Employee surveys are the best methodology to adopt for knowing the concerns and issues the employees may be facing. This is helpful to understand their problems and improve the organization’s productivity.
Employee surveys make employees feel important and contribute better to the organization’s growth using their skills and knowledge.
Want to learn how to improve employee survey results? You have landed in the right place. Read further to understand the top 5 tips to increase employee survey participation in 2022.
Increase Employee Survey Participation
1. Pre-Survey Awareness
One of the strategies to increase the survey response rate is to have a pre-survey awareness and discussions to find out the pressing concerns of the employees. The pre-survey communication helps the employee understand the objectives, goals, how the responses will be analyzed, and the actions that will be taken.
In addition, the anonymity of responses gives confidence to employees and it should be ensured at all times. This, in turn, will lead to an increase in the average participation rate in employee surveys.
2. Rewards and Offers
The notification about employee surveys has to be communicated through newsletters, staff meetings, emails, and team managers, improving the employee survey participation rate.
There are various methods to increase the survey response rate – one is to make offers and rewards. It can be gift cards for an entire team, reward points, a day off, etc. It is a great method for those looking at how to get people to take a survey.
The importance of getting feedback and analyzing them to improve the company’s functioning can be highlighted, which improves the employee survey response rate.
They can be told about previous surveys and how they helped the company improve productivity, increase turnover and profits. Such measures help in increasing the employee participation rate and employee survey response rate. You can use some best employee engagement survey apps to make the process automated.
3. Rating Scales
There are no clear agreements on what is a good response rate for surveys when it comes to responses. However, in some companies, an average response rate of 70-80% is good enough.
Employee survey response rate can be improved by framing questions that are not loaded or open-ended. For example, a rating methodology on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10 on certain areas of concern can help the company better analyze what is going on in employees’ minds.
Keep surveys short with about 30 questions, and this will ensure that they don’t become irritated or submit arbitrary responses. Setting a target date for submitting survey responses can help prevent procrastination on the part of employees.
Sending gentle reminders ahead of the deadline can also increase the average survey response rate. If you are wondering how to get people to complete surveys, don’t skip these tricks.
Recommended Read: How to Set up Remote Employee Pulse Surveys [55 Employee Survey Questions + Free Template]
4. Simplify the Process
It is also very important to help employees clear their doubts and problems in filling and submitting the surveys. The survey should be accessible easily on desktop, tab, or mobile and on multiple platforms with simple steps to fill the responses and submit them.
An acknowledgment on email with a thank you note can increase the employee survey participation rate and the average employee survey response rate.
5. Skip Logic
Employee survey participation can be enhanced even with multi-language support and voice-to-text, which will make it easier for the disabled to participate.
The use of skip logic can enable employees to go directly to a different question based on a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response so that questions not relevant to them can be skipped logically, increasing employee survey participation in 2021.
More importantly, there should be support provided by the team leaders or managers for each group when employees face problems with answering the questions, which will improve the average employee survey response.
Pro-Tip
Keeping the anonymity of responses is vital to get the most honest response from the employees. Also, after each survey is completed, there should be a post-mortem on the employee survey response rate, which will enable the organization to take corrective measures to improve the employee survey participation rate.
One-to-one conversations with those who haven’t submitted responses can help understand the reason for their absence and consequently increase the employee survey participation rate.
Wrapping up
Regularly conducting employee pulse surveys and looking for ways to increase participation in an organization can help organizations in many ways. After conducting the survey, a company must also communicate the outcome of the surveys and their action.
This will make more people complete the next round of surveys and lead to a better average survey response rate.
Don’t forget to use the tips mentioned above the next time you plan to conduct an employee survey.
