HR Survey

While 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.

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.

Employee 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.

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!

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:

Does it matter if not everyone takes your survey? What if only half your survey sample actually completes the survey questionnaire - or a third? You're never going to get everyone you invite to complete your survey. Those people conducting employee surveys, such as employee opinion surveys or workplace surveys will see the highest response rates on their survey projects. Some HR surveys see response rates as high as 90%. But if you're conducting a consumer survey, help desk satisfaction survey or customer feedback survey 90% response rates may be out of your reach.

The question remains, if I'm never going to get everyone, do those who didn't voluntarily complete your survey matter? Absolutely. Like with most things related to market research, there has been a lot of research to uncover the truth: are survey respondents different from non-respondents? It seems that research points to yes. Even early responders and late responders different, and this is probably due to interest in the survey.

There are a few things you can do to boost your response rates and limit your nonresponse bias.

1. Send email invitation reminders and partial response reminders to those on your email list. Two things happen when you do this, the first, you catch people who never even read your first email. The second benefit is you remind people who were willing to complete your survey but forgot about it.

2. Make sure there aren't any errors in your survey design. Double check your survey question logic, your question and answer choices, your graphical survey template, even your introduction on the survey welcome page.

3. Keep it short. This is a general survey best practice tip you should always follow. While there's not much you can do after you have already sent out email survey invitations and begun the data collection process, you should remember to keep your surveys short and limit the number of survey questions during the survey design phase.

It's important to keep non-response bias in mind when you're analyzing survey data and drawing conclusions from your market research results. Are your respondents different from your non-respondents? Perhaps only heavy users completed the survey, or only people with full time jobs, or only single individuals. Do those who opted not to complete your survey have a different opinion? These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself when evaluating your survey data. In some cases, it may not matter, in others it could cause you to make a decision based on skewed results.

When it comes to losing weight or saving more money, one of the most daunting aspects is simply wrapping your head around where to start. With hundreds of books and celebrity “experts,” it’s easy to feel overwhelmed before you even begin.

Administering, writing and creating survey questionnaires is no different. Ask questions, send them out and let everybody respond? Sounds easy, right? Not always. What survey questions do you ask? How do you know what’s important to ask versus what’s going to produce a meaningless data point?

Just as people turn to financial advisers and personal trainers, Cvent's Web Survey software tool offers more than 170 expertly crafted survey questions and survey templates to help you overcome the inertia associated with getting the ball rolling on your next survey research projects. Our question library helps users create customer service satisfaction survey forms, write employee questionnaires or staff attitude surveys, design marketing survey templates, and more.

From this extensive library of questions, we have created 20 fully built survey templates including customer satisfaction survey templates, training evaluation samples and employee exit survey templates.

Although Cvent won’t take those first steps on the treadmill for you or stash those first few dollars in your proverbial piggy bank, we are able to leverage our extensive experience to help you initiate your first survey project with pre-built survey templates.

In Cvent's survey application, survey account administrators can create different user roles with different permissions, controlling what particular people can view and access in the account. Administrators can add, view, edit and delete users, user groups and user roles. This feature is particularly helpful, if you have multiple surveys running at the same time with different people in charge of the creating and writing the surveys. For example, the administrator may want to restrict people in the marketing department from accessing HR surveys to maintain employee privacy or perhaps marketing finance shouldn't be able to see marketing surveys.

Users: Users are the individuals using the Cvent Web Surveys tool. A user can have only one user role and be a member of none or multiple user groups. The users are going to be the survey creators, designers and writers.

User Groups: User groups are used to set visibility for users. Based on their user group, users will be able to see different information within the survey software. You have several options to choose when setting up user groups:


User Role: In user roles, administrators can add, view, edit, copy and delete user roles from an account. Each type of permission may have a variety of specific permissions. For example, there are permissions to be able to edit a survey or launch a survey. The reason this is important is it helps ensure workflow. If the survey writer isn't allowed to launch the survey because only the department head has the power, by setting user roles you ensure those organization rules are enforced. Specific permissions may have no access, full access or read only access.

Sometimes a goal of employee feedback programs are to improve employee performance. Following the simple survey questionnaire tips and best practices we've shared before will help you collect the data you need to make tweaks to processes - or invent new programs - to improve employee satisfaction and productivity.

What are some of these human resource survey best practice tips?

• Collect anonymous survey responses. Make sure you select an online data collection tool with the option to collect contact information or collect anonymous surveys.

• Don't ask too many personal questions. If you're conducting an anonymous employee feedback forms, employees shouldn't feel like their responses could be tracked back to them. Asking what department they're in is one thing, but asking what department, what age group they fall into and their gender may be pushing it too far - besides, do you really need any demographic information?

