|
Question: We struggled to explain to our staff what a couple of the questions meant, e.g. “equal opportunity employer”, “the one thing that detracts…”, “poor performance is not tolerated” (agree or disagree??). We will see what we can do to reword some of our questions. We have to be careful that the new wording still means the same thing as the old wording! Update May 2007 - we have now reworded our "poor performance" question and removed the word "detracts" from another question. The EEO question remains as it is generally widely used. Question: You should change the direction of the rating scale on the questionnaire – it would make more sense to go from Strongly Disagree (=1) to Strongly Agree (=5). True. We intend to change the direction of the scale in 2007. Update May 2007 - the rating scale direction has been changed. Question: Some questions could be read more than one way - affecting the answer given. Absolutely. In order to offer a cost-effective employee survey that can provide benchmarking opportunities (and for the purposes of the Best Places to Work competition), we need all organisations to complete the same basic set of questions. These questions need to be applicable to organisations of all sizes, in all industries, employing people in all sorts of roles. The questions therefore have to be fairly broad. The alternative to generic questions is to customise them for each organisation – this increases costs, removes the possibility for benchmarking, and you may still be left with the same problem! The reality is that each respondent will be thinking of different things when answering questions, and we recommend you use related questions and responses to the comment questions to help you interpret results. An employee survey is not intended to give you ‘all the answers’ – often it provides the foundation for further discussion in the organisation (e.g. in your management team, in focus groups etc), and provides the starting point for targeted dialogue. Question: How about having an open ended question for each section to enable more interpretation? Often people give the same answer for different reasons. You can always add extra comment questions to your survey – the cost is $750+gst for each group of 10 questions. We do not intend to include comment questions at the end of every section in our standard questionnaire, as we have 3 main concerns this practice. The first is that it allows employees to emphasise very small/unimportant issues – you might find that instead of highlighting issues, the waters are further muddied. This is why we ask employees to only mention the ONE thing that makes/detracts from the organisation being a great place to work. The second is that having a further 8 comment questions multiplies the amount of data for our clients to deal with. Our third concern is that it makes the survey take longer to complete and requires more effort from employees, which may affect response rates.
*** Edited 5/21/2007 4:57:34 AM UTC by Leighton (JRA)***
|