The Survey Initiative: An Introductory Guide to Employee Research and Employee Surveys.
Selecting the right approach contd.
Census or sample
Having defined your survey objectives and selected your approach, the next thing to consider is whether there is a need to survey all employees or just a sample of them.
Generally organisations tend to conduct census’ employee opinion surveys. This is mainly due to the need to drive through improvement action planning at local levels, which require frontline managers to be provided with their own reports. By undertaking a sample survey, there may either be not enough responses to provide a report or the number of responses may represent too small a proportion of the whole employee population to be considered statistically robust.
Online or paper surveys
Increasingly, organisations are using online web-based methods of surveying their employees.
This type of survey offers organisations a number of benefits:
- It is cost effective and simpler to administer than a paper-based survey;
- Real time response rates are easily available;
- Unique access passwords can prevent employees from completing more than one survey;
- Employees can be routed to certain questions based on their responses;
- You can ensure all respondents answer every question they are asked.
However, consideration should be given to the following questions:
- Do all employees have, or have access to, a PC that has external Internet access?
- Are all of the employees sufficiently computer literate to complete an online survey?
- Do you have field-based employees and, if so, how would they complete an online survey?
- Can your IT Department provide the necessary assistance with the survey?
- Is the culture in place for it and would it adversely affect the response rate if the survey were online?
If some of these problems exist, then it may be more appropriate to initially administer a mostly paper-based survey with a small scale online pilot in the most appropriate parts of the organisation. In future years, the online element can be increased until it completely replaces paper-based completion.
There are alternative methods for administering surveys such as email surveys, one to one interviews, telephone interviews, polling stations, voting systems and comments boxes. All of these methods have been used to canvass employee opinion however the most popular remain paper and online surveys.
The Survey Initiative offers both online surveys and paper-based surveys (or a mixture of the two) that are customised to each individual company’s needs.