Anonymity and Confidentiality in Employee Research

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Anonymity and confidentiality has always been a contentious issue in employee research and seems to have become more so over the last year or so. At The Survey Initiative, we frequently facilitate pre-survey focus groups, and always include a telephone number/email address in our questionnaires allowing potential participants to...

Thinking about measuring the success of internal comms – read this first…

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  There is very little academic research into the area of employee communication and Chen et al (2006) argue ‘a review of the research on organizational communication practices has been ignored.’ Before undertaking the research consider your end goal; are you looking to measure the effectiveness, reach, impact or...

Why employee survey response rates are so important

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Today we are closing an employee survey on behalf of one of our longest standing clients. I thought I would share with you that, working alongside our client, we have achieved a response rate in excess of 80% (for the sixth year running).  As you can imagine our client...

‘People join companies, but leave managers.’ How to help managers better engage your employees.

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Gallup’s insight that ‘people join companies, but leave managers’ is as true today as it has ever been. Recent research underlines the fact that a person’s immediate line manager is the single biggest influence on their engagement — and whether they decide to stay. Given how much it costs...

Communicating opinion survey results to employees

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The first of a series of guest blogs – today Christopher Dean from theblueballroom talks about the roll of internal communications in succesful employee surveys. Listen, talk… then act One of the worst mistakes managers can make is to raise employees’ expectations, then fail to follow through with a...

Research shows that Line Managers don’t act on their employee survey feedback – is this true?

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Recent research from AON Hewitt and their European Engagement database suggests that line managers are not acting on their employee engagement survey feedback – on average spending only two to five days a year on engagement relating activities. Is this really true and reflective? Certainly one of employees major...

Engaging the organisation in employee survey action planning

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As a follow up to our last blog on getting the most from action planning after your employee survey we thought we would provide you with some innovative ideas for engaging employees in the survey and the resulting actions. Act Local The idea of localness is important in raising...

Defining your aims and objectives when conducting employee research and employee surveys

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Welcome to the third in our summer series of blogs about how to get the most from your employee survey.  You can read the previous blogs in this series here. Before embarking on your survey, define your objectives. Clear objectives linked to the business and its strategy should help...

Employee Surveys – the true value of external benchmarking

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When conducting any type of employee survey for our clients, be it engagement, empowerment, motivation and even work life balance – we are nearly always asked if we can provide comparisons against other organisations. And, like any good employee research organisation, we do provide external comparisons.  We have a...

Benefits of conducting employee research and employee surveys

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Welcome to the second in our summer series of blogs about how to get the most from your employee survey. You can read the first blog here. In our experience, the main benefits of employee research and employee surveys include: Demonstrating to employees that you are taking a genuine...