In-House vs Outsourced Surveys: Part 2

Not long ago, we discussed the benefits of outsourcing your survey. You may be more likely to get honest results, the people running your survey are likely to have more experience, and you save time for your staff to try to work on their normal projects. But outsourcing is far from an ideal solution, and has a variety of weaknesses that lead many businesses to performing the employee surveys in house.

Cost The cost of outsourcing a survey can be astronomical, particularly if you choose to add analysis. One of the main reasons to outsource is because another company has a staff member that can dedicate themselves to your work, but the cost of outsourcing the survey could be used to train a staff member in survey methods or hire a staff member whose job it is to run satisfaction surveys. You are often trading cost for cost, when running in-house surveys may be a much cheaper option in the long term.

Reliability Once you decide to outsource to a specific company, you will need to continue to outsource to that company every time you run this survey in order to ensure that the survey trends can be tracked reliably. That means that you will be depending on this company, and if the company raises their costs, or is unpleasant to work with, etc., you will still need to continue working with them. In house, the surveys, how they’re run, and how they’re tracked, should presumably be in your control, and that can easily be in your benefit.

Control/Communication When you outsource your survey, you will need to communicate through a series of channels in order to get the survey exactly as you want it, and any time you have questions, comments, etc. – or you want to change the survey in any way – you will need to coordinate with a completely separate company. It can be a time consuming process that may be fraught with communication issues, especially if multiple people are handling your survey.

It is difficult to say whether or not outsourcing your employee satisfaction survey is a good idea. On the one hand, there is evidence to suggest the data may not be as reliable if the employees think you’ll label them via the survey results. On the other hand, in house surveys are cheaper, can still be as effective for judging trends, and won’t hamstring you to a specific company. There is no right answer – it all depends on your company’s current capabilities and financing, and the method that you think will work best for you in the long term.