Why avoid designing your own Employee Survey

What is the purpose of the Employee Survey?

4 minutes reading

First it’s about really knowing what you want the employee survey to answer, the purpose itself, and then what kind of questions are best for investigating this. What do you need to know and what questions answer it? It may seem simple, but many are already stuck here. For example, should you have an employee survey that uses behavioral questions, attitude questions or experience questions? Or do you need factual questions, satisfaction knowledge questions or hypothetical questions? An advantage of experience questions in the survey is that it largely avoids the problem area with many people generally answering the questions even if they do not really have the information that is requested. However, both attitude and experience questions often have problems with leading questions, which can both direct the answers and give a negative experience to those who have an opinion that goes in the other direction.

5 Key Factors to consider with the questions in the Employee Survey

When the purpose of your employee survey is complete and the choice of question type is set, all questions must be formulated to:

1. measure the right thing

2. be understood by all respondents

3.understood in the same way by all respondents

4. be as short as possible (related to fewer reading deviations)

5. have a purpose

Just one relevant answer

All questions must have a relevant answer option for all respondents, but no more than one relevant answer. In addition to matching the questions, the answer alternatives must be shaped so that it is compatible with the analyzes you plan to make in order for the employee survey to be used. If this basis is not correct, there is a great risk that a lot of time is spent on something that does not provide as much value as it should.

Do the survey questions measure the right things?

Many want to be able to measure different indexes with their employee survey. Compiling an index on your own is not just about clumping together questions in an area. To see if an index has reliability, analyzes of quantitative data are required, something that requires both data to be based on and knowledge of statistics.

Usability and analyze results

The purpose and questions of the employee survey are not the only thing that determines the experience and results of the employee survey. To get a good and useful result, it is important that the system is both intuitive and user-friendly to implement and that it is easy to analyze the result. This requires much from the system, especially if the employee survey is to handle indexes and not just individual questions.

Use good work environment tools for your next employee survey in 2024

Do not settle for a low response rate and make sure you measure what is valuable correctly.

Preactly offers a well-proven employee tool for creating a sustainable working life. A smart service / app for work environment and lifestyle. Based on extensive research, we have identified 19 crucial work-related factors and as many outside of work, which make us feel good – if we feel that they work. Therefore, Preactly’s tools are largely built on experience-based questions. It captures challenges in the workplace in the psychosocial work environment, provides qualitative measurement values and insights into health-promoting factors such as job satisfaction, well-being in the workplace, and workload, but also takes into account life outside work. The tool captures risks to avoid mental illness in the workplace, by starting from what promotes long-term well-being and employees who want to go to work.

Feel free to read more about our HR tech tool and how we can support your business with work environment tools to achieve good employee engagement and active employees. We strive to prevent and improve the work environment in the workplace.