Employee Surveys That Work Improving Design, Use, and Organizational Impact

Poorly designed employee surveys frustrate participants, analysts, and executives and can end up doing more harm than good. Alec Levenson offers sensible, practical ways to make them more useful and accurate and counters a number of unhelpful but common practices. He provides specific advice for ensuring that the purpose and desired outcomes of surveys are clear, the questions are designed to provide the most relevant and accurate data, and the results are actionable. He also looks at a wealth of specific issues, such as the best benchmarking practices, the benefits of multivariate modeling for analyzing results, the linking of survey data with performance data, the best ways to measure employee engagement, the pros and cons of respondent anonymity, and much more.

Alec Levenson is senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. He has worked with a broad range of Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies, including American Express, Amgen, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Exelon, Nestlé, PepsiCo, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Royal Bank of Canada, and Sinopec.

Introduction: A Roadmap to Effective Employee Surveys

Part 1: Strategy, goals and objectives
1. Goals: Define a clear survey purpose
2. Objectives: The pros and cons of focusing on employee engagement
3. Methods: Match the measurement to the processes, roles and teams

Part 2: Design and delivery
4. Good Survey Practices: Don’t reinvent the wheel
5. Anonymity vs. Insights: Confidentiality and organizational data matching

Part 3: Analysis, interpretation and action taking
6. KISS: The power and pitfalls of simplicity
7. The Big Picture: What, how, why and who of statistical modeling
8. Reaching Conclusions: Benchmarking and statistical vs. meaningful differences
9. Moving forward: Reporting and taking action
Resources
References
Index
About the author