Staff Survey

There is a word in French I have always loved: mondialisation. Like many French words, there is no direct English translation for this term. To give you a rough idea though, mondialisation refers to the way that new communication technology has recently facilitated conversations between people on different continents. Companies headquartered in London are doing business deals with organizations and offices in Beijing, and American firms have clients in India. Cvent is no exception to this rule.

Since Cvent has clients literally all over the world, it makes sense that our clients want to conduct and design surveys in many languages other than English. I received an email from a web surveys client today who was wondering how she should best translate her survey into six different languages: English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi. My response was quick: I told her that she should create six separate surveys, one which was translated into each of the languages she had mentioned.

I explained to this client she could simply translate her questions in Microsoft Word and then copy and paste the translated text into the Cvent Web Surveys Question Wizard. Yes, you can even paste Chinese characters! I also explained that it would be easy for her to collapse the data from all six global surveys into one report. This is why we have made it easy for you to export your survey reports into Microsoft Excel. If you simply run the Answer Details for All Respondents report for each survey and export the results into Excel, you can copy and paste to combine the data from all six surveys into one spreadsheet.

Another great thing about conducting multilingual surveys in Cvent's online survey platform is that you can utilize the display text feature! Remember that display text allows you to specify the question text that your survey respondents will see separately from the text that you will see from inside the survey application (where you create and design surveys) or in your reports. So, it is easy for you to translate your survey questions in the display text window and leave the question text in English. This way, you don’t even need to speak the language in order to correctly interpret the electronic survey results!

I wasn’t lying when I told my client today that Cvent is also a multilingual survey software solution and is ideal for setting up multilingual surveys. Anyone who knows their right hand from their left knows that the corporate world is confined to your immediate surroundings and the world truly is one global market, so use the Cvent Web Surveys software to survey employees or clients worldwide.

Sometimes we forget we can't be everything to everyone all the time. It's just not possible. It wouldn't make sense for a shoe designer to start creating hard hats just because a customer wrote on a comment card in response to a retail survey that she wished the designer also made hard hats because the her husband worked in construction. It seems obvious to most people, going into the hard hat market would be a bad call on the shoe designer's part. So why don't organizations have the same clarity when it comes to their business?

It can be hard to say no to customers, particularly when they have good ideas. But just because an idea is a good one, it doesn't necessarily mean it's right for your business model. Take the example many organizations have to face in their life time: where do they belong? Is it in the high end of the market, the mid-market or the bottom feeders? Most people when you ask them don't want to admit to being a bottom feeder, but there's a market need there that can be very profitable. The organization that can fulfill that need is very rarely, if ever, the same organization that can fill the need at the high end of the market. This just points out, again, that we can't ever be everything to everyone. I remember my marketing classes in college always told us you could only be two of the three things: good, fast or cheap. You can never be all three. Good and fast is expensive; fast and cheap is inferior; good and cheap is slow. It's because we can't be everything to everyone.

So how do you figure out what you should be? Your organization's mission should be a start, but missions can change and transform over time. One place you can start is to ask your employees, survey staff to see what they think the organization is and where they should be going. Employees have stellar ideas, but this may sound like a trick question so make sure to follow these tips for employee opinion surveys.

You should also ask for customer feedback. Your customers will help point you in the direction you should be heading. Sure you'll have the one off cases like with the shoe designer who's customer wants her to create hard hats for construction works, but chances are, no one else will respond that way on her customer questionnaire. And then, at the end of the day, you should be armed with the information you need to support your decision. As you're reading through survey comments, you'll notice that everyone doesn't want you to be everything.

Over the past year, I have run into many new Cvent Web Surveys clients with the same issues or problems with their employee satisfaction surveys.  Most of the clients have the same story: in the past, using a different online survey solution, they released an employee satisfaction survey and were not able to follow up in a timely manner. 

The workplace employee surveys were conducted in a number of different fashions: paper-based, with different online survey tools, and even website survey forms.  All of these previous methods had one tragic flaw: reporting.  The survey administrators waited untill the survey was closed to run survey reports or review the paper surveys.  The problem inherit in this approach is time.  They would wait weeks before pulling reporting and discovering an employee had a problem in the workplace or in the case of paper based methods, sometimes months before they scanned the surveys.

When they finally discovered a problem that needed attention they would act, but what they discovered was:

Both of these resolutions are horrible.  If the employee solves the problem themselves they feel the organization is powerless and does not care about their situation.  If they quit, we all know that it costs 10 times more to train a new employee than to retain the old one.

A simple solution to these problems is a feature that Cvent's online survey solution embodies: Triggered Email Alerts.  Most other survey tools out there do not contain this feature.

The beauty of this feature is the survey administrator can have an email alert sent to whomever they designate; Human Resource Manager, Employee Liaison, etc...  In this manner as soon as an employee answers the appropriate question and then clicks finish on the survey an email is sent to the designated person, who in turn can then immediately follow up with the employee and solve the problem.  Thus, boosting employee retention rates, making them feel like a needed part of the organization, instilling employee loyalty, and finally creating a better work environment.

