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Employee Communication Surveys: Seven Tips For Successful Design and Implementation

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So, your organization is suffering from poor communication practices. John complains that his boss never tells him anything. Sally is expected to come up with sales targets without being briefed on this year's company strategy.

Where do you start in improving ineffective communication between people? A good first step in fixing communication problems in any organization is to survey employees. Even if there are no obvious problems, surveys can help get an organization to the next level of performance.

What are the benefits you would expect to see in conducting a communication survey and acting on the results? Well, you could experience some of the following:

* improved employee satisfaction
* lower turnover
* reduced absenteeism
* less political infighting
* greater levels of manager-worker trust
* reduced defect rates
* higher customer satisfaction

A well-run survey can give your organization these benefits. However, a poorly conducted survey can have the opposite effect. Surveys badly planned, rolled out and followed up can actually increase employee cynicism and resistance to change. It may also worsen employee turnover and absenteeism. And this impacts on customer satisfaction and your bottom line.

Communication Survey Tips

So, what do you need to consider before rolling out your survey? Here are seven useful tips to get you heading in the right direction.

Question types

Include in your survey questions requiring limited tick-the-box responses, such as Yes/No and Strongly Agree/Agree/Disagree/Strongly Disagree. Including these questions will allow you to perform quantitative analyses that you can use to compare results between different demographics and to use as a benchmark for future surveys.

However, just as importantly, allow provision for free form comments. Everything that people will want to say will not fit into your pre-packaged boxes. A good idea is to run Focus Groups with a random sample of survey respondents after the survey forms have been collected and analyzed. These discussion groups are invaluable in performing a sanity check on your results so far and in teasing out issues that have surfaced in the written survey.

Anonymity

Guarantee absolute anonymity for the people completing the survey and make this clear in the survey instructions. Some employees will either not complete the survey or give sanitized answers if they believe that their identity will be disclosed with their answers and comments.

Sample size

Should you survey the whole organization/department or a select group? Preferably, survey all employees as this gives everyone a sense of being listened to. If the organization/department is excessively large or budget is tight, draw a random sample from each of the demographic groups that you will be reporting on.

If your selection is not random, the survey results will not be representative and you will lose credibility with your client managers and employees. If a demographic group comprises 50 people or less, you will need to survey 100 percent of the people within that group.

Mode of delivery

If the people completing the survey are small in number and at the one location, then hardcopy distribution will not be a problem. As the number of respondents increase and the locations become more dispersed, give more consideration to the need for electronic distribution. Think about putting the survey on a local intranet or internet web server.

To make filling out the form easy for people, have it so that the form can be completed online. If this is not possible, either send the form by email or put it on an accessible server from which people can download it. If your survey respondents are not comfortable with technology, then be wary of online options and provide plenty of employee support if you decide to go down that road.

Inducements and Reminders

Survey participation rates are typically ten percent or less. You can dramatically improve on this completion rate by conducting some simple follow up. As you get closer to the survey cut-off date (of course, you will have publicized that date with your survey), send out an email reminder or have someone call the respondents personally. Advertising a prize to go to the first to complete the surveys will also increase the participation rate.

Distribute results

Once the results are in and analyzed, distribute your findings first to your client managers and then to employees. Withholding results from employees will only breed cynicism and distrust and make your next survey all that more difficult to get a satisfactory response rate.

Break down your results into meaningful groups, such as by department or by region. The reporting groupings need to be small enough that people can identify with the group enough for a meaningful action plan to be developed.

Be prepared for some kickback from defensive managers. Frank employee feedback is both confronting and jarring, especially for those managers not used to it. Use your best facilitation skills to deliver the key messages. If you are in a politically charged environment, use a professional facilitator to perform this sensitive task.

Follow up and Rewards

A survey conducted with no plan for action is not only a waste of resources but will leave employees asking why they bothered to feedback to managers how they felt. Work with each manager to construct an action plan that they agree with. Remember, it is the manager that will be implementing the plan, not you. Get back with each manager three or six months later to review how they are progressing with their plan and report the results to the organization. As you see communication practices improve across the organization, make sure that managers get rewarded.

