International Survey Issues

Worldwide implementation. There is no substitute for a survey consultant with years of experience in conducting organization-wide surveys for multinational corporations. Your survey consultant should have experience dealing with translations, accommodating cultural differences, and establishing rapport with foreign nationals. Look for survey consultants who have traveled extensively throughout the world conducting surveys, monitoring the work of others, training local employees, troubleshooting employee relations hot spots, and presenting results to country executives.

Maintaining consistency within language and cultural variations. The most important factor contributing to the consistency of your survey, for comparative data research, is the competence and hands-on experience of the Employee Opinion Survey Services provider in the international arena. It is very easy for less experienced providers to overstate the impact of cultural differences on the survey process. Many clients are easily impressed with anecdotes that exaggerate the impact of cultural oddities upon an international survey project.

Our experience with multinational organizations (especially high-tech organizations) suggests that employees are more alike than not alike, for purposes of assessing employee attitudes. While not dismissing the impact of language and cultural variations on the survey process, we find a number of factors that contribute to a consistent cognitive, experiential, and affective framework within the organization. These are:

Communality of product sets and service offerings Similarity of customer requirements and business applications Common training materials for manufacturing, servicing, and selling Equivalence of education and testing requirements for specific jobs

Office procedures, job titles, and lines of authority that are recognizable and familiar from one location to the next The leveling influence of English as the language of management and the language of science and technology The unifying influence of common acronyms, buzzwords, and corp-speak that creates a vernacular that is usable and comfortable for all employees Corporate values and business objectives that are communicated to everyone

The technique we recommend for translating survey instructions and items is an independent and parallel translation by two native speakers. Generally, your survey consultant supplies the first translator. The consultant can also supply the second, but we prefer the second translator come from within the client organization. The next step is for the two translators to examine each other's output, and note differences to be reconciled. Then the two translators discuss their differences directly and agree on a single solution. If the survey consultant provides both translators, you still need a review of the output by your country personnel.

We advise against the 'text-book' method of survey translations which calls for an independent translation into a foreign language followed by an independent translation back into English. This method turns out to be unwieldy, time consuming, very expensive, and no better than the method described above.