5 ways to increase the response to employee engagement surveys
You wake up, drink an invigorating cup of coffee, and open your laptop. Your engagement survey was due last night and you can’t wait to see the results.
As soon as you open the report, there is a problem. The response to your engagement survey was low, REALLY low. There is too little data to measure your employee engagement and conclusion.
If you find yourself in this situation, you are not alone! Poor response rates are often a problem for HR teams. Conducting an engagement survey with the firm intention of making real organizational changes based on the results is a great start. However, if you don’t get enough responses, it could end up being a waste of time and resources.
In this article, we’ll look at why engagement surveys get poor response rates and five things you can do to improve response rates in your organization.
Contents
Review
5 Ways to Increase Response to Employee Engagement Surveys:
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Use the three S’s rule
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Implement changes based on feedback
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Tell everyone about it
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Make it a big event
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Use rewards
Why is your review low?
According to Gallup, only 36% of employees in the US are engaged. At the same time, there remains a silent majority (64%), who should fill out a survey to understand the reasons for their lack of engagement.
Why should you spend more time and energy on improving your response rate, rather than just ditching surveys altogether? Engagement surveys are important because they let you know what you need to work on. With an engaged workforce, productivity will increase and turnover will decrease.
Engagement survey template
Here are five ways to increase engagement survey response rates:
1) Small, simple, short
When conducting an employee engagement survey, remember the rule of three S: small, simple, short. This rule focuses on three issues related to engagement surveys:
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Small. When creating, implementing and distributing an engagement survey, remember to keep it small. Don’t try to ask your employees about every problem they may have in the workplace. Focus your engagement survey on a single issue. If you have trouble focusing on one issue, look at the following seven factors of employee engagement and try to focus on just one of them per survey: human resources, work environment, communication, effective management, benefits and pay satisfaction, growth and development, health and well-being.
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Simple. Keep engagement surveys simple—mostly closed-ended questions with some open-ended questions where employees can provide a detailed, elaborate response. Make sure all questions are clear, that employees understand them, and that they can skip a question if it’s not relevant to them.
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Short. Keep your engagement survey short. About 60% of people don’t want to fill out a survey that takes more than 10 minutes. So consider the length of your survey and keep it short if you want people to complete it.
2) Implement the received feedback
The first engagement survey conducted by the HR team in the company has a higher response rate than subsequent ones if the feedback from the first survey has not been implemented.
Employees fill out surveys because they believe that their voice will be heard and something will change. Employees are willing to provide information about what is wrong and what improvements they think are needed.
But if the survey is conducted only for a “tick” and no action is taken based on its results, then employees will not take it seriously.
You need to implement the feedback you receive from employees through surveys. If you cannot implement something, you need to be open with your employees and explain the reasons why something cannot be done.
A survey is not a tool whose sole purpose is to listen, the purpose of a survey is to obtain information and implement feedback.
3) Tell everyone about it
Another problem we often encounter is that survey teams do not provide employees with information about the survey, its goals and objectives. Sometimes employees don’t even receive a survey notification. Make sure everyone is aware of the survey and that the link to it is shared through various channels.
If you want to get a great response to an engagement survey, sending just one email with a link to the survey won’t be enough.
When you plan an engagement survey, prepare a distribution plan for it. Use email, SMS, internal messenger, QR codes at counters or cafeteria.
4) Make it a big event
An engagement survey can’t just be one of the routine tasks for the HR team. The entire management team should be behind the engagement survey.
When distributing an engagement survey, make sure you get buy-in from executives, managers, line managers, and team leaders. Thus, the engagement survey will be recognized as important to the organization and more employees will participate in the survey.
5) Use rewards
Another way to increase response rates is to reward the team with the highest percentage of completed surveys by publicly recognizing them in front of the entire company (you can even prepare a small award). But you need to explain the importance of the survey so that everyone in the company knows how important it is to the organization. Employees need to know that you need their feedback to actually implement improvements.
Better not to do an engagement survey at all if you know it won’t do anything.
Each survey is the first step in a 4-step process:
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The survey collects data
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The HR team derives insights from the data
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Management and executive staff create an action plan based on the findings
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All stakeholders implement the action plan
Conclusion
Getting employees to participate in surveys is not an easy task. By using the tips in this article, you will be much closer to success.
For more information, check out our online tests and sample surveys and questionnaire templates on Testograf.