Triggered Email Alerts.  Most other survey tools out there do not contain this feature.

The beauty of this feature is the survey administrator can have an email alert sent to whomever they designate; Human Resource Manager, Employee Liaison, etc...  In this manner as soon as an employee answers the appropriate question and then clicks finish on the survey an email is sent to the designated person, who in turn can then immediately follow up with the employee and solve the problem.  Thus, boosting employee retention rates, making them feel like a needed part of the organization, instilling employee loyalty, and finally creating a better work environment.

The triggered email alert feature in Cvent's survey solution solved these client's employee retention nightmares and resulted in a better workplace and a more cost effective future.

While this entry is tailored to online survey best practices, these tips can also be applied to other market research methods.


For any survey type whether you're surveying customers, collecting employee feedback or conducting a product market research study, exercise caution and good sense in order to get results that are applicable and trustworthy.

As is the case with any research method, there are advantages and disadvantages to using an online web survey to collect data about customers, employees or the public-at-large.  For example, online surveys offer you the ability to gather vast amounts of data from many respondents at the same time, get your data back in an electronic form, see real-time results and automate analysis/reporting tasks... and you can do all of this affordably.  You can even use a relatively small research survey sample to accurately estimate the opinions of your larger population (for survey research in general).

But in some cases, it is best to use a “mixed-methods” approach to your research project.  This means you combine the online survey method with another kind of investigation, such as interviews or focus groups, in order to produce more well-rounded data and conclusions.  Here are some examples of when a mixed-methods approach is likely better than an online survey form by itself:

We all know the holidays are getting closer, which means office pot lucks are about to become all the rage. What will you be bringing? How is your office going to make sure that not everyone plans to bring the same thing? How do you determine the winner of this year's Tastiest Dish Awards?

Competitions involving food are definitely a favorite around this time of year. However, if you have a big office, it can be a pain to collect everyone's votes. As I mentioned at Halloween, building polls to quickly identify the winner of your office Halloween Costume contest can be applied to the Best Dish Award too. Simply log into your web site voting poll software, make a poll to gather employee opinions on who should win this year's Best Dish Awards. Have different categories, such as best presentation, tastiest appetizer, most unique recipe? Add in images of the dishes to help jog people's memories and create one web poll using your poll maker.

Don't think that an online poll survey software tool can only play it's part at the end of the pot luck event, you can send a pre-event survey to find out who plans to bring what. If too many people are planning to bring dessert, a typical favorite, the online poll generator can easily run a survey report to identify categories with too many volunteers. You can easily create a survey contact group to email those volunteers and ask them if they can bring something else.

Holidays are a time to celebrate with family and friends, and eat delicious food. Unfortunately, we often make such office traditions a little more painful than they need to be by forgetting we can use a polling system or survey software tool we already have. Since Cvent Web Surveys doesn't limit the number of responses you can have, it wouldn't make sense to suffer through paper ballots when it can be done for you! Ready to create a poll for your next staff opinion survey? Get started with a free trial.

What are your other sample employee opinion survey examples?

Surveys are an invaluable tool for researching the community attitudes, employee concerns, product needs, customer loyalty and priorities held by different groups or target audiences.  Designing a questionnaire and collecting survey responses from a sample allows us to draw a profile of the group as a whole, and perhaps perform some correlation analysis to understand the source of those feelings.  The online survey findings can then support fact-based organizational decisions or improvement projects to help continually improve the organization over time.

Survey research can be applied to many venues.  Here are just a few practical applications listed below:

An Internal Employee Survey could identify reasons for low employee retention and provide ideas for reducing those costs, such as a better designed benefit program, improved training opportunities, or problems in the way the organization functions.

A Training Survey can identify how a training program has improved the capabilities of some group and how the training program itself can be improved.  

A Product Satisfaction Survey can identify initial customer experiences with a product, providing data to address unforeseen problems and help the next product release.  

A Market Research Survey can identify customers needs when creating these new service and product offerings.  Surveys can be part of Design for Six Sigma activities.  

An Association Survey, which is similar to market research and customer surveys, can show the member benefits most of interest.

However, a survey program is only valuable if it is properly designed and executed.  While performing a survey project seems deceptively simple – it's just a bunch of questions, and survey software tools make electronic surveys quick and cheap – a small mistake in the survey questionnaire design or survey administration can skew or bias the data, leading to erroneous conclusions.  No organization should ever make critical business decisions based on unreliable or invalid data.

Bad data is worse than no data!

I realized it only after the emails had been sent.  It was a test survey that wasn’t intended for entry level employees and senior management.  It was an employee evaluation that had initially been slated to go out only to our newest batch of hires.  Only last minute did we discover we could use logic to create one interactive survey online for senior management to evaluate the progress of new hire training, and new hire survey questions for them to evaluate the training process.  The wording, the slang, everything was wrong!  What did I do…

Hopefully, this scenario has appeared solely in a nightmare (and yes, survey nightmares are very real and very terrifying).  But a similar, less daunting situation is common among many: You have an online web survey that will go out to two groups of respondents, the wording in the two would ideally be completely different, and you do not have the time to go into the two templates you’ve created and select the different audiences then manually send the emails.  Not to mention, this method would require using Cvent’s email survey tool's default templates and the Custom Messages.  What if I told you it was possible to create entirely separate email marketing campaigns, set the emails up to go out automatically AND keep the both default templates and custom messages for each group of respondents? 

