HR Survey Software

I recently finished reading Company by Max Barry. The short version of the story is someone had the idea to create a "fake" company to test out management theories. However, due to a variety of factors, worker satisfaction is practically non-existent and employee morale is in the toilet (although the group of "researchers," called Alpha, claim it makes them more productive). Barry gives a great employee satisfaction survey example of what not to do as an organization. At one point in the story, the main character initiates an employee satisfaction survey. Unfortunately, employees don't believe the survey is anonymous or Senior Management plans to make any changes based on survey results. Instead, employees believe if they answer "in correctly" they may be terminated.

If you're beginning to think about putting an HR survey program in place to conduct job satisfaction questionnaires or employee morale surveys, here's a hint: make sure employees believe the survey is anonymous and they will not be investigated as a result of their feedback. In my opinion when it comes to staff surveys, nothing is more important than preserving the survey respondent's anonymity. Barry took it to an extreme having employees look for tiny, hidden watermarks on the paper survey with markings of employee numbers.

Another important lesson for survey writers and survey project managers is if your employees do not believe the organization plans to make improvements based on feedback, your survey is probably worthless. Employees wont spend time thinking about their answers and providing constructive feedback. More likely than not, they will breeze through the questionnaire giving "correct" answers. Why bother?

While the last lesson is something that must be addressed with organizational culture and building trust between management and employees, the anonymity issue is easily solved with a web survey tool. Most online survey software has the option to build surveys that are anonymous. Take advantage of that feature when creating surveys to collect employee feedback.

When you sit down to because the survey writing and question creating, take a minute to review these tips for what types of questions to avoid.

I just created a survey to gauge Cvent employee interest in playing in a local softball league this fall. It got me thinking after yesterday's post where I suggested using online surveys to collect employee feedback for product enhancements. Perhaps it's not obvious how human resource departments or any other department can use online questionnaires to survey employees.

One of our sales team members has been trying to organize a company sponsored softball team for years. This year, it looks like it might finally happen - if there's enough people who want to play. But how do you easily find out in a company with over 475 employees who wants to play, when they're available and what positions they can play? It could be a lot of emails to manage and spreadsheets to keep track of responses. Or you could build an online survey in ten minutes and email the survey to employees. Much less work to manage data collection via an electronic survey than responses via email. If you want to know every time an employee completes your survey or online poll, you can set up triggered email alerts within the survey software to receive all the survey responses or just the ones that meet certain criteria. In this case, I might want to set up a triggered alert when an employee says they want to play.

My survey example is only one use of web surveys for collecting feedback from employees. You can do a quick employee poll to get suggestions for happy hour events or even lunch orders. Not every survey project needs a lot of planning. When you need to quickly poll employees on a topic, surveys will do the job there as well.

How else have you used surveys to gather employee feedback quickly other than formal job satisfaction or employee performance appraisals?

Getting survey respondents to complete your questionnaire is always the goal when sending out email invitations. Without enough responses, your survey data wont be representative of your entire target population and you may need to question whether it has enough validity to base business decisions. If you do have a high partial response rate, you may want to see what you can tweak about your questionnaire design to lower your abandonment rate and increase your completed responses.

My first suggestion is to run a survey report in your customer survey software tool, product registration software, hr survey software or whatever online survey tool you're using to collect feedback online to see where you're losing respondents. It may be very cut and dry. Perhaps you lose people during the product registration process when you ask for personal information such as the credit card used to make the purchase. Or it may be less clear why you're losing respondents because they're not all clumped together. If this is the case, I would question the length of your survey and the design itself. Using different types of survey question logic and varying question types can do a lot to keep it an interactive survey.

What are some of the tweaks you were able to make because you knew where you were losing survey respondents?

Yesterday, Salary.com announced the findings of their recent economic impact survey, conducted across 400 of their clients. Here's a quick synopsis of some of the HR survey findings:


As an human resources exec, this survey report may seem like old news to you. However, SVP of Marketing & Strategy at Salary.com, Brent Kleiman, warns against holding off on performance rewards because they can demotivate employees.


If you're under budget constraints and can't sell management on performance based increases, what are you doing to keep employee satisfaction, morale and engagement up?

Survey email alerts, also commonly referred to as triggered email alerts, are a must-have feature for online survey software. Why? So you can respond to customer or employee feedback from HR questionnaires to product evaluation to customer service surveys. Yesterday, I wrote a post on tips for listening to feedback. Timeliness in closing the feedback loop should be a priority for organizations looking to improve how they respond and implement changes in reaction to comments.


