Employee Questionnaire

What is a Survey?

Friday, November 6, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
What is a Survey?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.

New to Survey Design? Use Pre-Created Survey Templates

Thursday, November 5, 2009 by Lisa Boruah
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:

Advertisement Evaluation
Association Member Survey
Blank Survey
Buying Experience Survey
Company Evaluation
Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire
Customer Service Satisfaction Survey
Demographic Survey
Employee Benefits Survey
Employee Exit Interview
Employee Satisfaction Questionnaire
Internet Behavior Survey
Post-Event Survey
Pre-Event Survey
Product Feedback Survey
Senior Management Evaluation
Training Evaluation

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.

Writing Surveys for Your Audience

Wednesday, November 4, 2009 by Kelli Kelley
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.

It's Taco Time! Vote for Your Favorite Costume with an Online Poll

Friday, October 30, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
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?

Our Contest Winner!

Sample Workplace Employee Survey Questions

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
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:

Sample Employee Survey Question: How long have you worked for this organization?

Sample Employee Survey Question: From the list below, rank the top four issues you would like to  see addressed, with 1 indicating most important.

Sample Employee Survey Question; Are job openings posted fairly so that all employees are aware of new opportunities?

Sample Employee Survey Question; How important are each of the benefits provided by our company?
 
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.

10 Tips to Increase Survey Response Rates

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Increase Response RatesIncreasing 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!

Sample Survey Questions for Employee Questionnaires

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
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.

Sample Employee Survey Question: I am optimistic about the future of the company.

Sample Employee Survey Question: I am optimistic about my future success with the company.

Sample Employee Survey Question: I am proud to work for the company.

Sample Employee Survey Question: I feel more committed to a career with the company this year than I did a year ago.

Sample Employee Survey Question: I am satisfied with my understanding of the direction and goals of the company.

Sample Employee Survey Question: I understand of how the company's strategy differentiates us from the competition.

Sample Employee Survey Question: The company's leadership has a clear vision of the future.

Sample Employee Survey Question: Company leadership has made changes which are positive for me.

Sample Employee Survey Question: Company leadership is responding to the important internal issues.

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.

Conducting Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 by Kelli Kelley
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.

Spread the Wealth: Sharing Survey Results

Monday, October 26, 2009 by Tyson Gingery
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.

Online Survey Best Practices for Event Surveys (Part I)

Monday, October 19, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
A recent article in Meetings & Conventions Magazine caught my attention this month: Survey Science, How to Craft more Effective Attendee Evaluations. Meeting planners are usually not survey experts, their expertise lay in planning and executing events, not crafting flawless survey research questionnaires. However, in the last year the value of meetings and events have been called into question after bad press surrounding some organizations' meeting practices. With meeting and event planners having to increasingly prove the values of meetings and measuring meeting results, being able to create event surveys to gather attendee feedback has become even more important.

While we've discussed several of these survey best practices in the past in reference to sample staff survey questions or customer feedback forms it never hurts to review them again. Here are the first five online survey tips from the article:

1. Set survey goals first. This shouldn't be a big surprise. On Friday I wrote about how to create a customer survey, and setting customer satisfaction survey objectives was the first step there too. If you don't figure out what your objectives are in the beginning, writing meaningful survey questions will be a lot harder later on. For example, if the survey objective is to figure out how to improve the event next year, only ask questions about things you can change for future events. It doesn't make sense to evaluate the location if you've already booked the same venue for next year; if you haven't booked next year's location, asking about the venue makes sense.

2. Write survey questions that are clear and ask what you really want to ask. Articulating a question to really collect the feedback you're looking for can be quite a challenge. Take these sample conference survey questions, if the planner wants to identify which sessions would be best to add to next year's lineup (assuming attendees must pay to attend the sessions):

Which of the following sessions would you attend?
Which additions would you like to see at next year's conference?
For which of the following sessions would you be willing to pay?

 
If you've been paying attention to survey best practices, you'll know the third one is the wording you want. Why? Because it's the only one that explains the attendees will have to pay for the sessions. It's not a matter of which sessions sound interesting, it's a matter of which sessions present enough value to be worth the cost.