The multiple email marketing campaigns feature allows you to do just this!  You can select the number of separate email blasts you intend on sending, you can add entirely different contact groups to each campaign, and you can set up your emails to go out automatically. 

1. This feature is perfect if you have a multilingual survey.  You can translate your message into as many languages as you like to ensure maximum comprehension. 

2. Multiple email campaigns is also great for newsletters that are tied to a generic instant survey.  Instead of copying your survey and creating a new email blast every month, you can add an email campaign for the October '09 Newsletter, November '09 Newsletter, December '09 Newsletter and so forth.  You can then get an aggregate view of the data collected across all months.

3. The nightmare scenario outlined above.  It is likely that emails sent to your senior management are not worded the same as emails sent to entry-level new hires.  The formality of the verbiage aside, your new hires might be a bit disconcerted to know that the bosses of the bosses are watching them and evaluating their decisions. 

We all know creating surveys and designing questionnaires can be a bit overwhelming.  Why put yourself through that again just so different people can receive the same questionnaire?

Marketing departments love client testimonials and customer quotes. They're great to share with the sales team when prospects need referrals, they're helpful to put in powerpoint presentations, and can be a critical piece of any marketing website. Getting those sound bites from clients can be a challenge, however. As you can imagine, the challenge only gets bigger if your organization sells consumer products. Admittedly, the growth of social media has made finding people who are saying good things about your product, services or organization has gotten a little bit easier. But, it could be easier still.

Imagine a world where you had a plethora of client sound bites and quotes to share with the outside world. A marketers dream. No more tracking down sales reps to talk to their clients and mangle their words. Everything is already done for you. Well, if you're conducting client satisfaction surveys or consumer surveys, you should be gathering those sound bites already. You can even consider using website polls and website usability surveys to get those sound bites. Depending on the online questionnaire design, you may still need to contact the customer to get permission to use their quote, but the hard part is still done. You have the quote.

Question remains, how do you pull these customer quotes out of your survey web form? You make sure to add an additional comment box. Customers who love you will typically share those sentiments in the additional comments area, particularly if there are not other open ended questions in the survey for them to share why they like an organization.

Still wondering why your marketing department needs sound bites? Opinions for others is one of the driving forces behind purchasing decisions. If you want to learn more about the importance of customer reviews, check out this past post. It's also worth mentioning, this same idea can work for employee surveys and your HR department for recruiting purposes.

The benefits of online and email surveys are numerous. This is not to discount other survey methods but merely to point out the advantages.

1. Cost savings. It is fairly inexpensive to email survey questionnaires, once you have the email addresses of your target audience.

2. Ability to attach pictures or sound files. You can attach or embed necessary files in the online web survey – you cannot show someone a picture over the phone, or send an audio file easily through direct mail.

3. More honest responses. It’s been shown that respondents are more likely to reveal truthful information online than to an in-person interviewer. Think about how much people reveal through personal blogs and web sites, and this makes sense.

4. Limitless possibilities. With certain kinds of survey software, you can control what types of questions survey respondent can access, show additional questions if they answer a certain question in a particular way, and more. This can be done with paper surveys but it’s a bit more cumbersome and requires written directions: If you answered 'No' to the above question, please explain.

5. Fast results. As I discussed yesterday, the results of online surveys are very rapid, which saves researchers time and money.

Technology has come a long way – ten years ago, the majority of surveys were not online, and that has certainly changed. Now market researchers are using this format more often than not for at least one aspect of gathering feedback. Whether you're looking to conduct a product enhancement survey or an internal business survey of employees, web survey forms have their place in your internet research process.

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?

Just because you find correlation in your data when analyzing survey results does not mean there is causation. I find this is a common mistake in lots of survey reports when someone is new to survey research or conducting data analysis. Take this example:


Some people see this connection as a causation. Customers are satisfied because you contact them frequently to make sure everything is going well. The problem is, it's not a causation. Causation are extremely hard to prove because you cannot control every factor. For example, you may split your territory by industry and your solution suits some industries better than others. Or clients who are really satisfied simply use the product more often so the customer success managers reach out to them more frequently, because they are more likely to have questions. While those who use the product less have less to be satisfied about and may feel they are wasting those budget dollars.

To be able to prove causation, you need to be able to rule out all other possible explanations for the connection. As you can imagine, that's almost impossible to do since we do not control outside factors influencing the survey respondent or even the greater survey sample. Instead, when situations like these occur, we're seeing a correlation between two things. In my customer survey question examples, there's a correlation between how satisfied customers and how often they are contacted.

This principle does not only apply to customer survey research, it also applies to analyzing employee feedback forms, product surveys, market research and any other type of data collection and analysis.