In-House vs Outsourced Surveys: Part 1

Few companies have considerable experience with employee satisfaction surveys. Surprisingly few companies run such surveys at all, and those that do often outsource to other companies in order to avoid handling the project themselves. For a company looking to break in to the world of employee satisfaction, you have a choice to make.

You can either complete the survey yourself, or you can outsource the survey to a reputable company. The benefits and weaknesses of these methods are described below.

Honesty Quality of your data is crucial if you hope to make any definitive judgments with it. It doesn’t matter how large your sample is – if the answers you are receiving do not accurately reflect the feelings of the employees, the data you have is useless. It is the reason that when a waiter comes by at a restaurant and asks how your food is, the feedback they receive is meaningless – most people will say the food is fine, even if they hate the meal.

Some studies have shown that employees may be less likely to answer truthfully when they know the information is being gathered by the company. If true, your data may be far less relevant, if relevant at all. At the very least, you may have to change the way you look at “good results” considerably, which could harm your data.

Experience There are companies with much more experience performing these surveys, which may help you gather more relevant data. They may also have researchers on staff that can analyze your information and see if there is something relevant for you to use. Companies that do not have someone trained to run these surveys do run the risk of running them incorrectly, or analyzing the data even more poorly.

Staff Burden Finally, you may not have someone on staff that can handle that amount of work. That is why it may be in your benefit to send the work to a company whose sole job it is to complete outsourced surveys, and one that can help you complete the survey without impacting the rest of your staff.

Clearly there are benefits of outsourcing your survey. But outsourcing is nowhere near a perfect solution, and many companies will find that it is in their benefit to perform the survey in house. In the next article, we’ll look at some of the weaknesses of outsourcing your survey. Part 2 Related Blog