FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Yes we do. We provide initial advice on your communication strategy as part of the Full Service package. We can provide more extensive help, such as drafting your communication to employees, as an optional extra.

The following are the top success factors:

• Set clear survey objectives – We help you determine your survey objectives and critical metrics. You do not want to ask questions merely for curiosity or interest sake. You should be prepared to respond to what you hear back from your employees. If you are not prepared to respond to what you hear, you shouldn’t ask the question.
• Use well-crafted questions – Questions should be written in plain language, be unambiguous and ask about only one item – no double barrelled questions! We have a database of well-crafted survey questions about all aspects of the work environment. If you need custom questions written, we have the expertise to write custom questions that will meet your objectives.
• Limit open-ended questions – Open-ended questions are difficult to analyze and are qualitative in nature. While you should not have a lot of open-ended questions, we recommend including at least one open-ended question. Employees appreciate that opportunity to provide an explanation or opinion that’s important to them.
• Protect employees’ privacy – Employees are reluctant to respond to surveys if they fear their identity will be revealed. This is one reason to use an experienced external service provider.
• Employee preparation – Employees should know why you are conducting a survey, what you will do with the responses and how you are protecting their privacy and individual confidentiality.
• Encourage participation – Employees’ time is valuable. Ensure you let employees know that you need and value their feedback and participation. Send reminders during the survey period.
• Thank employees – Thank employees for their participation and feedback.
• Close the loop – Tell employees what the survey revealed and what your plans are for responding to the survey. If there are some ideas or suggestions that can’t be actioned, be sure to tell employees why.

Download the pamphlet “Eleven Top Tips for Employee Surveys” (PDF).

Absolutely. Advice on your communication strategy is part of our service for all surveys types – and as an add-on option we can provide in-depth communication services and write your communication for you.

Further details available on our Employee Survey and 360 Feedback Survey pages.

Absolutely. We prefer individual email addresses for the reasons mentioned above – but if this is not viable we can open the survey up to anyone, and then provide a single anonymous link (or multiple links by, for example, Department) for internal use.

Note that this means that:

• Employees will have to fill out the survey in one sitting. As we don’t know who they are, we can’t return them to their partially-completed form.
• It is harder to prevent an employee filling out the survey multiple times.

There are ways around these issues, however they tend to either involve more work on the part of the employee (a sign in process or request for an email address), or involve saving information on the employee’s computer through browser “cookies” (with the associated security implications).

Contact us and we’d be happy to review the pros and cons of each, and suggest how it might be best to proceed given your particular circumstances.

360 degree feedback is a process designed to give leaders feedback from a group of individuals usually their manager, peers and direct reports. This feedback from multiple sources provides insights into strengths and weakness and is best used to inform leaders’ development plans.

Yes we do, and some of our clients have offices or operations in both.  All of our pricing is in Canadian dollars regardless.

Yes absolutely – every survey we administer is set up to be “responsive”, in that they will adjust their layout to match what works best on any particular screen size, device or operating system.

In other words all of our surveys will work seamlessly on:

• all devices (PCs, tablets and phones)
• all modern web browsers (Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome & Opera)
• all operating systems (Mac/PC)

One caveat to keep in mind is that older and unsupported versions of Internet Explorer (IE) can cause issues, and it’s best to update to a more recent web browser for the sake of usability and security.

Yes we can.

If you have data from a previous survey run with another provider, we can use this in a year on year comparison assuming that the questions and scales are in any way comparative.

Contact us and we will take a look at what you have (at no charge) and suggest how we might use this data in a new report.

Absolutely!

Contact us to set up a free appointment or phone call where we can review your results and provide you with options on how we might help out.

Yes they do.

With the help of tools made available by webaim.org, all of our surveys are “WCAG 2“ and “Section 508” compatible – i.e. they conform to the standards used for screen readers and other accessibility devices.

Yes we can, and we are commonly asked to set up a paper version of a survey (including some form of anonymous collection method) in cases where a group of employees:

• cannot access the survey through an email invitation from us, perhaps because we do not know who they are
• do not have easy access to a computer set up for their use at work (where they would then all share one common link to the survey)
• are shift workers where a large group of employees are only available in certain locations for a short period of time (and so the use of a common computer for filling in the survey may be impractical)
• are unlikely to use a their (or any) computer or phone for survey completion

Contact us for further details on this and we’d be happy to review how this might work best in your work environment and provide a quote on the cost to deliver, collect and data-enter the results.