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Rising Star
Do anyone know about any HR ops vacancy?
Advice on taking and passing the SPHR exam?
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Chief
The biggest driver I have seen is showing employees what changed because of previous surveys. People are much more likely to respond when they believe their feedback leads to action.
Chief
Absolutely! It's important, whenever making changes to policies or practices or other things, to say "due to the results of the engagement survey, we have ..."
You kinda answered your own question in that you've clearly indicated that there is a trust issue. Address the trust and you'll get the participation. Individual change management 101: what are you doing, why are you doing it, and what's in it for me. The "what's in it for me" is usually the piece that centralized communication plans miss, and in reality, you can only answer that by understanding each individual, so you need to have every people leader onboard and engaged and communicating the importance of the survey to their teams. Sounds like you have to go back to basics and build organizational trust.
Rising Star
A truly anonymous survey would make it impossible to know “who” participated. Sure, participation numbers would still be discernible, but people dislike even the slightest suggestion that the employer can figure out who participated.
Your best bet for future surveys is to coordinate department-level focus groups to hear out issues and work toward resolving issues. Over time, you can reintroduce broader surveys once people trust the company again.
Chief
Third-party administration of the survey absolutely makes it impossible for managers to know who participated, unless the company had 100% participation -- then the company would know everyone participated. Where is that "slightest suggestion" in that? Besides which, knowing who participated is very different from knowing how people answered the questions. VERY different.
I always took the scores of each department -- IF they had enough people in the department and enough of them responded -- and asked them to "tell me more" about the highest and the lowest scores. It is the only way to know why a score was high or low -- how can we address the low-scored issues without truly understanding why they were scored low? I don't want leaders making assumptions about low scores, I want to know the why of those scores so we can develop action plans that actually address the issues.
Chief
Let me check your wording. You said the contest is based on *how* employees respond to a survey -- and I hope it's an Employee *Engagement* survey, not a "satisfaction" survey, which is useless.
So, with that wording, the contest is based on whether the employees rate things positively?
If you meant that the contest is to encourage participation and not at all related to "how" they answer the survey, that's a different thing. At a previous company, we had literally 99% participation, because we were able to prove that the survey was completely anonymous (unless, in the comments, the employee was dumb enough to out themselves by being very specific about something that clearly identified them -- but even then, there were never any negative repercussions to the employee).
Don't just say "doing it by third party means it's anonymous." Point out that the third party is the only entity that even sees any of the responses, and aggregates them without any identification of individuals, and provides those aggregated results to the company.
It sometimes takes years.