3. Find out why they're dissatisfied. It's not enough to know that an attendee was dissatisfied with the registration process. Planners should provide attendees with the chance to explain why they are dissatisfied - maybe it was a technical problem or there wasn't enough event staff to mitigate issues.

4. Keep it short. General survey best practices suggest keeping your online survey as short as possible. The best methods for making sure you're keeping it short is to only ask questions that have a direct link to your seminar survey objectives. The second method is to make sure you're using survey question logic, such as branch and skip logic. This allows you to keep the survey relevant to the respondent and only ask questions that make sense. We hinted at this in a recent post where we talked about using one survey to gather event feedback for all the sessions at your event.

5. Think about the survey's organization. When designing questionnaires it's important to keep the flow of the survey in mind. Start with general questions and work your way to the more specific questions. The survey should only focus on one topic at a time. In the example of multiple event sessions, it doesn't make sense to mix up the session questions. Instead, ask all the questions you have about one session, then move on to the next session.

In the next few days, I'll share the other 10 survey tips from the Meetings & Conventions article. As a meeting or event planner, how have you found pre- and post-event surveys helpful in planning events?

Use Customer Service Feedback for Employee Assessments

Thursday, October 15, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
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.

The Best of... Top 10 Survey Best Practices & Survey Pitfalls

Friday, October 9, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Happy 1st Birthday Cvent Web Surveys Blog!A year ago, the Cvent Web Surveys Blog posted it's first post. Over the past year, we've shared many survey best practices with you that can be applied to online surveys and paper questionnaires alike. Here's a list of some of our most popular posts:

Tips For Providing Survey Incentives: We get asked all the time about incentives and their place in survey research. There are arguements for and against offering survey incentives. This post isn't about those sides. Instead, it focuses on tips for offering survey incentives if that's the path you choose to go down.

Offering An Additional Comment Section Is An Online Survey Must: Simply asking for customer or employee feedback implies you're ready to make changes, you want to identify problems and fix them. If you fail to offer a "last ditch effort" with and additional comments (optional) question type, you could be making a huge mistake. Depending on your survey design, it may be the only place a survey respondent can give you truly honest, unprompted feedback.

Survey Question Flow Impacts Survey Findings: Question order is an important part of good survey design. Whether it's a paper survey on customer satisfaction or an online questionnaire to gather employee feedback, how you order your survey questions could impact your survey findings.

Survey Report Tips: Writing the Executive Summary or Setting the Stage: When writing a survey report, you can't just launch into the survey responses and the data collection results. You need to provide the report reader with some general background information about the survey project including why you ran the survey, what the goals were, what the data collection methods were. Then you can summarize the results and make recommendations.

Five Steps to Begin Interpreting Online Survey Results: The hardest part of any survey project is creating the questionnaire. If you design a good survey and plan the analysis, interpreting the data should be a walk in the park. Make sure to review these five easy steps for analyzing survey data.

Analyze Open-Ended Questions Faster with a Quick Trick: We all know using closed questions are easier to analyze. But sometimes they just don't cut it. This post gives you a quick six step process for how to analyze survey data quickly to summarize survey responses without spending days on the survey analysis.

Difference Between Causation vs. Correlation in Survey Data: To be able to prove causation, you need to be able to rule out all other possible explanations for the connection. This post aims to debunk the myth that correlations found in survey data means that one thing caused the other.

What To Look For When You Move Your Online Survey To Test Mode: It's definitely an online survey best practice to move your web survey to test mode before sending it out to your survey sample. Make sure to use this 7 step checklist to avoid any online survey pitfalls.

Market Research Process: 6 Steps to Project Success: When working on survey research projects - be it a customer satisfaction survey or product development survey or a staff performance review form - you should always follow this six step process to make sure you get the maximum return on investment from your survey project.

Online Survey Question Pitfalls—And How to Avoid Them: This post points out common online survey pitfalls that are in surveys all the time. However, identifying problems with your work performance assessment or customer feedback questions is only half the battle.

Top Reasons To Use Pre Employment Assessments

Thursday, October 8, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Have you ever applied for a job and been asked to pre employment assessment? Lots of companies have pre employment assessments in place before hiring new employees. Why? Because these new employee survey assessments help hiring managers select the correct people. Hiring a new employee has its own expenses associated with it, so human resource departments often look for ways to increase employee retention rates. Pre employment assessments are one way they improve their employee retention programs.

