3 Ways To Better Engage Employees When Sending Surveys

Whether you’re looking to collect feedback on training or employee experience initiatives, or on lighter subjects such as your employees’ office snack preferences with a view to purchasing a vending machine. Whatever your wider aims, whether it’s improving your employees’ motivation and engagement levels, or trying to create a greater sense of staff wellbeing and togetherness in your company. The more carefully you think about the channels you’re using to connect with employees, the better the response you’re likely to get when sending your staff survey, with feedback that you’re more likely to be able to do something useful with as a result.

However, given how busy many employees are, you still need to be mindful of their time, and ensure that your chosen medium of distribution is as convenient, quick and simple as you can make it, in order for them to complete your survey.

From an email or a link via a website, to an SMS or a link into a live chat application. Considering the growing number ways in which digital information can be sent these days, there’s a lot more scope to keep things fresh and engaging and help maximise the impact of any employee surveys you issue.

We outline some of the best of these below, giving you an idea of how they work and the typical topics and issues they work well with.

Survey Distribution Considerations to Better Engage Employees

1) Using more public facing work communication channels

For shorter, more informal surveys where you might be gauging employee views on anything from their preferences about a choice of company benefits, that you’re thinking about introducing, to a quick poll to identify their favourite Christmas meal venue, using group chat channels such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, can prove extremely effective.

Not only do these channels prevent you from clogging up your employees’ inboxes, the handy visual and audio push notifications they provide, mean they’ll be alerted to any fresh surveys wherever they are and whatever device they have to hand.

These group chat applications have become increasingly popular among organisations, as they are much better suited to real-time collaboration, compared with traditional channel like email. Subsequently, for more informal surveys, the extra noise group chat applications can typically generate among employees, should result in much greater participation rates and feedback.

2) The versatility of QR codes

QR codes offer another interesting and effective alternative.

From QR codes printed onto supporting materials for employees to pick up following a training session, to QR codes on memos pinned to company notice boards or embedded into electronic display boards dotted around the office. The versatility of the QR code means you can distribute employee surveys widely both digitally and in print.

You could even embed a QR code onto a presentation slide deck, in order to encourage greater engagement and audience participation during a live company presentation. Such is the flexibility of the QR code, that they allow you to collect feedback in real-time, as well as historically.

To find out more about using this method to distribute your survey, why not take a look at our QR code help page.

3) Keeping with email for official communications

While distributing surveys via company chat applications or QR codes offers an interesting and engaging approach, email is still typically the best channel when you’re looking to distribute formal or higher priority employee surveys such as the annual job satisfaction or quarterly pulse surveys. The importance of these surveys should also be immediately evident to recipients, having received their survey invite via this more formal distribution channel.

There are also several advantages to issuing your employee survey in this way.

• It’s quick and simple to send out: especially if you already have many pre-existing mailing groups within your email list that you can use. This can also be effective, if you only want to send it to specific departments or teams within your organisation.
• It’s easy to track: email is one of the best ways to track respondents, as it’s simple to see how many people opened your email, how many clicked through to your survey and who responded.
• There’s plenty of room to explain why you’re sending it: with plenty of available space in the body of an email compared to what would be typically available with any other channel, email is an effective way of introducing your survey and explaining why you’re carrying it out and how you plan to use the feedback. This can be extremely effective when you’re trying to maximise your response to higher priority employee surveys.

Given the more formal nature of employee surveys sent via email, it can help to maximise your response rate, if you consider promoting them via word of mouth, before you send them. Company, department or other staff team meetings present an ideal time to give employees a quick heads up that a survey will be coming their way, which will help maximise the response to it when it arrives in their in-box.

Why it’s important to do everything you can to engage employees.

Ultimately, employees are your most valuable asset, with the innovation, ideas and productivity they bring essential in keeping your business moving forward. But this will only happen if they are fully engaged.

While there are many factors that can affect an employee’s engagement levels, which can vary from one individual to the next, you won’t be able to start improving them until you know exactly what that are.

Fortunately, with the wide range of employee surveys and distribution channels that are now available, it’s easier to select the right survey and distribution channel for your needs. And long as you are doing everything you can to maximise your survey’s response, the feedback it will generate among your employees, should put you on the pathway to greater success.