A common form for feedback collection is web based surveys. So it should be no surprise when I say you need to have email alerts triggered to quickly respond to customer questionnaire or employee survey responses. Not every survey needs triggered alerts and you don't always need them for every respondent, so Cvent's Web Survey tool gives you three options for survey email alerts:

1. Alerts at the question level. If a client responds to a customer satisfaction survey saying they are very dissatisfied with your product or states they are unlikely to renew their contract, it may be appropriate to set a task for their account manager to follow up. Follow up as soon as possible. I find the sooner you can follow up with someone, show them that you're listening and want to resolve any issues, the easier it will be to win them back. The longer a customer has to think about a problem and stew about the pain it's caused, the bigger deal it's going to be later - possibly a deal breaker.

2. Alerts based on survey score. Many people use online surveys as a lead generation tool, for many of those users scoring leads to help the sales team prioritize follow up is important. In cases like this, you may decide you want to receive an email alert when someone scores over a specified number on the survey to ensure the team is following up with the hottest leads. The same idea could be used for educational surveys where you may want to know when a professor receives below a certain score on teacher evaluations completed by students.

3. Alerts for a completed survey response. There will be cases where you want to know when someone completes your survey and how they responded. Be careful with this, when you have a large survey sample, you don't want to be receiving emails every minute to let you know someone completed the survey.

With Cvent, surveyors have the opportunity to send the survey alert to five people and include a custom message in the alert. If you're using survey question level alerts, you can have different alerts be sent to different people as well. Meaning, if you want your customer care team to know when someone gives good feedback on a call they had, but the sales team to know when someone is unlikely to renew, you can set the alerts up that way.

Sign up for a product demonstration to learn more about Cvent Web Survey software features.

If surveying is part of your job (HR surveys, marketing surveys, customer feedback surveys, etc.), one of the best things you can do before you creating a survey - especially if you've never done a survey project before - is to learn from others. I always take surveys when I'm asked. I'll admit my draw to taking them is because I'm curious about what they're going to ask, but I also want to see what things they're doing right and what things I should avoid.

Looking at other people's surveys are a great way to get ideas for good survey questions. If you're focus is on customer satisfaction or customer service feedback, it should be easy to put your hands on other organizations' business surveys. After all, we're all someone's customer. This is the same with marketing questionnaires or product surveys. Every once in awhile, you should fall into someone's sample. However, if you're trying to get sample survey questions for an employee evaluation feedback form, staff opinion survey or other HR survey, the internet might be your best friend.

While it's easy to get question ideas from questionnaires in the same category as the one you're working on, don't discount what you can learn from surveys in other categories. Best practices cross over categories and someone creating a customer service survey can learn a lot from an education survey.

If you're interested in learning more about survey best practices, sign up for Cvent's free webinar.

I was reading through Bruce Temkin's 6 Laws of Customer Experience (CxP) yesterday, and I was struck by how well a survey program fits in with his CxP laws. I talk about implementing online survey programs to gather customer feedback all the time, to the point that I sometimes feel like a broken record. Often though, employees are overlooked as an essential part of the customer experience especially if they aren't front-line employees. For that reason, my favorite two laws are numbers four and five:
Obviously, conducting client surveys to find their satisfaction levels is important for customer analysis, product enhancements, customer service feedback, etc., but checking in with employee's satisfaction is equally important. Here are a few of the highlights from Bruce:

Various types of employee feedback and HR surveys can include questions to evaluate how your organization is doing when it comes to fostering the correct environment for providing amazing customer experiences. A quick online survey can show management if they're doing a good job communicating organizational goals, motivating employees, boosting morale by celebrating their successes, etc. One of the best ways to measurce customer experience is to measure employee loyalty and morale using surveys.

Employees are an organization's biggest asset; but if employees aren't motivated, don't understand or are just expected to churn through tasks, they could also be your biggest liability when trying to boost customer retention. A good first step to checking in on your customer experience is to check in with your employees through some type of employee satisfaction survey.

If your organization doesn't currently conduct employee surveys or conducts paper based surveys, I'd recommend signing up for one of our online product demos or a free trial of the Cvent Web Survey software.

How speedy is your online survey software? It may seem like a silly question with an obvious answer, and before yesterday I would have agreed. But once again, someone's web based survey has surprised me. I received an email questionnaire invitation from an ecommerce site asking me to complete a survey about my reading habits. In the invite, they told me it would only take 15 minutes of my time (good best practice, here are some other email marketing tips). I had 15 minutes to spare for a 25% discount off my next book purchase.

