(This triggers an old joke about camels that I’ve completely forgotten, but you know the one).
Your senior management team will likely be interested in question development, and that’s good, but you want to avoid the far-too-common “survey design by committee scenario” because:
- you don’t want to end up with a 100 question survey that nobody will complete.
- you may stray from your initial and overall objectives.
In either case it might be best to provide a rough draft, or at minimum a layout confining the areas of research, to your management team – and not a “blank page” where anyone can add whatever they’d fancy.
Avoiding “survey design by committee” is by the way where a third-party such as ourselves can help. When someone wants to add in questions that you deem superfluous or out of scope, you can blame your third party provider for setting the limit. “Sorry our engagement survey partner recommended that we limit the questions to 50 questions so that we don’t tax people. So it’s not me saying no, it’s them.”
Stay tuned for our next blog post – “Developing a robust communication strategy.”
