Employee Survey

It is tempting to include many similar question types with similar response options in your online survey design.  Matrix questions, for example, provide an efficient questionnaire design method to help you gather lots of data in a neat, brief survey form.  It is wise, however, to resist the urge to use too many uniform survey questions and response lists, namely because of two sources of bias that stem from doing so: habituation and acquiescence.

Habituation occurs when respondents begin providing the same answers to survey questions with the same response options.  They start to get in a habit and select the identical response choice for every question.

Acquiescence is related to habituation, and occurs when respondents passively agree with an interviewer or survey questions.  Agree-disagree scales are the most often-used response options in opinion surveys; it is important that you take steps to avoid the chance that respondents will passively agree with your statements in order to quickly complete the questionnaire or provide what they think may be the “right” answers.

To avoid these response biases, you can use online survey software that allows question randomization, break up your matrix questions with other types of questions and scales, and phrase some questions in a manner that makes respondents switch their thinking.  An example of the latter would be to ask a series of positive questions in your survey questionnaire, and then throw in a couple questions worded differently so as not to allow habituation or acquiescence.  Use care up-front in your online questionnaire design to be sure that you'll reduce error and bias in your results.

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).

Completing a study is just the first step in the market research process. A good researcher knows there is plenty of work left to be done analyzing survey data and taking action on survey results.

Stay in touch with the client and schedule presentations of the research. If you have a client contact assigned to the project, go over the preliminary survey data to see what key findings they feel are the most important to share. Create presentations around these key findings. You can also create separate market survey reports for different groups within the same company.

For example, if you have just completed a large product survey that includes feedback on customer satisfaction, the client may want a presentation simply on customer feedback for their customer service team.

A good researcher also has an eye for finding problems. If you notice an area for improvement in the course of your market research analysis, propose a solution to that problem for the client. Take this market research survey example, customers complain about being on hold too long when calling customer service. You could propose several ideas from hiring more staff to setting time goals for staff to talk to customers.

Even though the client may not agree with your solution ideas, ignoring problems you identify through the research is a bad idea. The client is paying you to compile and analyze research data, and they will likely appreciate all your efforts even if the information does not fit in with their current business plan.

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.

One of the great things about Cvent Web Surveys software application is that it is constantly getting “better.” I, for one, am not aware of another survey software company that can state with confidence that 80% of all product enhancements come directly from the requests of current clients. Cvent, however, has certain processes in place so that every time a client expresses interest in seeing a new feature added to the online survey application, this request is quickly relayed to our technical team.

For those of you who were clients before our most recent product release in August 2009, you definitely noticed at least one big change in your account the first time you logged in after the release. As soon as you logged into your Cvent Web Surveys account, you saw that your surveys were no longer organized into folders on the Survey Selection page. Instead, they are now displayed in “views.”

Now, you may wonder why I chose to write my blog post this week on the transition from folders to survey views. It may seem like a pretty dry topic. I wanted to write on this particular survey subject because I get so many calls from clients asking how to create a new survey view that pull the appropriate surveys into view. If you have a lot of surveys created in your account, then this is a pretty important thing to know how to do, so that you don’t have to sort through all of your company’s surveys just to find the few that you are personally working on!

When you are ready to create a new survey view and filter the appropriate surveys into this view, you need to remember 3 simple steps:

1) Create a survey custom field. You can create survey custom fields under the Administration tab, on the same page that you create contact custom fields. Survey custom fields are primarily used to classify the surveys in your account and pull them into the appropriate views on the Survey Selection page. So, for example, if your marketing department and human resources department are running surveys, you may want to create 2 separate survey views, one for each department. The first step to do this would be to create a survey custom field for department.

2) Create a new view on the Survey Selection page. You can create a new survey view by choosing “add new view” from the Display drop-down menu. When you add the new view, you will need to name it and also specify certain options (i.e. whether you would like the view to be private or public). Finally, at the bottom of the page, you should apply an advanced filter based on the survey custom field you just created for department. For example, if you are adding the survey view for “Marketing Surveys,” you should choose “department” as the field, “equals” as the operator, and “marketing” as the value.


3) Now that you have created the survey custom field and added the new view, all you need to do is pull the appropriate surveys into the view you just created! When you added the new view for “Marketing Surveys,” you should have gotten a message, “no surveys match your criteria.” This is because you have not yet applied the survey custom field at the survey-level! To do this, simply go into an individual marketing survey, and click on  Settings on the top navigation bar. On the General Information page, you should click on the Custom Survey Fields tab. Here you can apply the “marketing” label to the individual survey, so that it will show up in the “Marketing Surveys” view.


Hopefully this post will be helpful to those of you who are struggling with the transition from folders to survey views. Believe me, survey views are completely customizable and will help you organize online surveys in your Cvent Web Surveys software account.

