Improving the Survey Process for the Next Cycle

The collective wisdom regarding the conduct of Organizational Surveys in your organization will grow enormously from your first project. Planning and executing the survey will go hand-in-hand with real time debugging. In our experience, it is not necessary to establish a formal process to record every problem or idea for improvement. Memories are not so fragile that ideas that worked and mistakes that didn't will be lost before it is time to plan for the next survey.

There are some ways to evaluate the success of different aspects of the survey process. Some of these would be excellent issues for your internal personnel research or quality research department to study. Your survey consultant can help you with this as well.

The questionnaire should be subjected to a factor analysis and other statistical scrutiny. This will allow an understanding of the underlying structure of the questionnaire and identify items that are ambiguous, redundant, or do a poor job of measuring. An examination of the written comments may give clues to the omission of important subjects in the questionnaire. The monitoring of participation rates by the Steering Committee members will help refine the administration process for higher rates on the next survey. Institutional research can be done on the feedback and action planning process. Descriptive statistics can be assembled by department on the number of managers who held at least one meeting, how many submitted action plans, actions completed within six months, number partially completed, no action taken, etc.

Institutional research could focus on the relationship of survey responses to objective measures of unit performance and customer satisfaction. This would mirror significant research, recently published, which found employee satisfaction directly related to measures of customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, repeat sales, and sales volumes of regional offices. Middle-levels of management can assess to some extent how well their direct reports conducted feedback and action planning meetings. This assessment of the interpersonal, communication and facilitation competencies of their managers will shape management training for future surveys. Third-party leadership can be approached directly and asked for their critique of the Organizational Survey and suggestions to improve the process. This should not be seen as a patronizing accommodation on the part of your organization, but rather as a genuine interest in their input. The success of the survey in improving the organization and promoting better employee relations will be measured in large part by the results in the next cycle. We strongly recommend the convening of several focus groups six months after the survey, and moderated by the survey consultant, in order to assess the acceptance and impact of the process.