Boosting Employee Survey Participation - Moving From Tactics to Value

You get your survey ready to go, you’ve done the Town Hall update, along with your plea to managers to promote the survey to their teams… but you already know you’re about to embark on an exhausting journey of trying to hit your survey participation threshold.?

Are employees really that busy??

No doubt your people are busy, but the truth is employee surveys and pulses, depending on their length, should only take about 3 to 15 minutes. Considering people generally make time for things they want to do —even amidst a packed day, we’d wager there’s more to the story.?

It’s time for a reframe.?

If you're solely focused on the transactional tactics for improving survey participation, like securing airtime for survey promotion or increasing outbound communications, it's time to rethink your approach. Instead of thinking, ‘How do we get more participation”, the first question you need to figure out is ‘Why don’t our people value it enough to prioritize the time?”

Not sure the answer to that? Ask them! Set up some focus groups to learn more. Then you can start taking action on what you need to do as an organization (NOT as a survey administrator) to make your survey higher value. Some system-level changes likely need to happen.?

“Employees should just have to do it.”?

This is a common sentiment from executives who are frustrated that employees don’t care enough to complete a survey. There’s an assumption that just like submitting expenses and completing performance reviews, filling out a survey should be part of the job. But it’s different. If you truly want to improve your organization, the adage “garbage in, garbage out” applies here. If employees feel obligated to complete the survey, the quality of responses may not be what you’re hoping for. Mandating feedback won’t guarantee you get the best data to make informed decisions—you might even get unrepresentative results. Or worse, feed into other organizational issues at bay.

“Employees, we want you to want to fill this out!”?

^^ That’s the winning mindset.

How do you use this mindset to improve the quantity and quality of employee feedback? We'll be sharing more strategies on this shortly!