Unfortunately, the email should have read "15 minutes per page load." I could not believe how slow the online survey software they purchased was. I'm not exaggerating when I say one page took over thirty minutes to load. Are you kidding me? I thought perhaps it was just a momentary glitch or maybe my connection, but I tried it later that night on a different connection - it was just as bad. If it wasn't for the hopes that I was close to the end of the survey (I was promised it would only take 15 minutes), I would have abandoned the survey, but I find it so hard to give up when the finish could just be one page away!

No matter whether you're using customer survey software, HR survey software, product registration software, an email marketing tool or some other type of survey management software, speed should be a factor when selecting a solution. And while I'm at it, I'm going to suggest unscheduled downtime be a factor as well. If you have someone volunteering to take your survey, the last thing you want to happen is the software to go down in the middle of collecting their feedback. Here at Cvent, we're pretty proud of the fact that we've had no unscheduled downtime in the last ten years.

Cvent's online survey tool has a lot more to offer than no unscheduled downtime. Learn more about Cvent Web Survey software by registering for one of our best practice webinars - or if you'd prefer, we also offer weekly product demos.

Sometimes I feel like I'm always wearing my marketing hat. I watch TV and comment on commercials and their cohesion with the brand. I receive a sales and marketing email and critic the message. I go to a website and wonder how it could be more user friendly. I go on Twitter looking for help after a company offers terrible phone support and am irritated at their lack of presence in the social media realm. I'm always wearing my marketing hat. If you're like me, you probably are always wearing your hat too, whether it's marketing, customer service, HR, sales, the list goes on.

I went to Red Robin Friday night for dinner. We were seated in the first booth by the front - right by the kitchen which gave us great access to fresh bottomless fries. It was already loud and hard to hear the conversation with my table partners, but that's to be expected on a busy night, right? Then, out of no where, the manager starts blowing up balloons right next to us! We could no longer hear ourselves think, let alone have a conversation. I began looking for their feedback form on the table. I told you - I am always wearing my marketing hat. I wanted to give feedback because maybe they never thought blowing up balloons could be such an interruption (I'm always willing to give business the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise).

No customer feedback form on the table. I go to Red Robin a lot, and on occasion I've filled out the customer survey they leave on the table. I have always appreciated how easy it is to tell them they've done a good or bad job. Their feedback form was always easy to leave comments on - not just answer scale questions about my customer satisfaction. But there was no feedback form.

I began thinking, do organizations make it easy for customer to provide feedback?

At the end of the meal, the check came with an invitation to complete a customer satisfaction survey online. While I am a big supporter of using online survey tools to collect feedback, I was a little disappointed in their questionnaire. There was no real place for me to add additional comments like on the feedback form on the table, how were they ever going to hear my plea? So my point is two fold: 1. make it easy for customer to give you feedback on their experience and your service or product; 2. make sure you don't limit their responses on a client survey so the organization cannot see the whole picture. When your organization makes the switch from paper surveys to web based surveys, make sure you don't lose a critical part of your current process.

In today's economy, there are a lot of people looking for jobs. Some of those candidates are the cream of the crop, but how do you weed out the unqualified applicants from the qualified? It can be a real struggle for the HR department 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. Using an online survey tool can help facilitate your search. Cvent's Web Survey software gives human resource departments the ability to create online surveys and questionnaires for job candidate screenings. By applying survey scoring to responses, HR execs can spend more time looking at qualified applicants and less time with the duds.


You can set up as many questions as you want, setting scores for each question. Integrating trigger emails with the survey, hiring mangers can receive emails when an applicant receives a score equal to or greater than a specified score. But don't forget there may be more to some of these stories, be sure to include some open ended questions in your HR survey to gain more insights to the applicant's history.

An added benefit to conducting online pre-interview job questionnaires is having more information to help guide the interview. The interviewer can bring in examples from responses to ask for more clarification and explanation, as well as identify other qualities (like how well the candidate puts words to paper) which you can't get from an interview.

Survey scoring is an excellent feature in any HR survey software. This is one example of how survey scoring can save you time as an HR exec. Do you use online survey scoring in employee performance evaluations or job satisfaction surveys?

If your human resources department conducts job satisfaction surveys, employee performance reviews, or staff opinion feedback forms chances are they've thought about implementing exit interviews or perhaps they already have. Exit interviews are an excellent way to gather honest feedback about what the organization is doing well and what it needs to improve. A major benefit of conducting exit interviews is that human resource managers rarely receive frank, honest feedback from employees.

While some exit interviews are face-to-face meetings, we're seeing the use of electronic or online questionnaires more and more. It's important to always respect a departing employee's right to decline an employee questionnaire, but using anonymous web surveys can encourage more employees to participate. After all, there's not much in it for a departing employee besides potential risks.

