Improving Workplace Feedback: Strategies for Honest Employee Surveys

As a business owner, it’s important to get feedback from your employees regarding operations, morale, workflow, and many other things. Although, it can be tough to get a straight answer out of your team because they’re either worried about anonymity or trying to make the boss happy with their answers. With help from DropThought, you can formulate questions and structure into getting the truth into workplace surveys. Below we’ve included a few tips to get you started.

Don’t ask about thoughts or motives during work

It’s easy to ask questions about the opinions of people in the workplace. You can try to gauge engagement with your leadership team by directly asking what they think of their leaders, how well they think their leaders do training their team if they think managers are knowledgeable, and others. However, you’re going to get subjective answers that are all over the board. Besides getting varying opinions regarding your management team’s ability to lead, you could catch an employee on a bad day when they’re taking the survey or have a disgruntled employee who refuses to share any positivity. These will skew your results in the end.

Ask questions about observable and verifiable behavior

Rather than asking for opinions regarding management personality traits, ask how your leaders perform specific tasks. Have them rate how well their leaders resolve an issue with a vendor or customer. These tasks can be objectively rated and measured by those who are above the manager and the team in question. This helps to ensure that you’re not baiting answers from employees as well because they don’t feel like they have to learn more positively.

Don’t label sections or interrupt with page breaks

No matter what kind of research or survey you’re having respondents participate in, you never want to lead their thoughts. Two things that can cause leading thoughts are labeling sections or inserting page breaks in the survey. Putting a header on a section of questions will cause survey-takers to limit their thinking to the topic highlighted in the section heading. This often makes it more difficult to think outside the box and provide constructive feedback. The same thing can happen with page breaks as it insinuates a subject matter change without putting a formal hearing to the matter.

Rewrite questions to skew negative

Anyone who’s ever taken a survey knows that it’s not uncommon to get in a groove and start answering many questions along the same vein. For example, if 10 questions in a row have a fitting answer of “Most of the time,” we’re going to continue to see every question with the same answer.

You can keep your employees honest by rewriting questions by flipping the tone. For example, you might have a simple question that’s something as simple as, “Did you brush your teeth this morning?” Rewriting the question might be something along the lines of, “Did you skip brushing your teeth this morning?” Do this with about one-third of the questions throughout the survey to ensure that respondents are taking the time to answer the questions rather than simply agreeing with what is being asked.

Stick to one topic with questions

Workplace surveys are often unpopular because employees have to take time away from their busy schedules. You can help to encourage respondents to take their time and answer questions by making them straightforward. Don’t mix more than a single concept into questions; they have to take time to weigh different circumstances to make the point. Make each question clear and concise to encourage your team to take the time they need to provide honest answers.

If you want to know how your employees feel while working with your company, consider using Dropthought to collect feedback and improve experiences.

Dropthought is a user-friendly, omnichannel, and real-time employee experience management platform. We empower companies in different verticals to create delightful experiences for employees across their employee journey. Get detailed analysis and insights from data to exactly know what your employees think and what actions you need to take to delight them.

With a dedicated team, we would ensure that you are optimizing your employee Experience programs and strategies to create great experiences!

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