Why you should say no to DIY employee survey questions

So you need to send an employee survey. Maybe it’s an exit interview, or to see how people feel about returning to the office – or you could be measuring employee engagement. Whatever it is, take our advice: don’t write the questions yourself.

Would you rewire your house, or build your own car? You could, of course, but it’d be a much faster and more professional job if you hand it over to someone else. 

5 reasons you shouldn’t write your own staff survey questions:

1. It’ll take you too much time: employee surveys are likely one small part of your role, so why spend hours writing them? Not to mention that self-penned question sets will likely need sign-off from senior management – leading to further delays.
2. Your response rates will suffer: our surveys keep your response rates high for two reasons: they’re short, and use questions proven to get people to answer. Fill your surveys with too many irrelevant questions, and you’ll see response rates drop.
3. They won’t be backed by research: we’ve spent a lot of time and effort studying survey questions, and pinning down which work the best – why not make your life easier, and benefit from that instead of starting from scratch?
4. It makes it harder to benchmark: our question sets have been in front of 1000s of people, so we can provide benchmarks for engagement and other areas. With a bespoke staff questionnaire, that’s just not possible.
5. Analysis won’t be as simple: our tech works regardless, but if you use one of our tried-and-tested question sets then you’ll find it a lot easy to slice-and-dice, analyse, and interpret your survey results.

We have employee survey templates for every purpose

We call them ‘deep dives’. Employee lifecycle, change management, engagement, inclusion: you can benefit from our wide range of deep dive surveys. Taking a laser focus means it’s a lot easy to build a strategy, plan actions, and generally take your next steps.

For whatever you want to ask your people, we’ve got a question set. But what if you’re not sure where to start? We can help you there too:

How to choose which deep dive survey to run:

1. Run a full scan: start off with our Organisational Fitness scan, which covers the width and depth of the employee experience. You’ll get a score (with proven links to KPIs!) but also see your performance in 16 different areas.
   
2. Identify key focus areas: from ‘leadership’ to ‘role fit’, you’ll see how your people feel about a wide range of topics. See your struggling in one area, and want to know why? Or spotted a strength, and want to learn more? Do a deep dive!
3. Run a deep dive: one customer of ours saw a lower score for ‘Innovation’, so they did a deep dive. Each one is broken down into four key areas, each with a mix of open-ended and closed questions, so they could identify what actions to take next.

Watch the demo, and learn about the many ways to use our platform: