How to conduct a staff survey

Understanding your staff is key to a successful organisation. That can be through one-to-one conversations, team discussions, and – as we talk about here – staff surveys.

 

 

Why are staff surveys important?

 

It can be easy to run an annual survey just because you always have. If that’s the case, it could be time to take a step back and reconsider why you’re doing it and what you hope to learn.

 

Essentially, a staff survey can unearth what people think is working well in the organisation, and which areas need more attention.

 

They can be particularly helpful when trying to gauge how people feel about the culture of the organisation and the support they receive (and need) to be able to do their jobs well.

 

Carrying out and, importantly, acting on a staff survey can:   

• Help you to reinforce and build on what’s working well. If you don’t know what your staff feel is beneficial to their work-life, then you could be wasting resources on areas that aren’t making a difference
• Enable you to address any concerns early on and identify persistent issues that need more attention
• Give you an insight into staff wellbeing and how people feel about working for the organisation. This will give you valuable information about how to support staff to achieve their best at work, and how your organisation can be a better employer
• Boost staff engagement, which in turn can lead to happier, healthier, more fulfilled, more motivated employees – who ultimately will want to work for you for longer

 

External provider or in-house?

 

You might have the resources to go with an external provider who can run the survey and analyse responses for you. If you go with this option, then carefully consider what you need and what the consultancy provides. For example, what support do they offer before and after the survey? And how well do they understand the sector?

 

If you’re delivering the survey yourself, there are lots of digital survey tools available to charities. We outline some of the best ones, including Survey Monkey, Survey Gizmo, and Cognito Forms.

 

 

What do you want to find out?

 

If you’re running the survey in-house, think carefully about what information you want to learn from people, and use that as a basis to form your questions.

 

You’ll probably want to ask ‘rating’ questions, which could include:

• How well does our organisation live its values? 
• How do you rate our internal communication?
• Do you feel you have a good work/life balance?
• How would you rate the overall work environment?
• How proud are you to work here?
• Would you recommend our organisation as a great place to work?

It’s important not to overload your team with too many questions. You want people to consider their answers, not just rattle through them to get to the end.

 

Giving an idea of how many questions there are and how long the survey might take can be helpful for people to schedule it into their day.

 

CultureAmp recommends that surveys take ten minutes or less, and include no more than 60 rating questions (when people pick between ‘strongly agree’ and ‘strongly disagree’, for example).

 

You might also want to include some free-text questions to get a deeper understanding on some topics. That can be helpful for questions such as, ‘What do you most appreciate about working here?’ or ‘How could our organisation improve career development?’.

 

 

Try to get a high response rate on your staff surveys

 

To make your findings worthwhile, you’ll want to get a good response rate. It’s generally thought that’s between around 70-85%. If that sounds high, then you can use some of these ways to encourage people to participate:

• Ask line managers to speak to their team face-to-face about completing the survey – don’t just rely on messaging, which can be easy to ignore
• Emphasise confidentiality and anonymity – this will help people feel confident in giving honest and open feedback, rather than answering with ‘safe’ responses
• Give a clear indication of how long it might take to complete – so that people know it’s a manageable task and will be more willing to fit into their workload
• It can be helpful to feed back survey findings quickly. That will help to make people feel respected and heard
• Take action! There’s nothing more frustrating than airing an issue and it being ignored. Respond to any areas that need addressing, and importantly, communicate what you’re doing about them. When people feel that their input is valued, they’ll be more likely to respond to any future surveys

 

Take action and repeat regularly

 

When you’ve drawn together the results of the survey, share your findings honestly with staff and pull together an action plan.

 

Running your first staff survey will give you benchmarks. When you carry out any future surveys, you’ll be able to use that initial data to identify any trends and patterns – helping you to find out what is improving within the organisation and what might need more attention over time.