Guidelines for Survey Guided Development

Organizational surveys and assessments can be powerful tools for improving employee engagement and organizational effectiveness- or not. No doubt about it, some tools are better than others. However, this is one of those areas where a strong survey guided development process can compensate for a poorly constructed tool AND the perfect tool can be rendered useless by a poorly thought out or administered survey guided development process.

In our consulting work we use organizational effectiveness surveys because they can help assess how well an organization is functioning, how engaged or motivated employees are and any positive or negative trends that may be occurring. I like to initiate a survey guided development process at the beginning of projects to; baseline the organizations effectiveness, raise awareness and desire for change, increase engagement and measure the impact of change throughout transformation projects.

Below are just a few basic guidelines to follow when considering whether and how to make the most of your survey guided development process.

• Decide what you plan to do with the survey data and how you intend to feed it back before administering the survey. Our rule of thumb is to plan of feeding the results to anyone who responded to the survey.
• Survey results should be used for improvement.
• The survey used should be based on some interpretative theory or framework.
• The questions should be actionable.
• The rating scale should be consistent throughout the assessment tool.
• Ensure anonymity for people taking the survey. If using a paper and pencil type of survey, provide respondents with an a envelop they can put the survey in and seal it before handing it in, or a stamped addressed envelope to mail the survey back.
• Employees can take the survey on the organization, department or work group. We encourage “high fidelity” measurement by having employees take the survey on their work group. In this way we can easily provide high level reports as well as provide feedback at the supervisory / work group level.
• The time between taking the survey and feeding back the results should be as short at possible. We like to take no longer than a month to get some aspect of the survey results back to the organization to start the feedback and engagement process.
• The survey results should be fed back to the entire organization, not only the leadership team. Employees generally expect that when asked to take a survey that someone is interested in what they think and that this will lead to change.
• Leaders should be involved in feeding back the survey data to their organizations. While there may be a role for experts or consultants in the feedback process, leaders must be encouraged and prepared to demonstrate active engagement.
• We encourage linking survey results feedback with opportunities for managers and employees to help interpret the data together and collaborate on suggestions for improvement.

I welcome your input and dialogue on the list and if you would like to email me about how to increase employee engagement through the use of survey guided development, please send me a note to ksprock@aol.com.