How to ensure your survey content evolves with you

Reviewing survey content

By Lauren Gatt

Most of Voice Project’s clients have been working with us for a long time (no surprise given the hugely positive feedback we receive from them!). At Voice Project, we believe your success is our success, and we enjoy developing a partnership over time and being a trusted advisor as your organisation evolves. One key benefit of working with the same survey provider over time is being able to track trends and apply a consistent approach between your surveys.

Yet, while keeping your survey content consistent maximises historical benchmarking and comparisons to previous surveys, we still recommend that clients thoroughly review each repeat survey to ensure that your survey content evolves to support your organisation’s emerging needs.

 So, what things should you review?

Communications

To ensure strong engagement, it’s important that your survey communications are current and reflect what’s happening for staff. It’s an opportunity to reflect relevant internal or even external changes. For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit many organisations acknowledged the challenging circumstances in their survey communications and positioned the survey as a way to navigate the pandemic more effectively. Failing to reflect this huge shift in people’s personal and professional lives would have been at best jarring for staff, and at worst insensitive.

Rating Scale Questions

The rating scale questions (i.e. those asked on a 5 point scale) are the questions you may be most hesitant to alter, given that this can remove opportunities for historical or industry benchmarking. However, as strategic priorities and external factors can change between surveys, your engagement survey provides a good opportunity for you to get feedback from staff on these issues, through updated questions. For example, you can include retrospective questions to see whether staff agree that the organisation has been successful in executing its strategy. You can also use future-focused questions to get staff input on the organisation’s focus moving forward. With external change, you can use updated questions to see how staff feel about the organisation’s response to a disruptor and get their thoughts on how the organisation could manage it better. What are some current changes and challenges you may need to take a closer look at?

Also, if your previous survey revealed particular priority areas it would be useful to gain further information on, it’s worth considering additional questions to further flesh out the issue.

It’s best to discuss your ideas and evolving needs with your Voice Project consultant. As a rule, it’s better to update your survey questions to best match your organisation’s needs than stick with ones that are no longer a good fit simply because it’s what you’ve used in the past. Indeed, ensuring that survey questions stay relevant in the evolving world of work is why we updated our approach to the standard Engagement Survey in recent times. So, how can you ensure a smooth transition to including new or updated questions in your next survey? By keeping enough questions consistent to be able to identify high level trends, as we did when we moved to our new approach. It’s also recommended that you keep the outcome measures (i.e. Wellbeing, Engagement and Progress) intact as much as possible, as these are often the three key metrics that leaders need to track.

Open ended questions

Our standard engagement survey has two standard open-ended questions included (“list the three greatest strengths of this organisation” and “list three ways this organisation could be improved”) but many clients also choose to gather really rich data on specific issues. For example:

• Workplace differentiators “list the three best things about working at this organisation” and “list three ways working at this organisation could be improved”

• Organisational change “what could this organisation do to manage change more effectively?”

• COVID-19 How could this organisation better support your health and wellbeing throughout COVID-19?

• Strategy What do you feel this organisation’s top 3 strategic priorities should be?

• Values What things could this organisation do in order to live its values day to day?

The text comments collected not only add colour to the themes that emerge from your results, but can also highlight new issues not otherwise covered by your survey questions. This is particularly true for pulse surveys, which only cover a limited number of areas.

Including a small number of well worded open-ended questions can be an invaluable part of the survey process, and it is worth checking if you could be getting more value out of yours.

Demographic questions

Most survey results are presented by both work area splits and also general demographic splits.

Restructures and organisational change can make it important to check that the work area splits you used previously still reflect your organisation’s structure. Well-structured work area demographics minimise the risk of people responding incorrectly (or just not responding at all), and prevent any groups feeling that they haven’t been adequately included in the survey.

For general demographics, it’s been particularly evident in recent years that the language to describe some groups is rapidly changing. Options previously used to identify different gender identities, sexual orientations or cultural backgrounds may no longer be considered respectful or inclusive. Also, organisations may choose to add in new demographic questions to fit in with new strategic objectives, such as Reconciliation Action Plans, gender diversity initiatives or general workforce planning. As such, it’s important to check in with every survey whether your demographic splits are still relevant and enable you to identify targeted workforce segments.

Take aways

Reviewing survey content can be daunting, but in working with Voice Project you’re not alone in this process. Your dedicated consultant can walk you through the implications of changing survey content from a people and reporting perspective. We can also advise you on current industry and sector trends. If there’s one take away though, make sure you leave enough time in survey planning to get this important part of the survey process right!

Thinking of reviewing your survey content or starting your surveying journey? Contact us today to discuss your thoughts and make a plan.

Voice Project provides research-backed surveys that measure employee engagement, leadership capability and customer satisfaction. These state-of-the-art surveys help organisations get the best feedback to drive positive change. Voice Project works with organisations across the not-for profit, private and public sectors. Get in touch.