Communicating Employee Survey Results

So, you've deployed an employee survey and collected the responses.

Now, what do you do with the information? If you allow that valuable information to sit on your desk or computer, the fact that nothing happens as a follow up to the employee survey will result in lower employee morale and degraded loyalty.

If you have created an effective employee survey, you should have asked 10 to 20 carefully selected questions and provided multiple choice answer options, usually on a scale of 1-5 or on a scale of "agree completely" to "disagree completely".

Now, you have to figure out what the responses mean and display the responses, communicating them to the employees.

Probably the best means of tracking responses is to use one of the many software packages available for developing and collecting survey data. If your firm is small and you elected to use a hardcopy survey, you will have to compile the responses by hand, counting them and entering the numbers of responses into a spreadsheet.

If you elected to use commercial off the shelf software, you may well have the capability to display data in pie charts, bar charts and other graphs built right into the software package.

Even if you do not, once you have the numbers of each response in hand, you can readily create a meaningful graphic to communicate results to the employees who were polled.

If you use a software package such as Microsoft Excel® to track your data and create displays, you will be able to communicate very effective graphics using pie charts, bar charts or line graphs.

If you plan to communicate the survey results in a face to face meeting, bar charts and pie charts work best because they show up well on a viewgraph or overhead projection display of a computer screen.

You will want to focus your discussion with employees on the areas which have been identified as problem area or areas needing improvement.

Of course, you want to highlight the areas in which the employees are happy, engaged, satisfied, or have provided positive responses, but the focus should be on what will be improved.

You can not leave the employees wondering if there will be changes made based on the results; they want assurance that their input is going to create change and that the change will be for the better!

Copyright © 2005 by Bill Roche.  All rights reserved.  All material on this site (www.TopResults.com) is protected by U.S. Federal Copyright law. It may not be reprinted in any form, or hosted on any Web site, without explicit permission.

Copyright © 1998-2010 by The Executive Strqtegies Group LLC.  All rights reserved.  All material on this site (www.TopResults.com) is protected by U.S. Federal Copyright law. It may not be reprinted in any form, or hosted on any Web site, without explicit permission.