Employee Performance Evaluation

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!

Have a question? We're here to help! Here at Cvent we're always trying to help people improve their survey projects. Whether you're trying to write new employee feedback survey questions, create a customer service performance reviews or simply get a better understanding of how our online survey research software and enterprise feedback management solution works, we're happy to answer your questions!

To make it easy to get all your survey questions answered, we've added a chat to our blog. Someone will be happy to answer your questions during normal business hours (9am - 6pm ET). So go ahead, click to chat and ask our experts your questions about employee feedback software, data collection methods, customer survey questions, or any other survey questionnaire related question!

Sabre, a travel-reservations-technology company, recently conducted a survey of 90 global airlines and a whopping 86% said that efforts aimed at maintaining and growing customer loyalty had the most positive impact on their business. The survey also found that 58% of airlines are increasing fees on checked bags and peak travel times, among others, to help their bottom line.

See the disconnect? No? Well, JD Power reported in June that customer satisfaction with airlines has dropped - for the third straight year. JD Power cites increased fees and decreased services as a prime reason for the drop and also notes that the low-cost carriers - Southwest, JetBlue, and Virgin America - have significantly higher satisfaction. They also tend to have far fewer fees.

Everyone knows that airlines are struggling right now, but I bet your business has seen better times as well. Would you ever simultaneously think that customer satisfaction is the most important driver for your business... and then do exactly the thing that depresses that satisfaction the most? The industry has conducted some great research, but the belief that they can somehow do the opposite of what that satisfaction research suggests and still satisfaction in the long term seems tenuous.

But not all airlines are chasing short term revenues as the expense of long term customer loyalty and profits. The New York Times is reporting that some are urging regulation to stop airlines from charging "holiday surcharges" that do not appear as part of the fare, but are added to the price of your ticket later in the purchase process. Who is urging this regulation? Not consumer groups (well, they probably are as well!), but none other than Virgin Group founder and Chairman Richard Branson. Branson says the "fees are not a good idea" and is worried that airlines risk alienating travelers if they add to many after-fare fees. 

It is good to see that not everyone in the industry is blind to the data - and my personal customer experiences say that Branson is right on the money. I know that I am now far, far less likely to even consider flying on the legacy carriers these days. Why fly United if I'm going to be nickled-and-dimed when I can fly Southwest, JetBlue, or Branson's Virgin America? 

Surveying customers and your target market is only worthwhile if you actually listen to the results and act on them. As the former CEO of Southwest Airlines (a Cvent Web Surveys client!), Herb Kelleher said: "We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things". Survey your market, your customers, and your employees and use the date to enact change. Don't ignore it and hope for the best!

Every organization should ask themselves What is good customer service? and create their own definition for good customer service based on the answer they come up with. Giving customers the opportunity to provide feedback on their customer experience is one way to improve customer service quality, but only if the customer feedback gets back to the employees. Lots of organizations use customer service surveys to measure customer experiences and customer loyalty. What separates the organizations with mediocre customer service from the organizations with excellent customer service is sharing the feedback from the customer loyalty surveys with the employees. Seems pretty straight forward, right?

I suggest you take it a step further, however. While sharing the aggregate results of customer feedback surveys with front-line employees is important, you can use these customer surveys as assessments of employee performance or staff evaluations. If you're not already using customer surveys to support this type of employee performance feedback, here are some steps from the CRMBuyer to make this type of process possible:

• Move from random survey sampling to an attempted census. Random survey samples are great when you're just trying to get an overall sense of customer satisfaction rates. However, if you're trying to collect feedback to figure out how to improve employee performance, a random sample is unlikely to provide enough data for each employee. Like with all other types of surveys, not everyone you send personalized survey invitations to will participate, but you will likely get enough responses to support the employee assessments.

• Develop new employee reports. To improve workforce performance, organizations can't continue to provide infrequent high-level survey reports. Instead, employees should get to see weekly reports. Using standardized reports that compare the employee to the overall average and to their colleagues as a group have the most impact.

• Develop new management reports. Like with how employees see the customer feedback reports needs to change with this strategy, management reports do too. Managers should be able to see responses by employees so they can take appropriate action. Managers will have different opinions on how much information should be shared with their staff; some will want to share every customer comment from the employee performance evaluation form, others wont want to share individual survey results.

• Develop HR guidelines for the use of these employee reports. The HR department should be deeply involved in the creation of these HR employee appraisal forms and employee survey reports. If an employee constantly receives negative customer feedback, the organization may choose to terminate their employment so it helps to keep HR in the loop. However, that shouldn't be the goal of this type of customer survey program. The survey feedback should be used to improve employee job performance and mentor them. With the help of customer service assessment surveys and employee performance review forms organizations can figure out how to improve customer service quality.