• Ask questions about a third party. Asking questions in the third person can sometimes make the employee completing the web survey feel less threatened. Do your co-workers You may feel like your questions are fair and unbiased, but employees may think you have a hidden motive.

• Do something with the survey results. The importance of employee surveys is unmistakable, but if you're not going to act on the results the whole surveying exercise will be in vain. More importantly, if you don't close the feedback loop, employees won't take your next survey project seriously. When you do take action as a result of the survey report, let them know changes were made because of employee's feedback!

Is your employee survey software getting the job done? Having a survey program in place to collect employee feedback and measure employee satisfaction should be a no brainer for human resource departments. Unfortunately, a lot of departments haven't put a program in place yet, or worse, have never conducted an employee job satisfaction survey project.

You may be thinking to yourself, Why do we need to measure employee satisfaction? Our employees are generally happy. My response is, How do you know? I mean really, how can you know if your employees are actually satisfied and happy if you've never conducted a survey to ask them? No one is going to come to your office and tell you they hate working at your organization. Some HR professionals think they can measure employee satisfaction based on employee retention rates. Looking at employee retention rates isn't necessarily the best way to judge how happy your employees are. Employees who don't have high job satisfaction may stay at an organization because they're satisfied with something else, such as the work environment. Or in today's current economic environment, even the most dissatisfied employees will be reluctant to leave an organization because they think the job market looks bleak.

As you can imagine, there are many factors contributing to worker and staff satisfaction such as:


In past posts, I've recommended collecting survey responses using anonymous online employee survey questionnaires generated by an employee survey tool. By periodically conducting surveys organizations can measure employee satisfaction with management, the mission and vision, teamwork and corporate communication.

Don't forget if you use survey creation software to create employee satisfaction surveys, you should also create surveys to conduct exit interviews. After all, most of the time a satisfied employee is not going to leave an organization.

How do you feel about social media and business? What about your executives, marketing, human resources and customer service departments? A recent study published through eMarketer found more than eight in 10 management, marketing and HR executives said benefits of social media include relationship and brand building. According to eMarketer, execs also view social media as a good tool for recruitment and customer service. 46% of survey respondents believe social media enhances employee morale.

It's great to see opinion survey results showing the attitude towards social media is changing. If you follow this blog, you know I'm a believer in social media and it's ability to provide real value to organizations.

Not all is bright and shiny in eMarketer's survey report, however. Executives still have their fears about social media strategies. More than half of the survey respondents who did not use social media said they didn't know enough. In addition to a lack of understanding, execs worry about confidentiality and security problems, as well as decreased employee productivity. The good news is, I think these concerns will continue to shift in future attitude surveys. In fact, we've already seen a shift since Feburary 2009.

Survey reports from a global survey conducted by a security software company in February showed 50%-60% of companies surveyed blocked social networking sites, and 62.8% of managers polled thought employees shared too much on social networks. Between the February and July survey results, we've already seen a shift. Not a huge shift, but there is a shift happening. Instead of simply ruling out social media, execs are beginning to admit there may be value they just don't know enough about it.

If you're a social media expert, I'm thinking you have your work cut out for you. There is a continued need for information about social media and their potential value to be explained to executives.

I've been asked a lot recently what's the difference is between Cvent Web Surveys branch logic and our advanced survey logic features. I can definitely see where various types of survey question logic can get confusing. Hopefully this post will eliminate the confusion! When you're creating an online survey, it's important to include question logic so survey respondents only see questions that make sense for them.

BRANCH LOGIC:

Take the following example business survey questions:


I hope you can see it doesn't make sense to ask people who saw a TV ad about how they found you on search, and vice versa is also true. But you do want to know more about how they found you through a search and have a series of questions you want to ask. Branch logic allows you do do this. You can add "branches" to your survey so only those survey respondents who saw the TV ad see questions about the ad and those who used search see quesitons about search. I think this graphic does a pretty good job of explaining how branch logic works:


ADVANCED LOGIC:

Advanced logic has the same principle, you only want people to see questions that are relevant to them. However, using advanced logic gives you more freedom to narrow down who sees a question based on up to four criteria. You can pull criteria from a survey respondent's contact information (assuming you're not conducting an anonymous survey) and how they responded to previous questions.


What this means is only people who have Marketing in their title, work in California, heard about the organization from word of mouth and did not select option A in question 8 will see this question. Unlike Branch Logic where you control a set of questions by direction a survey respondent down a path, Advanced Logic allows you to only show questions to "qualified" respondents.

Adding in logic, whether it's branch, skip, advanced or pipe improves the respondent experience and keeps them engaged. More engaged respondents mean higher response rates and lower abandonment rates. If you're in the market for kiosk survey software, market research tools, or just an online survey system that will allow you to collect customer feedback or conduct employee surveys, make sure you ask what types of question logic are supported by their enterprise feedback management solution.

