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Suite 501 Brewster, NY 10509 USA
Phone: 845.279.6340 Fax: 845.279.3864
© 2004 eXpert Survey Systems, Inc.
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Second
Opinion™ Program
Get the right start One of the most important early steps in your organizational survey project is the development of your questionnaire. Canned questions and response sets can be disappointing, especially if they do not have specific relevance to your organizational goals. You and your survey project deserve material that is sufficiently tailored to your needs. The elements that make questionnaire design effective are often subtle and easy to miss, even for those who are experienced with managing organizational surveys. Even though deficiencies in questionnaire design are often revealed at the end of the project, you may not always see direct evidence that your questionnaire could have been better. You may miss opportunities to learn more from the people in your organization. Your response rate may have been lower due to the wording of the instructions, questions, or response sets. You could even miss subtle, but important, aspects of the organizational goals that the questionnaire is intended to measure. When it's time to release your survey, there is no substitute for confidence in the design of your questionnaire. Now there is a way to give yourself the confidence that your questionnaire is well worded, meets all of your objectives, encourages participation, and takes advantage of the golden opportunity you have to get input from employees. You can get that confidence from Second Opinion™. We will use your existing materials to give you the best questionnaire possible.
Strategic organizational goals and questionnaire design Articulate your organizational goals The first step in developing the questionnaire for your organizational survey should be the careful and thorough definition of the strategic goals you are measuring. These goals often come from multiple sources, such as statements of mission and/or vision, the project charter, or communications from upper managers. It is of vital importance to assemble your strategic organizational goals in one place, and to use them as a list of elements to include in your survey. With Second Opinion™, you will harness years of experience in articulating strategic organizational goals – just send your existing statements of mission and/or vision, the project charter, or other materials, and we'll do the rest. Align your questionnaire items to your goals Once your goals are established, Second Opinion™ will enable you to make sure that your draft questionnaire does what it should. You will get your own customized Goal Alignment Matrix. You will be able to quickly identify:
It is useless to analyze the results of your organizational survey without the thorough construction of your questionnaire, and how it relates to your goals. The matrix below is an example of how the Second Opinion™ can make it easier for you.
Get the most out of employee input Your respondents can tell you more than you think. Besides gaining the perspective of your employees and their opinions on the issues they face directly, you can get valuable data on other aspects of your organization. By expanding the scope of your survey, you can acquire reliable information on their customers. With the additional insight, you will be able to improve your understanding of the relationship between your employees and their customers. You are already devoting significant resources in surveying your customers, so why not also see your organization through employees' eyes, from multiple points of view? Second Opinion™ will allow you to develop a questionnaire that gets to the heart of the interactions between your business and its customers, and measures organizational effectiveness without any significant additional expense. Is your questionnaire too long? The optimal length of an organizational survey questionnaire has always been a controversial topic. While the design of the instrument should try to minimize the disruption related to the survey, shorter is not always better. The length of your questionnaire should be based on the minimum amount required to sufficiently cover the necessary topics.
Second Opinion™ will perform an analysis
of your existing questionnaire to determine
whether it contains the necessary elements,
and will make sure that your survey effort
uses your respondents' time in the most
economical way possible.
The right wording gets you the right results Even if you have a communications specialist dedicated to your organizational survey project team, they may be unfamiliar with the specific elements of questionnaire design. Properly phrased instructions, questions, and answer sets are crucial to good questionnaire design, and have a proven effect on response rates and the reliability of your data. Your existing communications plan may engage and orient the respondent, and may encourage them to take the survey. However, if you don't pay enough attention to the wording of the instructions, questions and answers, your project may be at risk of misinterpretation or high rates of survey abandonment. With Second Opinion™, you can be absolutely sure that your questionnaire design incorporates the most effective type of wording. By simply providing your existing instructions and draft questionnaire, you will receive specific feedback on what you are doing right, and what needs improvement. Second Opinion™ will give you wording for your questionnaire design that is:
You will be able to achieve the most effective survey wording without endless drafts and corrections, and without wondering if your results will be skewed by misinterpretation. Take advantage of this unique new offering, and allow yourself to focus more completely on the improvement of your organization.
What you will get from Second Opinion™
Without creating anything new, you will
have objective expert advice and
specific recommendations that will
vastly improve your questionnaire
design. You can choose from the
following three levels of service.
Level 1 Services
Level 2 Services
Level 3 (Platinum Services)
Take advantage of Second Opinion™ for the best organizational survey possible.
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