Who Drives the Content of an Employee or Customer Survey?

The first step in creating a survey is the most important. It must be decided who will determine the survey content. This avoids two very important pitfalls in employee and customer survey research: including survey questions that you don't need, or more importantly, failing to include questions you should have asked. Both of which greatly reduce the validity of your survey and directly impact participation and results. There are generally four possible survey content drivers: management, consultants, employees, or customers.

Management can be compared to a lookout in the crow's nest of a ship. Management can see to the farthest horizon, and from the top of the ship to the deck. But, it is impossible, with hundreds or thousands of employees and customers, for management to see everything that is happening everywhere, such as below deck. In many cases, it is critical that management learn what is happening "below deck" before it proves costly to the entire ship! So, management should certainly drive the survey content to a large extent. It is nevertheless critical that management learn the full extent of what is happening everywhere. Missed information can often prove costly to the entire ship, its resources, and its mission! So, it is specifically because of management's blind spots that conducting surveys is so critical in the first place. It is because of management's blind spots that it is critical that they are not the sole survey content drivers of an employee or customer survey.

Outside consultants have no intimate knowledge of your company or your customers, so can we tell you what your key issues are? The issues are universal to all companies, but how those issues are expressed within each company is unique to each company. Knowing this is how the critical content of the survey can be developed. No consultant, without in-depth research, can possibly know your organization or your customer base well enough to drive the content of your employee or customer survey.

Clearly, two of the best sources of information are employees and customers. The survey content for both employee and customer surveys should be driven by research, facts, and hard data discovered through confidential one-on-one content interviews of a stratified, random sample of the target respondents. Interviews are a qualitative tool that are excellent for gathering word (rather than numeric) information, such as the issues of importance in your company. Surveys, on the other hand, are a quantitative tool for gathering numeric (rather than word) information. Interviews will tell us if 'communication,' for example, is an issue. In addition, interviews will also tell us whether communication is too fast or too slow (speed) or too much or too little (volume). Other numerous, some unexpected, aspects of communication and how they are working in your organization can also be determined. This way, highly specific survey questions are selected from our databases or custom-written. Then, the survey serves to identify where and quantify to what degree each specific aspect of each issue exists throughout the organization or customer base. This gives your organization an enormous amount of power to take precise, targeted action, saving huge amounts of time and money.

Go to Next Step: Survey Content Interviews.

"We were very pleased with the work NBRI performed for EDS…
and of the interviews, data, and analyses that went into it."

Mike Edwards
Manager, Quality Systems
Electronic Data Systems