I came across an interesting conversation today where someone was objecting to conducting a customer satisfaction survey because they were concerned the customer questionnaire would only reveal negative customer feedback. This is definitely the wrong attitude. If you think online survey results will only contain negative feedback, it's even more important you select a feedback management tool or survey designing software TODAY and create a customer satisfaction survey tomorrow. Then start fixing the problems that are resulting in all the negative feedback.

Fortunately, the person who thought they would only receive negative feedback will probably be proven wrong. Unless your organization has some serious issues you've been turning a blind eye to for awhile, no survey - customer or employee survey - is going to result in all negative feedback. If everyone hated your company, then you would have no customers and/or no employees. So relax.

The misnomer here is that only unhappy people complete survey questionnaires. This is not true. Happy customers complete them too. Even people who don't have strong opinions either way complete surveys. I honestly cannot say it enough: conducting business surveys to measure customer satisfaction or employee loyalty is essential to all organizations.

Don't be afraid of negative feedback. It's actually a good thing because it forces you to make improvements. Your organization isn't perfect, and there is always more room for growth. Sign up for a free trial today and begin collecting feedback from customers and employees.

A few weeks ago, I gave you tips for what to include in the executive summary section of your next survey report. But what about the overall structure of the report? There are typically seven sections in a market research report: title page, table of contents, executive summary, methodology, findings, conclusions and recommendations.

• Title Page. This one should be obvious. The title page should be the first page of your survey research report. Some basic information about the survey project should be included such as what the report is about and the date of the survey research. You may want to include who prepared the report and to whom the report is being presented.

• Table of Contents. This page is simply there to help your audience navigate through the report. The table of contents should list each of the sections in the order they appear in the report. What you choose to include in the table of contents will depend on the length of the report. Longer reports, like market research reports, should include all the charts and graphs to make it easy for readers to located them.

• Executive Summary. As I stated in the last post, the executive summary should provide readers with a high level understanding of the project, findings and recommendations. Keep the executive summary as short as possible. Not every point needs to be written out in detail, bulleted lists are acceptable as well.

• Methodology. This section is your chance to fully explain your research data collection methods. Your quantitative market research methods may include online surveys, paper comment cards, telephone questionnaires or face-to-face interviews. In the survey methodology section, be sure to include how many participants the survey project had, the response rates and the timeframe of the project.

• Survey Findings. Use this section to detail your survey results. This is where you want to include your tables, graphs and charts - as well as appropriate descriptions for each visual. Be sure to point out the important parts of the survey responses and findings.

• Conclusions. Take the time to summarize your key points. Often your conclusion section will mirror your executive summary. Your conclusions should be strong statements that are supported by the survey data analysis you presented in the survey findings section. When it's appropriate, consider including information from related research, either past survey projects or secondary data sources.

• Recommendations. Based on your conclusions and survey findings, make recommendations for the next step, or course of action. Your recommendations should circle back to meet the goals of the survey project. For example, if you conducted a global market research study to identify new locations for a store, make a recommendation for where your organization should open a new store. Recommendations are there for your management team to use in their decision making process. Just because you make a recommendation, it does not mean that will be the chosen course of action.

Presenting survey research findings in a well organized report will help guide future business decisions. The importance of sharing survey findings is the same whether they're business market research study findings or human resources customer satisfaction survey results.

Matt Foley, blogger for MROC Talk, asked an interesting question today:


I think this question can be altered to work for surveys: Would you complete your online survey? It doesn't matter if you're creating business surveys or customer surveys, if you wouldn't take your survey - neither will your survey sample. If you even hesitated in thinking about how to answer that question, it's not going to happen. Keep these simple survey best practice tips in mind when working on your survey design (these apply to business-to-business surveys for customers, employee questionnaires and consumer surveys alike):

1. Introduce your online survey. You don't have to explain everything you plan to ask, keep it short and sweet (like your survey questionnaire). Give a short outline of the topic you're asking about and why.

2. What's in it for them? Are you offering an incentive? Promising change? Tell your respondents why they should complete your questionnaire. Business professionals need a reason to complete your research survey just as much as consumers do. Consider offering an incentive to give them a reason to help you out (yes that's right, they are helping you).

3. Keep it short. Put yourself in your survey respondent's shoes, if someone sent you this survey would you complete the whole thing? If it's too long for someone else's online survey, it's too long for yours. According to some people, keeping your survey to 30 surveys questions or less is a survey best practice. I don't recommend going over 30, but don't think that because it's a survey tip means you need to use all 30 questions. Only use as many as absolutely necessary.

