5 Common Employee Survey Mistakes

In our last survey post, we looked at 10 tips you can implement to ensure successful employee surveys. Using those tips should get you well on your way to developing effective employee questionnaires. However, there are some common enterprise survey mistakes you’ll want to avoid. Below we’ll review five pitfalls to avoid when planning and implementing your surveys.

1. Poor planning:

   Enterprise surveys often fail due to poor planning. Make sure that your project has a clear purpose and support from senior management. You will also want to assure confidentiality, design clear survey questions and develop a feedback action plan. Refer to our previous post for more planning tips.

2. No action:

   The most common mistake organization’s make is administering surveys and never following through on the feedback. This is counter-productive and makes the questionnaire serve no clear purpose. If management does not act on the results, employees will become distrusting of the process. This will directly affect response rates as employees will become cynical about company surveys. Nothing hurts a company’s credibility more than not taking action when they publicly stated they would.

3. Delayed response:

   Another common mistake is taking too long to act on survey feedback. Some organizations collect the data, review it and then take three to six months to communicate the results and take action. It is recommended that you share the results within 30 days of the survey. Employees did their part and contributed to the feedback process and now the company must do the same in return.

4. Lengthy survey:

   When designing your employee questionnaire be sure to avoid making it too long. Keep your questions clear, concise and on target to what the survey is measuring. Avoid asking irrelevant questions and too many open-ended questions. It is recommended that you keep the survey completion time to around twenty minutes to avoid drop-off. Be sure to time your survey and communicate an accurate completion time to employees.

5. One-off event:

   Another critical mistake is issuing employee surveys at random rather than developing an internal feedback process. Creating an ongoing feedback culture can create a stronger sense of trust within the organization. Be sure to engage your employees in the feedback process by promoting it and by delivering the end results. Using enterprise surveys for development purposes is also a great way to ensure engagement and to achieve continuous improvement. You can avoid conducting a one-off, lengthy questionnaire by utilizing more frequent pulse surveys to gather ongoing feedback.