By following the above tips, you're sure to get the most benefit from your employee communication survey. The key is to leave room for free form comments on the survey form whilst guaranteeing that participants will not be identified in the results. Make the survey accessible and follow up to ensure that a sufficient number of people respond. You can maximize your response rate by offering rewards. After analyzing the results, distribute to all employees. A survey report ignored is a survey wasted, so develop an action plan and follow up with managers.

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Guest post written by Stuart Ngai, Director of Technology Solutions, VERAX

Having worked in software development in the engineering and financial sectors through several technology eras, one thing strikes me the most is how often top notch IT professionals just get burned out by the fast pace of technology advances. As an educator, development manager, and technology driver for many years, it has been my passion to help our IT staff to keep up in light of global competition. On the previous episode of the AlignIT Manager Tech Talk, I shared with the audience my advice on how IT managers can play an important role in their team’s training. I would like to summarize a few important aspects to keep in mind when it comes to planning and managing training for your staff.

Continued from last Monday. Read Part 1 >>

Enforce a checkpoint schedule

Now that you’ve worked out a set of goals with your staff. Who’s responsible to make sure things are on track? My experience tells me that it’s both of you: your staff needs to take ownership to keep up with skills and you, as their manager, need to be the measuring stick. And if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. So it needs to be instilled as a routine in order to keep the momentum going. By measuring training progress on a periodic basis like once every 3 to 4 months , you’ll know whether your staff is progressing as expected or perhaps he or she is being overloaded. With such a feedback loop, you’ll be able to fine tune the training plan and keep things in focus.

Not one size fits all

Everyone’s different. Some of your IT staff might be more comfortable with structured classroom learning while others prefer to be given time and web resources so they can learn at their own pace. And one of the techniques we have done successfully at VERAX is to provide some of the technology savvy staff with resources and allocated time so that they can put together lunch and learn seminars for their peers. And there are many benefits for that: opportunity to showcase what they’ve learned, efficiency in cross training each other, a chance for the team to gel and discuss innovative ideas for your workplace, and virtually no loss of productivity at a minimal cost to the company. It’s been a win-win training mechanism that has been working well for us. So be creative in your approach to training.

Make use of web resources

With advances in webcasting and e-learning tools, many companies are no longer constrained to sending their staff on expensive offsite training. Virtual training along with virtual machine images would be a great way to learn. And there are tons of resources on the web for that purpose that you should look into (some free resources - Developer Connection, Channel 9)

Make it fun

Be aware of e-learning trends and listen to your staff for innovative and fun ideas to learn. As an example, one thing we have done is to provide tablets to loan to our staff along with e-book subscriptions so that they can read at their own pace anywhere anytime. Our staff love such innovative approaches to learning and they appreciate our willingness to invest in them. So not only did we generated excitement and high level of staff engagement, we know our staff will be able to learn throughout the year on their own pace instead of the standard one to two weeks training for most companies. So make it fun and engaging. After all, it’s a small investment that pays back many folds.

To finish off - You are not alone

Just remember that you are not an island on your own. The best way to avoid missteps is to learn from the lessons and best practices of other managers. And guess what? There are already great resources freely available for you, such as the AlignIT portal and LinkedIn group. They are great places where you can read and interact with other IT practitioners for advice.

Stuart Ngai

Stuart Ngai, Director of Technology Solutions at VERAX, is an IT professional with over 25 years of experience. As a development manager, lead enterprise architect, and a Senior Leadership Member, Stuart has led the delivery of many leading edge systems through several technology eras and guided many IT professionals in enriching and re-energizing their careers. With 7 years teaching software courses at Seneca College of Applied Sciences followed by another 7 years teaching software engineering courses for the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, personal development through perpetual training has been a theme in which Stuart helped many IT professionals to achieve and sustain their career growth. Stuart is a certified P. Eng. and PMP with a Masters degree in Engineering from McGill University and a management degree from McGill's School of Management. He has been with the software consulting firm VERAX Solutions Corporation in Toronto since 1993 focusing on building strong delivery teams and delivering results to their customers in the financial sector.

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