How to Improve Your Employee Survey Response Rates

Employee surveys are an extremely critical tool utilised throughout employee engagement practices to effectively measure, capture and assess the overall health of an organisation. Specifically, data captured may show the current engagement, motivation and overall productivity levels of employees within an organisation.

Human Resources (HR) departments will often conduct engagement surveys to assess key metrics they want to look into for the organisation or may be utilised to gain quality responses and feedback to new or existing practices within an organisation. Likewise, HR finds a critical importance in ensuring that responses are received highly to gain an accurate depiction of the entire organisation’s views for particular key measures.

Likewise, this blog goes into detail highlighting the keyways that management may effectively improve and attain high survey response rates within their respective business.

Communication

To improve employee survey response rates managers may consider effectively assuring that there are clear levels of communication throughout the organisation. Specifically, to increase survey response rates, HR managers should notify managers to communicate with employees that there is an upcoming survey that needs to be completed.

This notification should be given to managers before the survey has been sent as it gives managers and employees time to prepare for the survey’s release, freeing up time and ensuring that the survey may be completed as managers are on board and further the encouragement of employees to participate has been pushed.

Short Surveys

An effective way to improve employee survey response rates is through ensuring to create short survey for employees. Short surveys are a powerful way to improve survey participation rates as employees can answer surveys without hindering other working activities they are completing.

Moreover, to assure the survey response rate is high through short surveys, tell the survey recipient an estimation of how long the survey may take to complete. As an example, if you are undergoing pulse surveys an estimation may be that the staff survey could potentially only take two minutes for employees to effectively complete the survey.

Rating Systems

A great way to assure that employee engagement survey questions rates are improved is through utilising a rating system. Specifically, when an employee is partaking in a survey, if they begin to get bored of the survey, the responses will never be completed, likewise, utilising a rating system will ensure employees complete surveys.

This is because when a rating system is utilised employees may find questions easier to answer, survey time to completion becomes much faster and the overall survey process becomes much more enjoyable. In turn, rating systems have become one of the most common and powerful tools to increase response rates and gain solid survey results for any organisation.

Mindful Open-Ended Responses

A critical way to assure that your organisation improves employee engagement survey questions rates is through having mindful open-ended responses. This means that when designing survey questions, to assure a high number of employee survey responses management should assure that they limit the number of open-ended questions within the survey.

When employees are given a lot of open-ended questions in surveys for employees, there is a higher chance that the interest of employees whilst completing surveys would be lost. This is due to a majority of employees wanting to answer surveys that are fast and do not interrupt scheduled activities. In turn, it is critical to ensure to include potentially only one or two open-ended response type questions within the survey to assure a high survey response rate.

Automated Alerts and Reminders

When conducting employee surveys an essential way to improve employee engagement survey questions response rate is through automated alerts and reminders for survey completion. HR departments may automate surveys through utilising such Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) provided tools. Alert automation is critical as it ensures that employees become aware that a survey is to be released by a certain time.

Likewise, automating reminders for employees to effectively complete the survey is essential. This is largely due to employees often forgetting that a survey was in progress or hasn’t been completed yet. In turn, automating for employees to finish the survey whilst in the process of gaining results is extremely critical to remind employees and push for higher survey completion rates.

Employee Feedback

An extremely effective way in which managers may improve employee survey response rates is through assuring to gain employee feedback. Employees enjoy knowing that their opinions and voices are being heard. Likewise, it becomes critical for management to implement strategies to ensure employees know that their feedback is wanted.

Correspondingly, it should be communicated to employees that their responses are critically needed, and all the feedback received will be reviewed and action will be taken. In turn, when employees know that management wants their voices to be heard and they know that action will be taken through completion of surveys a higher response rate may be seen.

Rewards

Another essential way in which managers can effectively improve employee survey response rates is by offering rewards to employees. Rewards could be pushed to employees through a variety of ways. One such way is through offering rewards to employees once they have completed ten consecutive surveys.

The reward given should further be largely valuable to the employee as this will assure responses are gained for surveys sent out. An example of a common and highly inexpensive reward management could offer could be finishing thirty minutes earlier than normal. This in turn will dramatically assure that survey responses are attained.

Anonymous Responses

A critical way that any manager may effectively improve employee survey response rates is through assuring anonymous responses. When employees are assured that responses are anonymous two occurrences are likely to happen. The first is that employees are likely to complete the survey as they are assured privacy.

The second is that employees will give open and honest responses, this is due to the assurance of privacy meaning that employees can be critical without the fear of getting into trouble for voicing their honest opinions. In turn, anonymous responses have become one of the most common, yet essential survey strategies to increase response rates.

Implementing HR technology like EmployeeConnect helps you achieve automated recognition celebrating all the ‘Moments that Matter’ such as first day at work, successful probation, birthdays, and work anniversaries, improving engagement and encouraging a great workplace culture.