Designing a Survey part 3 of 3
In Designing a Survey parts 1 and 2 you learned about survey goals, survey design, question types, and scale types. Now learn about testing, sharing your data, and how to act on survey results.
Test the Survey
Don’t just test the survey yourself or with someone who is also working on the project with you. You have a clear understanding of your business and definitely have biases. If possible, test it with a real employee, client, or third party and ask them specific questions on understandability, length, and fatigue. Ask them about any problems or concerns that may have cropped up. Remember — you’re spending ample time and resources on this survey; you want to get the best possible information out of it.
Peak Surveys can be your third party tester and will look for bias, comprehensive questions, appropriate scales and answer options, fatigue, and much more. Please contact us with any questions about our services!
Share the Data
You’ve created your survey, deployed it and analyzed the results — so what do you do with the results?
Share them!
Especially in the case of an employee or client survey, showing your employees the changes you’re making goes a long way to include them in your improvements, and allows for buy-in. It’s even acceptable to describe an issue or problem that has been uncovered in the responses and explain how you’re working on it to improve.
Ideas for sharing your results include: Newsletters, email updates, meeting presentations, marketing, advertisements, working sessions, employee reviews, client reviews, and — of course — person-to-person conversations.
Lastly, it’s important to trend responses over time as it will allow you to track employee or client perceptions and determine changes before there are major problems or upheavals in the marketplace. Be careful when trending to utilize the exact question wording and scales so that you’re tracking exact responses, rather than a general idea.
The most important thing is to let respondents know you’re reviewing and acting on their input.
If you ignore their efforts, they’ll be less-inclined to opine in the future — or they’ll simply be less-candid with their responses.
I hear quite frequently “My employer sends surveys all the time, but nothing ever changes!” Don’t lapse into this pitfall; gather honest answers and follow through with action. When designed thoughtfully and accurately, a survey can drastically improve efficiency, quality, and trust.
Design, deploy, analyze, repeat. If you need help with any stage of (or the entire) process, please contact us for help. We are always happy to answer questions and provide assistance.
Contact Peak Surveys to get help in Designing a Survey that meets your specific goals and needs.
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