Accurate In-House Survey Responses

One of the biggest concerns about running an employee survey in-house is that employees may be less likely to fill the responses out honestly if they believe that their responses may be tracked. Your data needs to be as accurate as possible to generate reliable results, and while it is unlikely that every employee always answers honestly, the more honest responses you get the more your data can be used to make decisions. There is no ideal solution.

Outsourcing the survey may solve some of these issues, but it is certainly not a good solution for many companies that will benefit much more from running it in-house. Instead, you may benefit from the following ideas to get more reliable responses:

Start with Pre-Survey Meetings Before you run the survey, make sure every employee in the entire company understands that the data cannot be linked to them. Do your best to explain what you are doing to make the data anonymous and see if that helps drive honest results. Be aware, however, that you may need to do this often to keep the information reliable.

Avoid Demographic Data Demographic data is why many employees feel they can be figured out. If there is no identifying data, they may be less likely to have that concern. Single Use Computers Another options is to have employees go into a room to fill out the surveys.

It’s possible that employees may feel more confident that their answers are kept anonymous if they are on dedicated computers that have no identifying information, rather than opening up an email and filling it out there. A cursory search shows no studies on whether or not this is true, however. Low Level Analysts Once again, this idea does not appear to have been researched, but putting people in charge that are not at an executive/management level may be another way to avoid the idea that their responses can be tracked.

Employees that are not seen as intimidating may cause people to be more candid in their responses. Logos/IDs When you build the survey, you may want to avoid advertising that the survey is being run in-house. You may be able to create a survey that looks generic enough that employees won’t feel the company is clearly monitoring it.

Employee surveys do not need to have the marketing that companies like to place in customer surveys, and avoiding too many identifying information may be one way to handle it.

In truth, it’s also possible that it may not matter. Satisfaction data is often about trends, and it’s possible that even if the responses are less honest, the average responses combined with changes in trends may support accurate decision making as long as you keep the survey consistent. Still, you do want the most accurate responses possible. It’s always tough to know exactly what will cause surveys to be more or less candid, but anything you can do to improve the honest response rate should be helpful.