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Mastering survey questionnaire design

Back to blog homepage for: HR means business: by Hannah Stratford 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. 

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Editor's Welcome

 

Hello! I'm a great believer in the power of stories, whether they be folk tales, novels, films or TV dramas.
 
They have a wonderful ability to get complex moral or social issues over to us in a palatable, easy-to-understand way and can provide many lessons if only we care to look just a little bit below the surface.
 
But they can also act as a fun starting point for discussion and debate on rather more serious topics that are all too often brushed under the carpet and ignored.
 

Hence our decision to start up a Review slot on the site to look at those everyday stories that are all around us from an HR perspective.

Although we've been publishing book reviews (take a look at our Book Club list of suggested possible non-fiction works for evaluation here) for some time, you may also have noticed that we've been running a weekly home page blog on The Apprentice courtesy of The Chemistry Group for a while now.

And Pauline Wood, managing director at specialist retail headhunter, court & spark consulting, was likewise kind enough to write our first film review on the Headhunters movie.

But the big question is, why don't you give it a go yourself? There's a world of choice out there and I, like the rest of the community, would love to hear your thoughts and insights.

So next time you watch a movie, see a TV drama or read a novel that you think has an HR message worth sharing, send your review to me at cath.everett@siftmedia.co.uk or post it directly to our blogs section at www.hrzone.co.uk/blogs.

So get critiquing and look forward to hearing from you very soon.....

Cath Everett
HRZone Editor 
 
 
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