Employee Satisfaction Survey - Employee Satisfaction Survey Success Book, Opinion Surveys Sample Statements

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There are three important reasons to use an opinion survey. Surveys provide a road map for problem solving, facilitate communication in companies that do not communicate well and provide a baseline from which a company can benchmark progress.

Road Map: Effectively administered surveys provide critical information about the primary problem areas and map out the most logical path to solutions. Surveys identify problem areas particular to specific groups and those common to the company. This information provides a road map and priority list for dealing with problems in all areas. The order in which problems are dealt with is not always dictated by the ones employees feel worst about. Nevertheless, ranking the issues first puts some logic into the system of designing a plan for attacking employee relations problems.

Facilitate Communication: It is also critical to initiate communication by asking for employee input and appropriately responding to that input when it is received. The most effective method for gleaning opinions from employees and formulating a response is a formal survey. By conducting an employee satisfaction survey and communicating the results of the survey, a company is well positioned to formalize a communication process in its workforce.

Benchmark Progress: Finally, the survey results provide a snapshot of employee attitude at a moment in the life of your company. Starting from this point you can later identify, in an objective and scientific way, whether the company is making progress or backsliding. While administering a survey is not the only method of providing this benchmark, the information gained provides a background with which to interpret other necessary data such as turnover statistics and numbers of grievances or complaints filed by employees. Survey information is a critical piece of the puzzle and, if used properly, can pinpoint areas for improvement.

Advantages: One advantage of this type of survey is its anonymity. The survey can be administered in such a way that members of management are precluded from seeing the actual survey questionnaires filled out by employees. This promise of anonymity helps some employees overcome the fear of negative job implications for answering questions honestly. As a result, most employees feel that they can be more candid in this type of survey.

It is important to note that even this type of survey can have skewed results. For example, in a unit where a group of employees conspire to answer all questions negatively or positively, the results obviously will be inaccurate. This problem is not unique to the anonymous forced response survey, but it can more difficult to detect.

Potential Problems: The primary disadvantage of the anonymous forced response survey is that the information gathered is limited by the specificity of the questions asked. If the questions are not framed properly, employees may not be able to communicate all the problems or concerns they face. Otherwise there is a risk that the wording of a single question might skew responses toward the positive or negative.

Obviously the wording of the statements is very important. Review all the statements in your proposed survey form to ensure that they apply to your company. For example, if a statement asks about emergency medical or training facilities and you work in an office environment, the chances are that this statement will receive a poor rating; more important you will have missed an opportunity to get feedback on an issue important to your workforce.

You should revise the statements to reflect your work environment. You may want to get supervisors or a small sample of employees to help you review the form for its content and to suggest changes. Another way to deal potential wording problems is to ask several statements about a particular issue. This way you can control somewhat for problems with the wording of a particular statement.

Open-ended questions are another good thing to add to forced response surveys. This provides a method to voice issues not covered in the forced response section, or for clarification of answers to that section. While some employees may not respond to the open-ended questions (fearful that management might see the surveys) it provides a good way to correct for any problems in crafting the forced-response questions. Concerns about anonymity can also be handled during the administration of the survey.

Constructing The Survey
Our survey asks for employee opinion in the following 10 categories:

We typically ask seven statements in each category in a “Likert-type” scale (each statement is ranked from 1 to 7, 1 being most disagreement and 7 being most agreement).1 In this way we avoid the wording of one statement skewing the survey results. The scores on these seven statements are then combined to get the category score. At the conclusion of this book (See Appendix 1) is a sample basic survey, to give an idea of format.

You can customize the form to include statements or even categories that you think are more appropriate for your work environment. You can also change statement wording where you feel that the suggested statements are not appropriate for your workplace. However, make sure that the changes are thought through carefully; we have thousands of clients who have used the wording in the basic survey–custom statements will not have this kind of track record. This does not necessarily make them wrong (many times a client will change one or two statements on the basic survey that don’t seem to fit their workplace). But take care when changing statements.

Statement wording should be carefully considered. Statements should not be vague or subject to varied interpretations. They should cover observable behavior as opposed to thoughts or motives.2 Since the Likert-type scale is designed to capture degree of agreement or disagreement, it is better to word questions directly and mildly positive or negative (“My immediate supervisor treats workers consistently” is better than “Managers usually treat workers well”).

Survey designers sometimes add even more reliability into the instrument by some of the statements in the positive and some in the negative (i.e. “My immediate supervisor treats workers consistently” and “My immediate supervisor does not treat workers consistently”), preventing someone from skewing results by marking the same answer on every statement.3 This is an option on our survey, although most of our clients choose to keep the statement wording consistent due to the reading level of the survey participants. We typically word our survey statements all in the positive, so employees are not confused during the survey.

It can also help to ask a few items that can be independently verified.4 For example, you may want to ask a statement that you know is false, expecting a low rating on that statement. You could also ask about items that can be verified through data that is kept by other departments or for other purposes (production records, HR reports or other data).

Most of our clients use the model survey form in Appendix 1 as their format. If you decide to customize your form, use these survey construction principles to guide your changes. Any time you change your survey form you should discuss those changes with your survey consultant.

There is some debate in the academic literature regarding the validity of using various numbers of response categories in a Likert-type scale (i.e. 5, 7, 9 or more responses). Cf. Paul Kline, Handbook of Psychological Testing 189 (2d ed. 2000) (7-point scale is most reliable) with Lewis R. Aiken, Rating Scales & Checklists 238 (1996) (5- point scale best, although 7-point scale may be best where range of attitudes are small). We prefer the 7-item scale for employee attitude measurement.

See Palmer Morrel-Samuels, “Getting the Truth Into Workplace Surveys,” Harvard Business Review 111-118 (February 2002).

See Kline, supra note 7, at 188-190 (2000).

See Morrel-Samuels, supra note 8.

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