When you hire the wrong person a few things can happen:

1. You spend extra dollars on new employee training to get them caught up to speed, when you could have hired someone with the right experience from the get-go.

2. You will face employee turnover that causes you to go back to the drawing board with advertising the position, screening applicants and interviewing - again, wasting more dollars.

Neither one of these scenarios are good for your organization. It's much easier to put a formal screening process in place. One added benefit of pre employee assessment surveys is they protect your organization from claims of discrimination in the hiring process. I certainly don't think pre employee assessments should be the only thing hiring managers look at when reviewing a job application, but I do think it should be part of the process.

Using Audience-Appropriate Language for Survey Questions

Thursday, October 8, 2009 by Tyson Gingery
One of the best ways to ensure your survey results are meaningful is to design questions your entire audience can clearly understand and answer (be they employees, customers, event attendees, etc.).  Writing survey questions may seem easy at first glance, but careful considerations are taken by professional survey researchers to write unbiased, comprehensible questions.  The survey tips below will help you design appropriate questions and responses with a diverse audience/target market in mind.

Design survey questions that are simple, short and clear.  Don’t use large, complicated words and ideas when smaller, simpler ones will do.  You intention is for your entire population to be able to understand and answer your questions.

Do not assume that survey respondents will know what a word means just because you do.  Most customer data collection samples consist of diverse groups with a wide variety of cultural and educational backgrounds.  Again, simple and universal is better here.

Likewise, define any terms that may need defining.  You can do this in the question text itself.  For example, if you are asking someone to evaluate training materials, include a short sentence in the question that explains which materials you are asking about (and which ones you are not).

In most cases, avoid technical terminology and jargon unless it is necessary to use due to the purpose of the survey.  Doctors and nurses will likely know medical terminology extensively, but patients probably will not.  Likewise in a workplace employee relations survey conducted across employees who have worked there over a year can support company specific terms, but a new hire survey may not.  Use your best judgment based upon the make-up of your respondents to design audience-appropriate questions and responses.

Find Simple Ways to Cut Costs with Employee Surveys

Tuesday, October 6, 2009 by Julide Gunduc
Employees may suggest cutting out snacks if you collect employee feedbackWhile many organizations are continuously focused on cutting costs, it becomes ever more important during a tight economy. While expensive consultants can do a great job at finding these bottleneck areas, there may be a more economic recession friendly way to cut costs: just ask your employees.

Employees tend to be the largest expense an organization faces and, believe me, they know it. They may be "expensive", but they're worth it. Your workforce is the DNA of your organization, which is why they are the first people to know where minor costs can be eliminated. By asking for employee feedback and suggestions of areas to eliminate expenses, you are identifying expenses that wont affect their productivity. For example, you may offer employees complimentary snacks and beverages to keep them going through that afternoon hunger. However, an employee opinion survey may show employees think the organization should cut out the snacks in an effort to cut costs. It wouldn't be what you expect, but it's certainly a real-life example.

So the next time you're trying to cut costs due to a shrinking budget, survey your employees. You may just find out that the cookies and soda aren't as important to them as keeping their job.

The Best of... Top 5 Employee Survey Posts

Monday, October 5, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
This Friday we are will be celebrating our blogs' first birthday. I can hardly believe it's been almost a year of sharing our Web Survey Best Practices with you. Each day this week we will be counting down our top favorite posts. You might have already guessed, today's theme is employee surveys.

HR Survey Tips: Weed Out Unqualified Job Candidates: In this post, we talked about how pre employment assessments can be a big time saver for HR. It can be a real struggle for hiring managers to identify the best candidates. It's no secret that asking pre-interview questions or providing job applicants with a pre-interview questionnaire can save you from having to speak with people who are not a fit from the start.

Employee Surveys Can Help Cut Costs: This post highlights how staff opinion surveys can help you identify areas to cut costs. You may find that the best cost cutting ideas come from the trenches and not senior management. All you need to do is ask.

