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Mastering survey questionnaire design

Posted by Samantha Arnold on Fri, 03/02/2012 - 16:00
Back to blog homepage for: HR means business: by Samantha Arnold of ETS

Is your current employee survey benefitting your company?  Some suggest such surveys are just a tick box exercise. That surveys offer little or no real business value. Both assertions may well be true … for some companies, at least. However, this needn’t be the case.

Your employee survey should be designed to fit the company’s unique organisational context and reflect and measure your business strategy. We cover this topic in greater detail in our latest original HR insight paper Mastering questionnaire design in employee surveys.

Relevance is crucial to a meaningful employee survey – and an accurate measure of engagement. A generic set of questions relating to a standard definition of engagement is likely to provide fairly similarly generic data. This restricts your ability to really understand what is driving engagement for your business and implement targeted action plans.

What an engaged employee looks like is different in every company. That means every survey model should be bespoke – an approach advocated by David MacLeod in the Engaging for success report.

A well-aligned survey will give a more valid measure of employee engagement for your business and shows you are progressing on your business strategy from an employee perspective. Such insight and understanding is vital in making informed business decisions and maintaining competitive advantage. 

 

HR means business: by Samantha Arnold of ETS

A blog by Samantha Arnold

Hi, I’m Samantha Arnold, Senior Business Psychology at ETS. We are an HR consultancy and bespoke solutions provider specialising in 360-degree feedback, employee surveys and performance/talent management. This blog is my take on the very latest issues concerning people management processes and the wider HR community.

 

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Editor's Note - May 10

Had a busy week with two days at the Responsible Business Summit in London. What struck me was the appetite for sustainability in the corporate world. I spoke to senior figures from multinationals who knew wholeheartedly that businesses in the future would not succeed if the society around them failed.

Much of this appetite was understandably focused on collaboration - the future of sustainability. Words that were previously indicative of success - power, might, scale, size - are no longer enough in the open source, peer-reviewed future where opponents will not simply grumble and moan and then leave you in peace. Companies must work with governments, NGOs, charities and social enterprises as a matter of course. And even competitors, where necessary.

Facilitating this collaboration is the big challenge of the next five years. Highly-strung and ego-centric companies, feverish with the need to protect their brand, will struggle the most, but it's either adapt or die.

The business/charity relationship is one of the most interesting focal points. Business power can drive positive social change in so many ways but charities are the key holders to communities. As businesses are expected more and more to play a stake in the future, charity partnerships should be top of the corporate priority list. Businesses that don't work closely with a charity will find themselves with reputational problems.

There's a lot more to CSR, of course, but collaboration is the bedding on which CSR will rest. Businesses can no longer find the answers to all their problems in their own resources and assets.

And for many that's a scary thought.

Any thoughts, thoughts or questions, drop me a line on editor@hrzone.co.uk.

Best wishes

Jamie