Here are some example survey questions to get you started developing an online questionnaire:


If your organization does not conduct HR surveys, some employees may question why their feedback is suddenly being requested or how the organization plans to use it. These are valid concerns. I want to stress the importance of having a HR survey program in place to continually assess the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. Implementing an online survey program to conduct any range of staff surveys is a good idea for any organization. We've talked about the benefits of conducting HR surveys in the past. After all, your employees are your biggest asset.

How green are your employee survey practices? In celebration of Earth Day, I wanted to spend some time talking about how Human Resources executives could green up their HR surveys. It's really popular to be seen as a "Green Organization" these days, but some people have the misconception that being green means you're spending more. This isn't necessarily true. We consume six times more paper today than 50 years ago, with the average office worker using 20 reams of paper annually (that's 10,000 sheets!). Just cutting paper consumption can save organizations money.

But how does this relate to greening up your employee surveys?

If you conduct employee evaluation surveys, job satisfaction surveys, staff opinion surveys, or any other type of HR survey, you have the opportunity to cut your organization's paper consumption just by moving your survey project online. Web based HR survey software can eliminate the need for paper surveys. Furthermore, you can gather more of the information you need. Anonymous employee online questionnaires could yield response rates as high as 80 or 90 percent.

Taking your employee surveys to the web have more benefits than just cutting the human resource department's paper consumption. Check out our past blog posts for some additional benefits to using HR survey software to send web based surveys to staff.

Harris Interactive recently completed survey research that unveiled some interesting findings surrounding employee confidence.  If your organization is facing tough decisions, consider some of the research findings about what concessions employees are willing to make to keep their jobs:

70% would take on more projects and responsibilities
62% would work longer hours
40% would take a pay cut
35% would accept reduced benefits such as health and dental
34% and 30% would take unpaid leave or give up vacation time, respectively

Running cross-tabulation analysis is important when doing market research, customer satisfaction, HR surveys, etc.  If you look at the ages of the respondents, the employee confidence survey found workers 55 and older are less likely to take on more responsibilities and work long hours than younger workers.  In addition, younger workers are more willing to give up vacation time.  This information could be very important to HR executives and senior management trying to find ways to boost productivity and cut costs.

Organizations can use this same model to enact similar programs to include customers in product enhancements conversations with product surveys.  An employer can host an internal website with relevant information about the industry, their products, and HR information and include employee surveys.  With more and more people using the internet and availability of easy to use web survey applications, what's your excuse for not implementing a similar program to have a conversation about important issues?

When was the last time you surveyed employees to understand job satisfaction?  Staff opinion surveys can tell you a lot about the organization’s culture and overall employee satisfaction.  With organizations asking employees to do more with less time and resources, keeping the workplace positive and productive should be a top goal.  Every day, I read about job burnout and added stress at work, both these factors can increase the cost of doing business.  In this economy, most organizations are trying to cut costs, not increase them.  We recommend using employee questionnaires to identify possible areas to cut costs, reallocate resources or boost productivity.  You may find adding a break room would give employees space to relax for a few minutes and boost productivity when they return to their desks.  Most employees are happy to share their cost cutting ideas and program ideas with employers.  You may find that the best cost cutting ideas come from the trenches and not senior management. 

If you’re thinking about surveying employees, whether it’s to conduct employee performance evaluations or job satisfaction surveys, Cvent’s Web Survey software can help get your survey program started.  Cvent’s online survey tool has templates and question libraries, such as sample employee survey questions, to help get your HR surveys off the ground in minutes. To learn more about using Cvent's Web Survey software for your survey management needs, sign up for a product demonstration.  

Think about the last time a company asked you about your last purchase or visit. Did you expect your opinion to resonate and influence a change (particularly if you were dissatisfied)? Or, consider the last time you were asked to fill out an employee survey. Did you expect management and HR to consider your thoughts when moving forward with a decision? Of course you did, otherwise you wouldn't have taken the time to complete the questionnaire.

When conducting surveys of clients, customers or employees, you're setting expectations that the organization is going to consider the survey responses before moving forward. If customers have a terrible experience with your brand, product or service and they complete your customer satisfaction survey, they're going to expect steps be taken to ensure their next experience is much better. If their next experience is the same, or worse, it's going to hurt any loyalty they feel towards the organization.

The same concept rings true for employee surveys. And, as we discussed in an earlier post, employee satisfaction has a direct impact on customer satisfaction.