Employee Satisfaction Surveys Boost Productivity: This post is about employee morale and satisfaction surveys. Research has shown that motivated and satisfied employees tend to contribute more in terms of organizational productivity and maintaining a commitment to customer satisfaction. So how do you make sure your employees are, and remain, motivated and satisfied?

When other companies come calling, will your employees remain loyal? This post talks about how you may have high employee retention rates now, but that doesn't mean you have satisfied employees. When the economy picks up again, organizations will begin to grow their workforce and skilled professionals will be in high demand. If your business fails to take care of their employees now, they may not keep those employees once hiring starts again.

Employee Surveys Can Improve Customer Experience: This is my favorite post on the list, probably because my precondition to focus on the importance of creating a positive customer experience. One of the best ways to measure client satisfaction and experiences is to measure employee loyalty using employee satisfaction surveys.

When Was The Last Time You Recognized Employees?

Monday, October 5, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Employee recognition is important to any organizationEmployee surveys don't always need to be measuring employee satisfaction or gauging employee commitment and loyalty. Sometimes, you may want to conduct an employee information survey to just update employee contact records. Employee surveys don't always need to be about discovering ways to improve a process or increase employee retention or satisfaction rates.

You can also create employee recognition surveys to identify employees who deserve extra recognition at your next company event. It may be a matter of some employees consistently going beyond the "call of duty" to help co-workers, but it's not something management sees. Like with a 360 degree feedback survey, colleagues and peers can have a different view of someone's work ethic and tasks they complete than management.

A common myth in the workplace is that employees don't need recognition, or shouldn't be recognized for "just doing their jobs." But if you were to do a quick opinion poll, you'd find that's not always the case. Instead, having employee recognition programs can serve to reinforce the good work employees are doing, and simultaneously increase employee satisfaction, productivity and loyalty. Those are all things organizations strive to promote within their employees. Employees want to know they've done a good job and their work, effort and time mean something to the organization.

How do you get started with an employee recognition survey? First, choose an online poll survey software for employee surveys (I would recommend Cvent Web Surveys Software). Then begin designing survey questions to fit your survey goal: identifying employees who deserve extra recognition. Example employee survey questions might include asking who they would like to nominate for an employee recognition reward, and why that employee deserves to be recognized.

Use Survey Display Options to Customize your Online Survey

Friday, October 2, 2009 by Cvent Client Services
Most planners use welcome pages, thank you pages, presentation headers and email survey templates to personalize their online surveys by putting in customized messages and images related to their organization, the purpose of the survey questionnaire and even the survey incentives. But the Cvent Web Surveys software platform allows you to go above and beyond to personalize the way your survey looks (the graphical survey template), how people see their progress (progress indicator bars), whether they see the survey title and question numbers, what buttons are on the survey and even the text of these buttons!

Graphical Template – Choose from over 50 out-of-the-box graphical templates, each with its own unique background, header image, button style and survey question displays. Beyond the out-of-the-box survey template designs for market surveys, customer surveys, employee attitude surveys, or any other type of survey, you have the ability to further customize the layout of your survey by adding customized headers and footers to reflect your organization's brand.

Progress Indicator Bar
– Select whether you want a progress indicator bar that shows survey respondents how much of the survey form they've completed. Choose from four different styles – whether you want them to see % of the survey completed or page X of Y, etc.

Survey Title and Question Numbers
– Select whether you want respondents to see the Survey Title; also determine whether they should see the Question Numbers. When it comes to showing survey question numbers ask yourself, Do I have a simple survey or a complex survey? If you have a complex survey, you may not want to show question numbers if you're going to use survey question logic to jump respondents through the feedback form.

Previous and Cancel Buttons
– You can choose to display one or both of these buttons to respondents at the bottom of every page along with the Next button.

Button Text – Customize the text of each button – Start Survey, Next, Previous, Cancel, Submit. This can be especially useful if the survey acts as a Test, Quiz, Registration Form, etc. Next can be changed to Next Section, Next Level, Advance, etc. and Submit on event surveys can read Yes! I want to Register.

Button Style
– Select whether you would like to keep the default button style of the survey design you selected or choose from the 15 additional button styles available.

Surveys are targeted at a wide variety of audiences, from board members and senior managers of organizations, to kids and teenagers using a product. Using the survey application features above, you can truly customize the look and feel of your survey based on your audience!

