Employee Surveys That Work: Improving Design, Use, and Organizational Impact
- 1h 24m
- Alec Levenson
- Berrett-Koehler Publishers
- 2014
- Offers practical guidance for designing employee surveys that yield useful results
- Explains the hidden pitfalls in many popular survey practices
- Written by a rising HR analytics thought leader
Most employees like company surveys (A) Very much, (B) So-so, (C) Not so much, or (D) Not at all. For most, the answer is D. And the same is often true for the executives who have to figure out how to apply the results.
But that’s because so many employee surveys are poorly designed, says Alec Levenson. Employees with very different work functions are given the same set of questions, even though their experiences and concerns are wildly divergent. Surveys try to cover too many different kinds of issues at one time, resulting in either a bland set of questions or a survey that goes on forever. Questions are asked without a clear sense of how the answers will help improve the business, the reason for the survey isn’t clear to the participants, and employees never see anything done with the results.
Employee Surveys That Work offers sensible, practical ways to make employee surveys more useful, accurate, and effective and counters a number of unhelpful but common practices that have arisen as employee surveys have become commonplace. Levenson provides specific advice for ensuring that the purpose and desired outcomes of surveys are clear, the questions are designed to provide the most relevant and accurate data, and the results are actionable. He looks at a wealth of specific issues, such as the best benchmarking practices, the benefits of multivariate modeling for analyzing results, linking survey data with performance data, how best to measure employee engagement, the pros and cons of respondent anonymity, and much more.
Employee surveys serve an indisputable role in providing a way to measure key organizational processes based on information from the people most informed about those processes—the employees who work with and implement them on a daily basis. But a lot can be done to design, implement, and act on surveys in more meaningful and productive ways. This book provides a road map for doing so.
About the Author
Alec Levenson is senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. He has worked with a broad range of Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies, including American Express, Amgen, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Exelon, Nestlé, PepsiCo, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Royal Bank of Canada, and Sinopec.
In this Book
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Employee Surveys That Work—Improving Design, Use, and Organizational Impact
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Introduction—A Roadmap to Effective Employee Surveys
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Goals—Define a Clear Sur vey Purpose
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Objectives—The Pros and Cons of Focusing on Employee Engagement
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Methods—Match the Measurement to the Processes, Roles, and Teams
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Good Survey Practices—Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
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Anonymity vs. Insights—Confidentiality and Organizational Data Matching
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KISS—The Power and Pitfalls of Simplicity
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The Big Picture—What, How, Why, and Who of Statistical Modeling
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Reaching Conclusions—Benchmarking and Statistical versus Meaningful Differences
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Moving Forward—Reporting and Taking Action
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Resources
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References
