5 Questions for Planning Your Own Employee Survey Project: A Practical Guide for Beginners

“If the questions don’t make sense, then neither will the answers”.

-UNK in the Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

I recently posted about common survey item writing mistakes I have seen and provided suggestions to creating and evaluating surveys (here is a link to that post: 4 Survey Mistakes and How to Fix Them: A Beginner’s Guide for the HR Professional). Originally, I wrote a lot more in that post about things like having a clear purpose of the survey and what to do with the results. The post quickly became unbearably long and I thought that it would be best if I divided the topics into two separate posts. So, this post is on the broader topics of survey planning that come before you start writing items. If you are helping plan or in charge of a survey project, this will help you get started.

The efforts to effectively plan may seem tedious and a bit overkill. But, without these important steps, all the good item writing skills in the world will be diminished in impact. When paired with good item-writing, this planning allows for powerful results much like operational and tactical work need to be aligned well with a mission and vision of an organization to function. It’s got to be the right items of the right people at the right time.

I have 5 questions that will help you in many cases decide what else needs to be done in the survey project, if a survey needs to be done at all, or if a survey is the right method for you. There are many ways to approach this process, but these are things that I have found to be helpful in my consulting work. Good survey planning means more efficient development, distribution, and analysis your survey. The whole process will be smoother.

The main idea is to clearly identify your purpose for the survey. Like survey item writing, however, that is much easier said than done. Answering these 5 questions will get you there quicker.

1. What are the three highest priorities that you want to make decisions on as a result of this survey?

This question is vital to the survey process. One survey expert I have worked with always tries to get clients to start with the end in mind. If you know the outcome you want, it can help place a lot of other processes and decisions. These priorities aren’t always yours. Sometimes they will be your boss’ (or bosses’ priorities for that matter). Sometimes they will be for other stakeholders.

There are a couple of very big benefits to answering this question up front. First, it provides a strong framework for the topics and content of the survey. If it’s not getting you directly to those priorities, then leave it off. Surveys are easy avenues for scope creep (i.e., gradually broadening the purpose of a project to encompass more things). Continually coming back to the prioritized decisions you want the survey to help with can help make difficult choices on survey content during development.

Second, answering this question will help you tremendously with the many of the other questions I will present, especially the ones about who else should be involved and what to do with results after they come in. The last question about using the results is a key one that I will get to later. But know that using the results well also benefits future survey efforts.

Third, it can help with keeping the number of items down. As part of scope creep, the number of relevant items can increase quickly. You want a survey to balance comprehensive content and respondent fatigue. Length of the survey is a big factor in whether or not people complete it and put thought into their responses. If it’s going to be long, make sure that it’s worth their time. I try to keep the number of survey items at 80 or below. Pushing into the 100-item range should be very infrequent and have a very specific purpose so that respondents will know what their effort is being used for.

With the highest priorities identified, you will have a lot of the foundation already laid for a good survey experience. And though you may not have 3, if you cannot identify any priorities that you want to make decisions about, then you either need to do that before doing a survey to or ask a survey expert to help you work through that.

2. What do you hope will be different as a result of the survey?

The reason why I like to ask this of clients is that sometimes there are peripheral or less defined goals about organizational culture that they would like to emphasize. They aren’t necessarily the specified priorities of their management team but can allow the manager who is closer to the respondents to accomplish something as well. Additionally, not every benefit is a specified organizational goal.

I commonly hear things like clients want to make sure results are representative of the whole group or they want to make sure people feel like they are heard by management on hot button topics. Sometimes, it’s to give people the chance to contribute to the change process. I have also seen clients wanting to avoid resurfacing certain negative feelings or experiences with the survey.

Some of those can (depending on the situation) can have disingenuous motivations behind them. For example, you might be tempted to help people feel heard, but only to do that: solely feel heard, and then do whatever you want anyway. That is not a suggested practice.

The main point here is that including thoughts about other goals, motivation, and tone of the survey can help the survey developers understand how to provide the tone that matches the feeling that your team wants to have. Especially when we talk about that last point with things that the team wants to avoid communicating, it will be important to work closely with your survey developer to get that right. It has also helped my clients think about their purpose in slightly different terms and refine their thoughts along the way.

If you do not want anything to change, then I highly suggest stopping the survey effort altogether and re-evaluate what you are wanting to do. A survey may not be your answer and could actually be detrimental if you aren’t looking to change anything.

3. Who will complete the survey?

This is an important one because it is vital that items are asking things that the group of people can respond to. Otherwise, all the good item characteristics will be useless. I once heard of a group that wanted to improve its policies around working mothers in their organization. The trouble was that they didn’t have a good way to identify them in their organization. Typically, there isn’t an HR field for parental status and there wasn’t for them. The group ended up not using a survey and they were able to be persuasive enough to get the policy changes that they wanted anyway.

It is also important because you have to be able to identify the group to send right people the survey. If you cannot identify them through your own records, weed out questions might be of use, particularly when you want to survey employees with a particular set of experiences. But this might be as simple as employees in specific department that can be taken from your HR files, but it might be less concrete like people who perform specific types of job duties.

If you cannot identify a specific group to send this to, then you are not yet ready for a survey to be done. Figure out who has the information you need to make the high priority decisions you want to make.

4. When do you need this survey to be launched?

The question of timing can be vital for a couple of reasons. The most obvious one is that there might be some kind of deadline to meet from your management team. This could a traditional deadline, or it might just be the knowledge that your management team will move on without you whether you have survey results or not. Either way, knowing those constraints are very helpful in developing a custom survey or knowing when you need a vendor to implement something at your organization.

The second issue around timing has to do with the survey content itself. Sometimes, survey content might be affected by other things going on in the world or cultural factors. For example, if you want to ask employee about their well-being behaviors, January might be a bad time to send a survey on the topic since so many people set New Year’s resolutions that are well-being related. Thus, responses will show higher than normal well-being activity in January. Also think about the types of organizational activities that are going on at your organization. You may not want to send a satisfaction survey to employees during an employee appreciation week, for example. Those results are likely to show higher satisfaction than is actually the case.

Lastly, you should avoid sending out multiple large-scale surveys at the same time. Employee surveys are getting more popular and as a result people are seeing more of them at work. If there are multiple large surveys, response rates will suffer for all surveys and results may not be as reliable as they otherwise could be if employee are able to focus on one survey.

I have never had a survey project without timing considerations to account for. If there are none for your project, you’re either missing something or extremely lucky.

5. What is your overall plan for using the results?

This question is a way of organizing the information found in the other questions I asked above. Having a good idea of what you will do with the results helps provide another perspective on the issue and can help put together the other pieces of information you considered in the other questions listed here. The plan should include a presentation strategy for who will hear the results, who the relevant parties are for those presentations, a communication strategy for each stage of the survey, and the decisions that should be informed by the different parts of the survey. If you do not effectively use your results (key word here being effectively) then the survey is a waste of time for everyone involved.

If you don’t have a clear organization of these ideas, you will want to do this early on in the survey development process. You may not need to have every single thing laid out, but having these pieces generally in place early on will make the project management side of things easier.

Conclusions

You may have noticed that these questions are really just variations of the vague question, “What’s the survey about” organized around the end goals of and people to complete the survey. Again, this is easier said than done. You don’t need to fear this process but you also shouldn’t take this for granted. A great survey plan makes the survey project easier and gives you higher quality results in the end. Those results come from a combination of a clear purpose and well-written items.

It’s all in an effort to make those responses you get back really meaningful for you and your stakeholders. The more you can make sense of those items the better. Just remember that, “If the questions don’t make sense, then neither will the answers”.

Thanks for reading!

-Brandon
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