At minimum, two specific characteristics define a good list of response options for survey questions.  First, the categories (response options) must be mutually exclusive, which means they do not overlap with one another.  Second, survey response options must be collectively exhaustive, meaning they provide all possible options that could comprise a response list.  Let’s take a look at examples of common mistakes for each of these characteristics:


You can see while this response list is exhaustive, it does not provide mutually exclusive categories.  For example, if a survey respondent eats out three times per week, he or she could select either (b) or (c) as an accurate response.


In this survey question example, the response categories do not overlap, but they are not collectively exhaustive.  If a survey respondent make less than $10,000 annually, he or she does not have an option that can accurately capture his or her response.  This could be corrected for option (a) by applying the same response type as shown in (e), such as “$29,999 or less."

Perhaps you have an extra special research project that really needs a good response turnout, or you’re simply looking for ways to boost your response rates. Well, maybe its time to try sweetening the pot a little?

Studies have shown that surveys where potential participants were offered monetary incentives of as little as $1 received higher response rates then ones that didn't’t offer any incentives at all. In fact, offering any incentive to your potential survey respondents as a way of saying “Thank You” even before they take your survey is a great way to get started on the road to higher survey returns. Good examples of survey incentives that work are gift cards, checks, gift certificates, and of course good ol' fashioned cash.

The amount isn't as important as the belief by the participant that the offered incentive will actually be provided. Credibility is key. So if you choose to offer incentives to your potential respondents after they have participated in the survey (say for example the option to be entered into a random drawing for a chance to win an iPod) remember to follow through on giving out the reward after you collect feedback from all the survey respondents!

This tip is particularly useful when trying to avoid survey bias. By offering incentives you're more likely to attract people who would not normally participate in your surveys. Learn more about minimizing survey bias from some of our other posts.

I found an interesting poll today about colors preferred by men and women, and it provoked some questions about what are the best colors to use when you create polls or design survey questionnaires. Here's the breakdown from the poll shared in a Lyris Whitepaper:


Why does it matter? Because colors are also a form of non-verbal communication. So whether you're creating an online questionnaire to collect feedback or using an email survey tool to craft email marketing messages for survey invitations, you should care how colors affect those reading your email or completing your customer survey forms.

Colors can cause physical reactions. For example, too much red has been show to increase blood pressure. As you design survey templates, keep in mind how color meanings can affect survey respondents.

Cool colors: Cool colors typically have a calming effect. Keep in mind that cool colors can appear smaller than warm colors and visually recede on the page.

	Blue - As you might have guessed, blue is calming. Almost everyone likes some shade of blue, whether it's a strong and steadfast blue or a light, friendly blue. In fact, in 2008 Pantone selected Blue Iris as the color of the year. As a result of the calming effect blue has, it can make time seem to pass more quickly and help you sleep. However, too much blue can cause the calming effect to go to the extreme and cause you to have the blues. Beyond just being calming, blue can convey richness and sometimes superiority (deep royal blue) or it can convey trust and truthfulness (combining light and dark blue). See how using blues could improve your response rate if it helps people trust you?
	Green - Like blue, green has some calming effects and can make time seem like it's moving quicker, but it also signifies growth, renewal, health and the environment. Like with blue, green has it's own extreme as well, green can mean jealousy or envy and inexperience. With a hint of warmth and coolness, green can create balance, harmony and stability.
	Purple - Over the ages, purple has come to be synonymous with royalty. Since purple comes from red (warm) and blue (cool) it has intriguing qualities of both. Typically deep and bright purples suggest riches, while lighter purples are more romantic and delicate. Keep in mind though, while purple can be noble and spiritual, too much purple can cause moodiness - the same as with too much blue.
	Turquoise - As a blend of blue and green, turquoise can have a soft, feminine qualities or a more sophisticated feel with the darker teals.

Look for parts two and three later this week for warm and neutral color meanings.

When performing a market research study for clients in certain marketplaces, it is important to remember the competition. If, for example, you were doing a customer market research survey for a fast-food restaurant, Burger One, you would want to gauge survey respondents’ feelings about the competition as well as your client.

You might ask restaurant customer satisfaction questions like:


If respondents frequent Burger One and four other fast-food restaurants, that gives you insight into the survey data provided. If respondents only frequent Burger One, that is helpful to know as well. Take this example of how survey results can be applied to the restaurant's over all marketing strategy:


On the other side of this equation is what Burger One's loyal customer base thinks. If customers who only eat fast-food at Burger One express no interest in the new sandwich, it may not be the best possible sandwich to launch. However, if respondents who frequent competitors more often than Burger One express high levels of interest in the new sandwich, it could spell an opportunity for Burger One to gain new business.

It’s best to analyze market research from all angles when launching a new product – there are multiple factors at play.

