How to increase employee survey response rates

Gathering employee feedback has always been a valuable exercise for businesses, but it’s especially valuable in today’s landscape that increasingly rewards employers who are adaptable and responsive.

Understanding how employees are feeling about their jobs, the pain points they’re experiencing, and what they think your business does well or could improve upon, can be extremely valuable feedback to gather.

It allows you to improve their experiences, drive retention, refine your business strategies, and strengthen your bottom line over time.

To collect this feedback, employee surveys are a tried and true channel. But to make truly impactful improvements based on employee feedback, you need responses.

What do you do when employee surveys return just a handful of thin responses, or even no responses at all?

This is a common problem for businesses for all kinds of reasons, but there are steps you can take to encourage more engagement with your employee surveys. Here are some top tips:

Start by defining your goals and purpose

Businesses might use surveys to improve the employee experience by collecting feedback on internal processes, leadership, compensation, etc., or to gather opinions and ideas on business strategy.

You might even aim for a mixture of both and create a variety of surveys for different purposes to share in a regular cadence.

Whatever approach you take, defining your top-down philosophy or priority now will help to guide the entire survey process as you work to improve it.

There are two key areas that you need to consider as you get started:

• The broader purposes of your survey program. What do you want to learn through employee surveys? What do you need to measure? What are your overarching goals? Are your current surveys geared towards that purpose, or do they need to be refocused? 
• The specific goals of your survey improvements. What are your survey engagement goals? What’s your current response rate? By how much do you want to improve it? Who will own this initiative? These logistical and process considerations should also be defined early on to help ensure that your efforts stick.

Being able to define your purposes and goals will make it easier to prioritize the employee perspective. After all, they need a reason to care about your surveys. What will your organization do with their feedback, and how can it show that it truly values the feedback?

By defining the purpose of your survey program, you’ll be able to give employees a clearer sense of how their responses support the organization’s broader goals.

Be sure to define who will review and act on employee feedback, as well.

Leadership will certainly play a role, but what about HR or your product, marketing, or customer experience teams? Having an organized system for handing off feedback so that it can actually be acted upon will show employees that you take their input seriously.

Meet employees where they are

Accessibility and ease of use have become watchwords for businesses looking to boost customer conversion rates.

It’s well understood that people are busy and that you need to catch their attention and steward them through the buying process quickly, both out of respect for their time and to reduce the chance that they’ll abandon their cart.

These same principles need to be applied to your employee survey program—in short, meet employees where they are and ensure that completing a survey isn’t a hassle.

Make your survey process as easy, quick, and accessible as possible. Using employee experience software that sends automatic survey emails is the best choice for keeping the entire process streamlined.

Software is an ideal way to measure employee experience in-office and in remote professional settings alike. And to maximize ease of use, make sure that your surveys are mobile-optimized for employees clicking through emails on their phones.

However, if some employees aren’t at a computer for the whole day or don’t have a company email address, how can you best reach them?

Businesses that don’t primarily operate in a professional office setting can and should provide multiple channels for employees to offer feedback as needed, like paper surveys and kiosks. Completing your survey should never be an inconvenient task.

The key takeaway: Ease arguably has a bigger influence on survey response rates than employee motivation, and the medium through which you deliver surveys will directly influence the perceived ease of filling them out.

Keep the surveys short

This best practice again ties into the importance of ease and convenience. To generate the most possible engagement, keep your surveys fairly short and focused. 

Unnecessarily long surveys will harm your response rates and lead to disengagement. Bad content, surveys included, creates slowdowns and frustrations that impact results. This can play out in a few ways:

• Employees might start a survey, realize how long it’ll take to complete, and eventually abandon it.
• Employees who do complete the long surveys might come to resent how much time they require, especially if the program isn’t backed up with purpose-driven communication.
• Employees might remember how long the surveys take to complete and begin avoiding or de-prioritizing them over time.

Long surveys can also result in skewed results since employees might rush through them, giving generic responses without careful thought or details, in order to get it over with.

Instead, it’s recommended to take a minimalist approach. What are a handful of the most important, insightful questions to ask? Drill down to the questions that will drive the most impact for your business at that particular time and focus on those.

Remember, too, that you can easily create rolling cadences of surveys in order to collect different types of feedback or learn about specific areas of your operations over time. Monthly or biweekly surveys might follow a rhythm of collecting feedback on different topics.

A series of short surveys delivered in a regular pattern will go much further to encourage engagement than fewer but longer surveys that require heftier time commitments.

Ensure anonymity with your surveys

Even if you don’t expect employees to frequently share feedback that they’d prefer to keep anonymous, it’s still important to note that an anonymous survey process encourages more responses and more candidness.

Anonymity is the recommended route for most businesses that are launching or refining their employee survey program.

Using an anonymous process to boost response rates starts with communication.

Ensure that all employees know that the survey process is anonymous. You should also communicate that anonymity is a conscious decision by the business in order to encourage the most honest responses that will truly help the company improve and adapt.

Using dedicated employee and customer experience software will naturally add a layer of anonymity to the process. Although survey vendors will be able to attach responses to individual names, this information should never be shared with employers if the surveys were given with a promise of anonymity.

The vendor’s role instead is to compile anonymized reports and distill the most important insights that your organization needs to be aware of.

It’s also possible to create an anonymous online process by sending employees generic links to a survey on your website, for example, www.company.com/employee-survey, rather than links that include tracking mechanisms. However, this tactic does bring the risk of repeat submissions that might skew results. 

These best practices will help you design an employee survey program that doesn’t get in its own way. Clearly define your purposes and goals and then ensure that the surveys are a truly easy and anonymous task.

These steps can help you drive significant improvements in your response rates and give you the insights you need to boost employee retention and satisfaction, improve the customer experience, streamline your operations, and more.

And as you roll out your new or improved survey program, don’t forget a few tactical best practices:

• Share big-picture results with your team and make real, tangible changes based on feedback. This will show employees that their responses don’t just sit on a desk but are actually valued as a strategic asset for the organization. 
• If feedback or ideas can’t or won’t be acted upon, don’t shy away from clearly explaining why. This will help you build a transparent, communicative culture that further encourages engagement.
• Finally, always thank your employees for their time spent completing surveys. After all, filling out surveys isn’t a part of their job descriptions. Simple rewards or even just a thank you email that highlights your response rate can be extremely effective.

Combined, the main tips above and these tactical best practices will help you develop and implement a survey program that actively contributes to a positive culture of engagement and continuous improvement—both of which are invaluable characteristics to have in today’s ever-changing landscape.