Click here for a full transcript of the episode.

Getting staff members to fill out surveys is not always the easiest thing to do. And the more you survey them, the more likely they are to get survey fatigue and start ignoring the surveys. As HR and business leaders, we want to know what our employees are thinking, so we want to get the highest survey participation rates we can.

Collecting employee feedback takes good planning and communication. You need to know why you’re surveying them, what you’re going to do with it, and how you’ll explain it to your employees. You’ll also need to decide on a data collection method and a timeline for collecting responses and for sharing the results.

Responding to the feedback is the most important thing an organization can do; if you’re not going to respond, don’t bother to ask for it. It will destroy your employees’ willingness to provide their feedback again. If you tell employees their feedback is anonymous, you need to protect that and share “buckets” of key concerns rather than sharing pieces of feedback word-for-word.

One popular way to collect feedback is a dual approach; daily pulse feedback through an anonymous third-party service and a more detailed biannual survey. This allows you to stay up to date on emerging trends and daily struggles and then use some of that feedback to identify areas of concern to ask about in your larger survey.

There’s a difference between employee satisfaction surveys and employee engagement surveys. Satisfaction surveys gauge how happy or content employees are with things like their work-life balance, benefits, compensation, work experience, or environment overall. An engagement survey gauges the employee’s emotional connection, motivation, effort, and commitment to the company. Both are important; you want to get to the root of how the employee feels about what they do, but it’s even more important to understand how they feel about who they’re doing it for.

In this episode’s listener question, we’re asked about maintaining communication and relationships while working remotely. In the news, New York City has made it illegal to discriminate based on body size, specifically weight and height.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Purple Ink
• Powered by Purple Ink
• Susan Tinder White Consulting
• ”Less Means More: Employee Engagement Survey Frequency”
• Consultative HR
• SurveyMonkey
• Microsoft Forms
• Gina on LinkedIn
• Consultative HR on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook
• 15five
• Slack
• ”New York City makes it illegal to discriminate against weight and height”
• SHRM credit evaluation
• The JoyPowered® Shop
• JoyPowered® on Facebook
• JoyPowered® on LinkedIn
• JoyPowered® on Instagram
• JoyPowered® on Twitter
• Email JoyPowered®

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