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This article was published 11/02/2023 (1149 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While larger organizations might turn to a commercial organizational culture survey to identify the various elements of their culture, smaller outfits can just as well create their own survey to assess employee perceptions of “how things work around here”. Once this is complete, it is important to report the findings back to participants and propose the ways and means of strengthening culture.

Designing a custom employee survey requires adherence to some basic rule, shared here for consideration.

● Determine survey outcomes: Prior to beginning a survey project, determine its primary purpose. What is the overall outcome you are seeking? What are the employee viewpoints and/or behaviours you are trying to assess? Determine if a survey is the best and/or more efficient way to achieve your goal. Once a decision is made to develop a survey, create a project plan with specific goals, objectives and timeframes.

● Plan for anonymity: Employees need to feel safe when replying to any survey questions. As well, management wants honest answers rather than what employees think management wants to hear.

● Survey timeframe: Employees are busy and need time to think and formulate their answers. Provide a minimum of least two weeks to complete the survey.

● Design rating questions: Questions that ask participants to rate an issue rather than assessing a number of options, allows individuals to focus on one thing at a time. Use a rating scale of one to five because it has been proven to be most reliable and will help to create a strong anchor for each issue. This type of rating scale also helps to eliminate bias and speeds up the time required to complete the survey.

● Question design: Drafting survey questions can be quite the challenge and needs to be done carefully. Avoid grammatical negatives such as “not, do not” and/or mixing positive words with negatives. Keep the language simple and avoid extreme words such as always and/or never. Be sure that the question is focused on something the participant will actually know about, otherwise participants will simply respond with a neutral rating. Avoid “double” questions where an individual could agree with one part but not the other. Finally, I suggest staying away from using the word “culture” as this is mostly a formal human resource term.

● Question focus: Frame the questions around the well-known engagement drivers that help to identify the feelings and emotions employees have about their organization, their job and their leaders. These include questions related to participant understanding of the organizational mission, vision and strategic direction and their alignment to these elements. Review your questions to ensure they are truly quantifiable and that action could be taken to improve any issues identified.

● Questions should be related to leadership trust, whether individuals feel they have sufficient tools and resources, if they receive effective feedback from management, and/or if employees feel recognized, rewarded and appreciated. Include questions regarding both direct and senior leadership, whether or not an employee feels supported and if the organization demonstrates support for employee wellness. Finally, be sure to include questions about learning and development as well as pay and benefits. Group the questions that enable a focus on issues such as organizational structure, departments and teams, roles and responsibility, rewards and recognition and compensation as well as gender and age.

● Survey length: Whereas employees are being asked to take time out of their work day, consideration needs to be given to survey length. The survey should be reasonably short but allow for enough time to provide thoughtful responses. The longer the survey, the more risk is created for decreasing the quality of the data. A maximum of 50-60 questions is a typical number that can be reasonably answered in a brief timeframe.

● Narrative questions: At the end of a survey, provide an opportunity for participants to respond by writing with their own longer answer. This allows for individuals to give a broader explanation of personal/professional viewpoints as well as their wants and needs regarding their work environment.

● Test, test, retest: Prior to full implementation, test your survey questions. Are they grouped so as to create more depth of response? Are they relevant? Is anything missing? Should any topics be expanded so that more detail could be discovered? Do test respondents fully understand what is being asked and do the responses actually answer the question? Do the questions move from broad topics to narrow and more specific questions? Are the number of questions and timing appropriate? Make revisions as required.

● Create comfort: Once the survey is ready to go, take time to arrange communication strategies to the employees. Create a global communique for all individuals to be included in the survey. Explain the purpose and rationale for the survey, the types of questions that will be included, how long it will take to complete, and what will happen to the results. Be sure to state there will be a feedback session for the employees.

● Reviewing results: While the individual responses will be anonymous, the survey design can provide for group responses according to departments. This provides great value in terms of identifying problems in specific areas. Prepare the report results using coloured bar graphs and percentage ratings accompanied by each specific survey question. Group the narrative responses by each question while being sure to remove any identifying comments/names that were inadvertently provided by a participant.

● Interpreting results: It is important to sift through survey results and highlight key trends. Apply quantitative analysis to identify trends for each of your questions. For instance, if 60 per cent of participants indicate they don’t feel they have the right tools for the job, then this is definitely an issue to be addressed.

● Set benchmarks: Even if this is your first survey, management can set benchmarks for each question as part of the evaluation. Then, keep these benchmarks for survey comparisons in the future. Finally, undertake some comparison of the survey results with actual business performance including overall financial performance as well as employee motivation and productivity.

● Preparing for feedback: Use coloured graphics to bring your survey data to life. Be prepared to present the feedback to management first and discuss an appropriate strategy for sharing it with others. Be prepared to provide an open and honest report and invite questions for further discussion.

● Provide ongoing feedback: Ongoing feedback is important as employees are interested in what steps are being taken to improve any issues identified in the survey. Failing to provide ongoing information and feedback on progress will discourage people from participating in the future.

As mentioned earlier, there are many commercial employee engagement surveys but homegrown surveys created with care and attention will work just as well or even better. The key to success is careful preparation, testing and effective feedback.

Source: Guide to designing a survey, Culture Amp Support Guide; How to Interpret Employee Engagement Results, by Energage, Sept. 22, 2022.

Barbara J. Bowes, FCPHR, B.Ed, M.Ed, CCP is a human resource professional, author, radio personality, speaker, executive coach and workshop leader. She can be reached at barb@bowesleadership.com.