The triggered email alert feature in Cvent's survey solution solved these client's employee retention nightmares and resulted in a better workplace and a more cost effective future.

We all know the holidays are getting closer, which means office pot lucks are about to become all the rage. What will you be bringing? How is your office going to make sure that not everyone plans to bring the same thing? How do you determine the winner of this year's Tastiest Dish Awards?

Competitions involving food are definitely a favorite around this time of year. However, if you have a big office, it can be a pain to collect everyone's votes. As I mentioned at Halloween, building polls to quickly identify the winner of your office Halloween Costume contest can be applied to the Best Dish Award too. Simply log into your web site voting poll software, make a poll to gather employee opinions on who should win this year's Best Dish Awards. Have different categories, such as best presentation, tastiest appetizer, most unique recipe? Add in images of the dishes to help jog people's memories and create one web poll using your poll maker.

Don't think that an online poll survey software tool can only play it's part at the end of the pot luck event, you can send a pre-event survey to find out who plans to bring what. If too many people are planning to bring dessert, a typical favorite, the online poll generator can easily run a survey report to identify categories with too many volunteers. You can easily create a survey contact group to email those volunteers and ask them if they can bring something else.

Holidays are a time to celebrate with family and friends, and eat delicious food. Unfortunately, we often make such office traditions a little more painful than they need to be by forgetting we can use a polling system or survey software tool we already have. Since Cvent Web Surveys doesn't limit the number of responses you can have, it wouldn't make sense to suffer through paper ballots when it can be done for you! Ready to create a poll for your next staff opinion survey? Get started with a free trial.

What are your other sample employee opinion survey examples?

Surveys are an invaluable tool for researching the community attitudes, employee concerns, product needs, customer loyalty and priorities held by different groups or target audiences.  Designing a questionnaire and collecting survey responses from a sample allows us to draw a profile of the group as a whole, and perhaps perform some correlation analysis to understand the source of those feelings.  The online survey findings can then support fact-based organizational decisions or improvement projects to help continually improve the organization over time.

Survey research can be applied to many venues.  Here are just a few practical applications listed below:

An Internal Employee Survey could identify reasons for low employee retention and provide ideas for reducing those costs, such as a better designed benefit program, improved training opportunities, or problems in the way the organization functions.

A Training Survey can identify how a training program has improved the capabilities of some group and how the training program itself can be improved.  

A Product Satisfaction Survey can identify initial customer experiences with a product, providing data to address unforeseen problems and help the next product release.  

A Market Research Survey can identify customers needs when creating these new service and product offerings.  Surveys can be part of Design for Six Sigma activities.  

An Association Survey, which is similar to market research and customer surveys, can show the member benefits most of interest.

However, a survey program is only valuable if it is properly designed and executed.  While performing a survey project seems deceptively simple – it's just a bunch of questions, and survey software tools make electronic surveys quick and cheap – a small mistake in the survey questionnaire design or survey administration can skew or bias the data, leading to erroneous conclusions.  No organization should ever make critical business decisions based on unreliable or invalid data.

Bad data is worse than no data!

Marketing departments love client testimonials and customer quotes. They're great to share with the sales team when prospects need referrals, they're helpful to put in powerpoint presentations, and can be a critical piece of any marketing website. Getting those sound bites from clients can be a challenge, however. As you can imagine, the challenge only gets bigger if your organization sells consumer products. Admittedly, the growth of social media has made finding people who are saying good things about your product, services or organization has gotten a little bit easier. But, it could be easier still.

Imagine a world where you had a plethora of client sound bites and quotes to share with the outside world. A marketers dream. No more tracking down sales reps to talk to their clients and mangle their words. Everything is already done for you. Well, if you're conducting client satisfaction surveys or consumer surveys, you should be gathering those sound bites already. You can even consider using website polls and website usability surveys to get those sound bites. Depending on the online questionnaire design, you may still need to contact the customer to get permission to use their quote, but the hard part is still done. You have the quote.

Question remains, how do you pull these customer quotes out of your survey web form? You make sure to add an additional comment box. Customers who love you will typically share those sentiments in the additional comments area, particularly if there are not other open ended questions in the survey for them to share why they like an organization.

Still wondering why your marketing department needs sound bites? Opinions for others is one of the driving forces behind purchasing decisions. If you want to learn more about the importance of customer reviews, check out this past post. It's also worth mentioning, this same idea can work for employee surveys and your HR department for recruiting purposes.

Designing a survey instrument can be one of the most fun aspects of conducting survey research. In this two-part tutorial, we'll first look at some of the "Don'ts" of writing survey questions, and then we will look at some of the "Do's".

Once the brainstorming of ideas phase has been accomplished and you have a good idea what the scope of your research is, it's time to get down to putting question ideas on paper (or online!).