If you’ve ever looked at results from a public opinion survey or political poll, you’ve no doubt seen the margin or error noted alongside the findings.  Usually the note will read something like margin of error = plus or minus x%, CL 95%.

So what the heck does that mean?

Well, the first part basically tells you how close the results from your selected sample are compared to what you'd find if you surveyed the entire population.  The expression of “plus or minus x%” tells you that the percentages of given responses might be a bit higher or lower “in reality” (i.e., if you surveyed absolutely everyone).

Generalizability to the larger population is also described by an associated measure called a confidence level (CL). This term describes how confident you can be that your results are not due to chance alone.  A confidence level is normally set at either 90%, 95% or 99% (95% has become standard).

Let’s use an example to understand how these two concepts work:

A random sample of Americans were asked whether they preferred cake or ice cream for dessert.  The results showed that 60% preferred ice cream over cake, and 40% preferred cake over ice cream.  This question had a margin of error of +/- 3% at a 95% confidence level. What this means is that you can be 95% confident that the percentage of all Americans who prefer ice cream would fall between 57% and 63% (60 plus or minus 3).  Another way to put it would be as follows: if you conducted 100 surveys of the entire population, at least 95 times you would find that the percentage who preferred cake ranged from 37% to 43%.

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?

As market researchers, we are all aware of the many ways data can be gathered for a study. There is the online survey, telephone survey, in-person interview, direct mail questionnaire, email survey, focus groups and more.

Telephone surveys often yield decent response rates but can be difficult to conduct. A lot of people simply don’t want to be bothered on the phone and spend time answering poll questions. But phone surveys are great because you can ask all the questions and get clarification on any answers that don’t quite have the information you are looking for. The opportunity for that is of course not present in an online, email or direct mail survey.

A telephone survey is not going to work for every study, however. There are some products that won’t match up well. For example, a survey about a medical product is likely not one that anyone will want to discuss over the phone with a stranger.

For a consumer survey with a lot of feedback answers using numbered responses, an email questionnaire might be best as it could grow tedious and leave too much margin for error.

If it works, you can also combine survey methods and gather data both ways. When creating the surveys be sure to incorporate the differences into the call script and email. If it is necessary to have pre-screening questions for the phone interview, make them as concise as possible. Combining data collection methods is helpful and can achieve a more well-rounded result, but be careful about choosing the best method for your purposes.

When was the last time you fretted over an email that looked perfect for some of the people in your audience, but seemed irrelevant for others? If you are a survey writer, it was probably not so long ago. It is an essential component of the planner’s job to create an email that would seem inviting to the audience; the hard part is deciding the emails' subject, body and sender so that the proposition is attractive to everyone. If you have been walking this tightrope, it is time to come down.

Multiple Email Campaigns is a Cvent email survey tool feature that gives you the ability to give everyone exactly what they want! Within one survey invitation email, you can send out different messages to different groups of people by segmenting your invitee list. This functionality allows you to specify the From Name, From Email Address, Subject Line and body of the email for each group or targeted list.

Let’s take an example, hosted an event and created an event survey to send out to the exhibitors and attendees; you’ve created separate questions for them and used survey question logic to decide who sees which conference survey template questions. Now, when it comes to the invitation email you realize the exhibitors need an email asking them to fill out the questionnaire asking about how much they gained from the event and why they would/would not want to return next year. On the other side, the attendees will prefer a warm note from the CEO thanking them for making the conference a success and inviting them to vote on which exhibitors/stalls they liked best or how they liked the food/accommodation. It is impossible for the two emails here to be the same; hence the need for multiple target lists.

Customize your email marketing to your audience and take advantage of this functionality in order to increase the open rate of your emails and your survey response rates.

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!

A good survey includes both qualitative and quantitative data, but when gathering qualitative data it is important to gather the right kind of answers. Go too open-ended with your question, and you may end up with answers that do not help you with your study at all.

Consumer insights into a new product or service are important to a market research study, and open-ended questions are the way to get them. When conducting consumer surveys, there are several online survey tips you can follow to get the right mix of closed and open-ended question:

1. Determine if it is a question that you cannot ask in any other way. For example, if you were asking consumers how often they purchased a product, it would be difficult to analyze data if that question were left open-ended. Group responses into categories like once a month, twice a month, more than three times a month.

2. If the question must be open-ended, make it narrow. Sounds contradictory, but if you ask too much, you’ll get too much. Don’t ask if they like your product and if they share it with friends in one breath. Ask simple questions like: Why do you purchase the product?

3. Allow expansion on closed-ended questions. If you are unsure about something, leave room for comments on close-ended questions. This is a good compromise that can help you get the responses you need.

These are just a few best practices for survey writing, but it goes without saying that when creating a survey, you need to put as much, if not more, effort into writing the questions as you will analyzing the data.

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.