4. Keep it interesting and engaging. Use various question types and logic patterns to keep survey respondents from zoning out or rushing through your survey.

5. Make it visually appealing. Don't be fooled, looks and survey layout matter! The graphical survey design can make it easier or harder for online survey respondents. Keep color schemes and graphics in mind: are the colors easy to read or do they clash; do the images enhance the respondent experience or are they distracting or offensive?

6. Test, Test, Test! Another survey best practice: always test your survey. When you ask other people to look at it, ask them if they received an email survey invitation whether they'd complete your web survey or abandon it. Same rule applies, if your testers wouldn't take it - neither will your target population.

How much money are you losing each year due to poor customer experience? A new study on customer experience and consumer behavior found Australia, New Zealand and India suffer combined losses of $5.6 Billion (USD) in revenue because of organizations' failure to meet customer expectations.

As I've mentioned plenty of times before, a critical step in the survey research process is taking the time to analyze data (check out these tips on how to analyze survey data) and presenting your survey findings. If you're like most people, the thought of having to create a survey report makes you cringe - perhaps even hide out under your desk until you think everyone has forgotten about the survey research project. Shame on you if you're under your desk! Why did you even bother spending all that time on the market research or employee questionnaire or customer satisfaction marketing survey in the first place if you didn't want to share the findings?

I do understand, despite my sarcasm. Creating a survey report can be daunting. After all, where do you even start? In past posts, I've mentioned how great Cvent presentations and reports are for post data collection survey analysis and report creation. It's awesome that our online survey software can do a lot of the heavy lifting with the graphical representation of your survey, but you still need to structure the report and provide recommendations.

After you finish analyzing survey results, here's a quick guide to what should be included in your survey report:


Even with these survey tips for creating survey reports, you may still not have the extra time to allocate to building reports and presentations. If this is your situation, let our Survey Professional Services Group help. Our talented team created countless custom, professional reports for our clients to share with their management teams and decision makers. Contact us to learn more about our Professional Services.

According to a recent Kelly Services survey report showed 75% of respondents appreciate the opportunity smartphones and laptops give them to stay in constant contact with work. However, only a third are working longer hours. The Kelly Services workplace survey had 100,000 survey respondents from 34 countries across North America, Europe and Asia.

According to the employee survey, more than 55% of respondents claimed to be happy with their current work-life balance, while 87% say having the capability to work anywhere, anytime, creates motivation and a better work-life balance.

Interesting survey results:

• Survey respondents in North America are happier with their work-life balance than any of the other regions in the study. European respondents employee satisfaction with work-life balance is the lowest across the globe.

• 30% of respondents in North America work longer hours as a result of new technology, this is lower than Europe (33%) and Asia (41%).

• Northern America baby boomers are experiencing a better work-life balance than other generations. In Europe, Gen Y places a greater emphasis on work-life balance than other generations.

• The opportunity for telecommuting or working remotely is important when deciding where to work despite the area of the globe. It is the most important in North America (92%), followed by Asia (89%) than Europe (84%).

George Corna, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Kelly Services, concluded flexible work practices, working from home and other family-friendly arrangements have improved work-life balance and boosted organizational efficiency.

Wondering whether you should start using an employee evaluation tool or how to do employee evaluations regularly instead of those yearly paper evaluations? Sometimes employee evaluations feel like a chore and extra paper work, managers and human resources professionals don't realize the potential benefit. Regularly conducting employee performance reviews offer a range of benefits:

Even still, employee evaluations cause some extra stress for both employees and employers. Remember Office Space? The employees loved being evaluated by the Bobs.


Office Space I have people skills - Watch more Funny Videos
While it may seem on the surface there's a lot of work that goes into conducting staff evaluations or conducting 360 degree feedback surveys, selecting an online employee evaluation tool or 360 survey software can eliminate a lot of the paper work for the HR department. After creating the evaluation once in your online survey tool (just like you have to do for yearly paper evaluation then make copies) you can collect all the same information without any of the data entry or printing expenses. You can even improve the experience for the managers completing the evaluation form by using various forms of survey question logic to ask important follow up questions, or hide irrelevant questions.

A good employee performance review example of how survey tools can improve the experience so managers dread it less is if your organization has different variations of the same survey for different departments or business units. Instead of having to manage and update several documents because you need to change one question in the list of employee evaluation questions that are shared across all evaluation forms, you can do it in one place. With one survey evaluation, you can use skip, branch and advanced conditional logic to show the variations only when appropriate.

The same idea can be applied to 360 degree feedback surveys. The 360 degree feedback example might change slightly depending on the role of the person filling it out. A manager may see a different set of questions than a co-worker. Again instead of having to manage these variations of the feedback form, you can keep it all in one survey online.

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.