As is the case with validity, there are multiple aspects of reliability in survey research.  In general though, while validity refers to accuracy in question design, reliability refers to the consistency of your results (i.e. the probability of producing the same results after repeated measurements). 

One way to easily conceptualize reliability is to consider it as another word for precision.  Let’s use archery as an example: if you shoot ten arrows at the target and they all hit the same area, your shots can be said to be reliable or precise. 

You can test for and estimate the reliability of your survey questions in a variety of ways.  You could use a test-retest design, where you use the same questionnaire more than once to see if the results remain consistent.  You could also send your feedback form to different survey samples (consisting of similar respondents) and then compare your results for any fluctuations.  Also, if you create a set of customer service questions designed to provide you with a composite scale, you would want the individual questions to produce similar results if they are intended to measure a single concept (an overall customer service scale, for example). 

It is also important to understand the relationship between reliability and validity; results can be reliable without being valid.  If we use our archery example, the shots are reliable, but if they aren’t near the bullseye (an undesirable outcome!) they cannot be said to be valid.  Reliability is necessary for validity, but it is not sufficient alone.  You want to accomplish both objectives: shots that land near the bullseye consistently.  By creating reliable, valid questions for attitude surveys, online market research, employee reviews or public opinion polls, you can be confident that your results are not due to chance.

You should take great care to avoid using leading questions and loaded words when you design survey questions.  These two faulty sample survey designs can do more harm than any other possible hazards during the survey creation process.  They can bias respondents’ views (and hence their answers) to the point of making your data unusable.

Leading questions bias respondents by subtly directing them toward particular answers.  These items usually provide judgments about ideas or concepts before the actual questions are asked -- or the wording of the questions may just be biased from the outset.  Leading questions can make respondents feel as if there is an obviously "correct" response, and that they would be foolish to answer otherwise.

Loaded words are those which carry overtones or connotations that predispose a survey respondent to think in a certain way.  If researchers use overly strong words (positive or negative), or use labels with clearly judgmental implications, this can bias respondents by priming them for certain mindsets.  Consider the following example of a leading question filled with loaded words:


We can easily tell that the purpose of this "question" is to bias respondents into saying they would not pay eight bucks for a burrito.  There is a clearly derogatory sentiment contained in the question itself (leading).  And with the inclusion of phrases such as most people feel, way too much, and simple burrito, respondents would have to be irrational fools to admit they might pony-up the $8.00 (loaded).

This of course is an extreme example, but if you’ve been selected for a political poll, you know that there are agenda-based questions out there that are almost as egregious.  When writing survey questions remember: your results are usually only as good as your questions!  By avoiding leading questions and loaded words, you can be more certain that your questionnaire results will accurately represent the views of you customers, employees or public opinion survey samples.

I was recently asked to complete a restaurant customer satisfaction survey. Only two questions into the restaurant questionnaire I was asked the following restaurant survey sample question:


None of these answers fit my situation. I simply just don't eat out that often. So to me, none of these answers fit. I suppose technically, after thinking about it for awhile, I could have answered that I think it's too expensive or the value isn't good enough. However, because of the question before this one, to me this restaurant customer satisfaction survey question is asking why don't I eat there over other restaurants more frequently. So in reading the options, I'm thinking the survey builder want to know why I don't visit their restaurant over other restaurants more frequently.

Morale of the story? Survey respondents will not always read your restaurant, market research, employee or retail survey the way you planned. Everyone makes different associations and is influenced by question flow or answer choices. Make sure that if you're going to give a long list of options, you include all the possible answer choices. This question could have been improved simply by not requiring it.

You want your employee performance surveys, public opinion polls, and online market survey studies to produce valid data.  But what does validity mean exactly in the field of survey research?  Although there are actually many different types of validity, in general, designing valid survey instruments means that survey questions adequately measure (in reality) the concepts the researcher is attempting to measure.  As opposed to reliability, which refers to producing the same results with repeated measurements, validity involves designing legitimate, suitable survey questions that accurately address the ideas you’re seeking to evaluate. 

Survey researchers try to attain high levels of external and internal validity. External validity is the degree to which your study’s results are generalizable to individuals other than those in your survey sample.  If your results are externally valid, you can come to increasingly accurate conclusions regarding larger and different populations (people/markets across various time periods, geographical locations, etc.).  Obtaining external validity is a major goal of survey and market researchers, because most research is performed using a small sample of people from a larger population or target market in order to decrease costs and lessen workloads.

Internal validity, on the other hand, centers around estimating how valid your measures are based on an inward look at the research design and any other variables that might interfere with accurate results and conclusions.  To increase internal validity, survey researchers often like to implement experimental designs, as well as perform statistical analyses that control for variable effects.  Examining any additional measures and proposing alternative explanations for results both go a long way in judging the validity of any survey research project.