The Employee Survey:
From Opinion to Fact

By: Robert F. Abbott

An employee survey can be an invaluable resource, but perhaps the most important reason for using one is a reason that doesn't get much attention: Getting from opinion to fact.

Not long ago, I completed a 360 Feedback survey for a colleague, and she got many important insights from the responses she received. But, most importantly, the aggregated results gave her data, or facts, with which to work.

Like any good employee survey it moved information from the realm of relatively subjective to relatively objective. And, with that shift came the possibility of making the right decisions to advance her career.

If you're planning an employee survey, make the acquisition of facts your primary objective, and the purpose you started out with the secondary objective. Once you've established the principle of fact acquisition as your main objective, you'll move in the right direction, whether you develop a survey from scratch or purchase a ready-made survey.

With that, let's look at some examples:

• Employee safety survey: When I worked as a construction laborer and foreman, I had many safety issues, but at that time, employee surveys were hardly management's priority. And, had managers walked around and asked for opinions, they would have received a wide range of opinions and suggestions from the laborers, carpenters, and other tradespeople on their sites. To get from that bewildering array of opinions to actionable facts would have been a major challenge. That's where a well-designed employee safety survey would come in. With the right questions, appropriately worded, management would have data (not just opinions) that identified the issues to prioritize. It would also allow management to choose the issues that would give the greatest safety return for each dollar spent.
  
• Employee wellness survey: Similarly, when I provided newsletter services to a large manufacturing plant, employees had, and expressed, many opinions about health and wellness issues. In this case, though, management did use employee wellness surveys to track and respond to to current and emerging issues. Again, it was a case of aggregating opinions to develop data that was used to develop policies addressing specific issues.
  
• Employee engagement survey: As a front-line employee I saw how a company used an engagement survey to assess the needs and wishes of employees after a lengthy strike. In the post-strike environment, emotions were inflamed, but the survey process meant the company could move ahead confidently on several initiatives because the process meant it had solid data on which to base its actions.

These examples touch just the surface, but should provide an indication of how good employee surveys allow us turn opinions into data or facts, and how the possession of facts allows management to make good decisions, and make them confidently. More after this...

Here are a some other cases in which well-designed survey instruments will provide actionable data:

• employee satisfaction survey
  
• employee benefits survey
  
• employee attitude survey
  
• employee orientation survey
  
• employee turnover survey
  
• employee recognition survey
  
• employee performance survey

This process of moving to from opinions to facts is also at the heart of scientific inquiry. Scientists from all fields usually start with a hunch or an idea, and then design an experiment or series of experiments to test that hunch. If their experiments (the equivalent of your survey) confirm their hunches, then they've created a new fact or set of facts.

Whether your hunches are about employee recruitment, employee communication, or employee attitudes think in terms of proving or disproving them (and sometimes, disproving a hunch is just as useful as proving one).

With good information, fact-based information, you'll make better decisions, and you'll make them more quickly.

Robert F. Abbott is a writer and author who specializes in business communication. He's taken part in employee surveys while working on the front-lines, consulted for managers surveying their employees, and completed a graduate-level survey design course while earning his MBA.

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