If you're going to conduct surveys—and we clearly suggest you do, as they're a vital part of any organization— make sure you act on the responses. Surveys aren't just an exercise to forget about after launching. Ignoring responses can cause real damage to your perceived trustworthiness and your brand.

If you’re considering doing employee surveys, whether they’re staff opinion surveys or job satisfaction surveys, consider conducting them online. Cvent clients who switched from the paper-and-pencil survey method to web based surveys saw a dramatic increase in survey responses. Using an online survey software company such as Cvent has a number of benefits, including:

• Reducing concerns about anonymity
• Using email reminders to decrease survey abandonment
• Gaining more insight into employee opinions due to longer responses
• Collecting data quickly and conveniently via the web
• Detecting “ballot box stuffing” by limiting the number of responses

If you're part of a high-tech company or a small firm, you’re likely to see the highest response rates from using Internet surveys. Surveyors conducting employee surveys should aim for a 75 percent response rate. Following best practices could yield response rates as high as 80 percent to 90 percent.

If you’re currently surveying employees and getting less than a 65 percent rate of response, sign up for one of our product demonstrations to learn more about how you can increase response rates for your HR surveys.

If your clients are unsatisfied, do you know why? Customer retention should be a huge focus for any organization, if for no other reason than that acquiring new customers is five times more expensive than keeping a current customer.

As many HR executives and relationship managers know, employee satisfaction has a direct link to customer satisfaction. An employee who is satisfied with his or her job and work environment is more likely to work to keep customers satisfied. So, when it comes to increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, take care of your biggest asset: your employees.

Consider conducting an employee satisfaction survey. Just the act of running a survey has been shown to boost employee satisfaction. It lets employees know that management is listening and considering their concerns.

If they have valid concerns about overtime expectations or incentive plans or a range of other issues, just running an employee survey won’t solve those issues. It will, however, allow you to to identify issues affecting various parts of the organization and take steps to improve the culture and environment.

Unlike what some organizations have come to believe, each department does not live in a vacuum. If your marketing department is unhappy, it will affect your sales and client services teams. If your technology department is unhappy, it will affect your accounting and marketing departments. If your customer service employees are unhappy, look out! You may have a hard time renewing current customers and winning new clients.

Instincts tell us that poor customer satisfaction is linked to problems with your product offering or customer service, but it could have wider implications. Before investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in R&D to improve your offering, consider implementing a survey program to help identify the true cause of your customer retention problems.

In today's economy, we have a lot of clients concerned with Return on Investment (ROI). They ask, What's the ROI for a web survey, and how is it different from that of traditional survey methods of phone and paper? In fact, web surveys generate a much higher ROI than traditional surveying for a number of reasons.

First of all, traditional surveys require several hard costs to distribute a survey, such as postage and printing costs. Creating and conducting a survey by paper or phone also costs you in terms of human labor.

Analysis of traditional surveys demands another set of costs, most notably the time and manpower required to manually enter responses and create reports. Plus, completed paper surveys and phone calls cannot be saved, which means you face these costs all over again for your next survey.

Such challenges do not exist with online surveys. Distributing online surveys by email or website links eliminates the costs of printing and postage. An automated process of survey answer collection cuts back on your need for human resources, with the additional benefit of eliminating common manual errors. Finally, one-click reports drastically reduce time spent using survey analysis techniques.

Aside from addressing the challenges presented in traditional surveys, online surveys can also yield higher response rates overall, thanks to features such as automated email reminders. Email reminders have been shown to increase response, sometimes even doubling it.

ROI is an important factor to consider when deciding how to go about a survey campaign. Web surveys can clearly yield a much higher ROI than phone and paper techniques by saving you money and time.

A successful company is only as good as its employees. After all, the efficiency of your entire team—from sales to marketing to technology to human resources—determines your organization's profits and growth. Isn't it, then, more important than ever to make sure your team is productive and happy overall?

Research has shown that motivated and satisfied employees tend to contribute more in terms of organizational productivity and maintaining a commitment to customer satisfaction—both essential characteristics of an organization that will successfully weather the economic storm. So then how do you make sure your employees are, and remain, motivated and satisfied?

Employee satisfaction surveys are great tools for boosting morale within an organization. In fact, it's generally seen that companies that encourage or engage their employees to provide ideas and suggestions have higher employee retention rates and job satisfaction. Give your employees a chance to share insights and suggestions, and you'll have invaluable information that can be acted upon to increase workplace satisfaction and improve business processes.

Employee feedback and satisfaction are critical to the success of any organization. To read more about how to successfully implement a survey program that will positively impact your culture and bottom line profits, read Cvent's new white paper on employee satisfaction.