Frequency of employee surveys

Qualtrics has a decent survey template for employee satisfaction that you can use as a starting point, which will make creating the survey much easier. Our organization has also been experiencing several changes recently, so we created a standing employee suggestion survey that can be submitted multiple times and has one or two questions about satisfaction and then an essay-style response for them to type as much as they want for their suggestions. We mention it at our monthly staff meetings so that everyone remains aware of the survey, and the responses go to our HR manager, who reviews them with our Executive Director. We also created a desktop shortcut for the survey link that is on each user’s desktop so that they don’t have to search for it. 

Utilizing a standing suggestion survey is good because you don’t have to worry about inundating your employees with surveys about their workload and satisfaction when you’re already concerned that they’re stressed from recent changes. You just have to make sure that you reiterate that the survey is there and ensure that responses are as anonymous as you can make them to encourage submissions.

Hope this helps!

We run an annual engagement, plus quarterly pulses that are a subset of questions from the annual survey (plus an additional 1-2 questions if there have been major changes the employees would be feeling). Since we’re recycling questions from the engagement it isn’t too much of a lift to run.  

The most important thing to making sure this frequency doesn’t feel like a “burden” though, is making sure you are communicating to employees what actions you are taking from the survey results.  As long as they can see true listening and action planning is taking place, my experience is that they’ll continue to give you feedback when you ask for it.  On the other hand, if their responses just go into a vacuum and they don’t hear how you are using the data, they will be less likely to give you feedback in the future.

Also, I really like the suggestion given above - for an always on type listening post that is available for employees to respond to at their own convenience.  

@SJones - I don’t look after EX in my current role anymore, however have found quarterly a good consistency for all involved.  Any more frequent, and you don’t have time to action.  The depth of each check-in from experience is what will impact respondent burden/comments more than the frequency.