However creating good survey questions can turn into quite an art form, as we all struggle to word our items in such a way that our participants will understand what information we are asking for. Recognizing when you've accidentally designed a survey question that is worded in a non-objective way is the sign of a good researcher. Let's see if you can spot the poorly worded question from this group of sample survey questions:


Now that we've looked at some question items that shouldn't be put into surveys, next time we can define some ways we can create objective question items that will provide us with the results we need!

Some people still believe in using paper surveys instead of designing online questionnaires, sending personalized email survey reminders and utilizing electronic survey methods. Sometimes I have to wonder, Why? Some of the reasons people claim they want to use paper questionnaires instead of web survey forms is because they think it's cheaper. That's not usually the case.

Consider this: Online survey response rates are typically hire than response rates on a direct mail survey. Online survey research designed well will yeild response rates from 20-40%. Let's be conservative and say the paper survey you plan to send out will get a 20% response rate as well. I looked up the cost of a ream of standard multipurpose paper (500 sheets) on Office Depot's website: $7.09. A black ink cartridge for a laser printer is $77.99 and will print on a maximum of 2,200 pages. Most printed surveys will be kept to three to five pages, longer than that your survey form looks over whelming from the very beginning and is going to lower your response rate. This is how that cost quickly adds up:


Keep in mind these costs don't include the staff time of stuffing envelopes to send out the direct mail survey, or the staff time of manually entering in all of the responses into some sort of data collection software, be it Excel or a survey software tool. You can figure it will take an intern a week to send out 5,000 survey responses and another week for them to do the data entry for the 1,000 responses. So that's an additional cost of $600 to $800 for one survey campaign. What if you want to do a quarterly customer satisfaction survey? You're looking at an annual cost of over $25,000.

For me, that would be enough reason alone to look into an online survey software application. With a web survey tool, you have the ability to not only send one invitation, but reminders survey emails as well. Sending reminders, as we've mentioned before, can drastically increase your survey response rate. My suggestion: don't fall for the myth that paper surveys are cheaper than online surveys. It's definitely the other way around.

The benefits of online and email surveys are numerous. This is not to discount other survey methods but merely to point out the advantages.

1. Cost savings. It is fairly inexpensive to email survey questionnaires, once you have the email addresses of your target audience.

2. Ability to attach pictures or sound files. You can attach or embed necessary files in the online web survey – you cannot show someone a picture over the phone, or send an audio file easily through direct mail.

3. More honest responses. It’s been shown that respondents are more likely to reveal truthful information online than to an in-person interviewer. Think about how much people reveal through personal blogs and web sites, and this makes sense.

4. Limitless possibilities. With certain kinds of survey software, you can control what types of questions survey respondent can access, show additional questions if they answer a certain question in a particular way, and more. This can be done with paper surveys but it’s a bit more cumbersome and requires written directions: If you answered 'No' to the above question, please explain.

5. Fast results. As I discussed yesterday, the results of online surveys are very rapid, which saves researchers time and money.

Technology has come a long way – ten years ago, the majority of surveys were not online, and that has certainly changed. Now market researchers are using this format more often than not for at least one aspect of gathering feedback. Whether you're looking to conduct a product enhancement survey or an internal business survey of employees, web survey forms have their place in your internet research process.

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.

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.

The Grand Island Independent recently published the results of a survey conducted at St. Francis Medical Center in Grand Island, Nebraska.

Some of their key findings? Mentors not only help retain staff, but also increases the quality and quantity of job performance in the workplace.

Approximately one-third of all St. Francis' employees have a mentor, an unusually large number for any organization. Mentors were most likely to be an employee's direct supervisor, and were most effective for new-to-the-job employees.

What do these results mean?  In these tough economic times, utilizing the benefits of mentor-mentee relationships is a great way to improve employee retention programs through decreasing staff turnover, increasing job security and grooming more staff for leadership positions, all huge cost-savers for an organization.

Perhaps most important for both employees and their companies, having mentors in the workplace can help everyone learn to do their job better.  In other words, an increase in workplace performance.

Find out what's working well for your organization, and what may not be working by following in the footsteps of St. Francis Medical Center. Learning more about your business research needs.

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?

I recently read an interesting state on Drew's Marketing Minute: 70% of business lost in America is lost due to post-sales apathy. Now, I don't know where that 70% number came from, but it's terrifying. Too many organizations are out there just focused on bringing in more customers, not worrying about keeping them (happy). When it costs ten times more to acquire a new customer than keep an old one, it's shocking so much business would be lost because you ignore a customer post-sale.

Drew says, If you don't have a customer retention program - one that turns your clients into raving fans... you need one. And you know what? I agree.

Your retention program should be simple and easy to implement. If you make it too difficult, you're probably not going to want to do it. After you implement it, consider doing a post implementation survey. Find out if your program is working, what changes you need to make, what isn't working, what's going great?

No CEO wants to see clients leave because your sales staff or client services team wasn't paying enough attention to them. As always, I'd love to hear about client retention programs you've implemented, what worked and what didn't?

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!

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.