When other companies come calling, will your employees remain loyal?

Thursday, October 1, 2009 by Evan Willingham
In a recent survey of senior executives from some of the nation’s largest companies, more than 30% indicated increasing staff would be a top priority in the upcoming year as the recession tapers off and our economy starts to recover.

As executives begin to emerge from a defensive, survival mode and look to expand their business, it’s important that they don’t overlook their organization’s lifeblood and most valuable asset, their existing employees. While it is true that bringing new talent into an organization is exciting and reinvigorating, the collective knowledge and insight of your current workforce is invaluable and protecting this resource must remain at the forefront of every executive’s mind.

As one of Cvent Web Survey’s whitepapers on employee satisfaction mentions, 21% of individuals are eager to change careers, while only 20% feel very passionate about their jobs. This should be a very sobering fact for business executives with the economy picking up pace, workers will become particularly empowered to look for a new career path if they do not feel a strong commitment to their employer. Couple that with the prevailing statistic that it costs 10 times more to hire and train a new employee than it does to retain one and executives should begin to see the value in periodically checking the pulse of the workforce through internal surveys, specifically employee engagement surveys and employee commitment surveys.

When the economy picks up again, organizations will begin to grow their workforce and skilled professionals will be in high demand. If your business fails to take care of their employees now, they may not  keep those employees once hiring starts again. As the Reuters article points out after polling 150 survey respondents by telephone, recognizing employees does not always need to be monetary. Tracking employee satisfaction and engagement can help identify ways to keep employees feeling valued.

Cvent’s Web Survey application is uniquely suited to reinforce a connection between employee and employer through employee surveys. Using our advanced survey question logic in combination with the ability to create custom contact fields, survey creators can ensure their employees only see questions that pertain to their specific job responsibilities.  For example, your finance department won’t see a question asking them, “How satisfied are you with the leads generated from marketing?” because that does not’t apply to their daily responsibilities. The robust capabilities of our online survey technology ensures your efforts to improve employee loyalty and engagement don’t backfire and end up alienating your employees!

Customize the Graphics, Charts and Analysis on your Reports

Wednesday, September 30, 2009 by Cvent Client Services
Survey reports in the Cvent Web Surveys software tool offer a wide variety of ways to view your data and begin conducting your market research survey analysis. The answer summary by question report, for example, pulls up a table, a graph and basic statistical analysis for each survey question. Another example survey report, answer details by respondent, offers you the option of seeing each respondent’s answers on a separate page or answer details for all respondents gives you the opportunity to see all the answers for all respondents on a single page!

But sometimes these are not enough when you want to make a professional report for your boss to present to the board members. This is exactly why Cvent has the presentations feature within the survey application. The presentations section allows you to create reports with unique combinations of filters and display options. You can use our presentations creator to access data views that are unavailable with other out-of-the-box survey reports. Creating distributable reports in the Cvent Web Surveys software tool makes it easy to communicate the survey results in either Word or PDF format.

To determine what you see on each page of your sample report, choose from the options below:

• Chart: Gives you the option of selecting a horizontal bar chart, vertical bar chart or pie chart. You can also select your own color palette either to meet report requirements your organization has or to improve the appearance of the final product.

• Table: This will show a summary of selected answer options with response percent and response count.

• Respondent Count: Returns the total count of respondents for each question.

• Skipped Count: Returns the number of respondents who skipped the survey question.

• Online Survey Analysis: Allows you to enter comments and analyze survey data for the survey question included in your market research, customer survey or employee survey report.

Additionally, you can create multiple pages for the same question. This can be beneficial because you can view different answer options on each page or filter the data differently. Perhaps you asked several demographic survey questions, for example:
 
What year were you born?
What is your ethnicity?
What is your gender?

You may want to look at the response distribution based on the answers to the demographic questions in your electronic survey. Or take this report example: with your matrix questions, you can select which categories and which answers you want to include, then select how you want the chart to organize the data, either by category or answer.

When you have configured the survey report to be exactly the way you want it, just use the output buttons at the top of the presentation page to export your full report including title, introduction and conclusion pages into either PDF format or Microsoft Word.

Don't forget these other report tips.