Assessing Your Workplace and Finding Underlying Issues the Right Way

As someone who helps run or who runs a business, knowing the underlying causes of problems and workplace issues is one of the topmost priorities you have. Despite how large or prominent some organizations may be, there surely exists issues that trouble the employees, and ultimately, the organization itself. To get to the root cause of issues, there are two methodologies that are quite effective—employee feedback surveys and 360 feedback surveys. Want to learn more? Well then, read along to find out the right way of going about it.

But before we do that, you have to fully understand what these two surveys are. First of all is the employee feedback survey which is pretty straightforward. The employees of a company take part in surveys designed to find out causes of issues. This ultimately helps management to take care of the issues and rejuvenate employee engagement.

On the other end is the 360-degree feedback survey. A 360-degree feedback survey is also performed by the employees of a company, but the respondents’ identities are anonymous. In other words, no one knows who is saying what in the final responses that you collect. Anonymity helps the employees feel more comfortable answering more freely and honestly. However, if the results from a regular employee feedback survey and a 360-degree feedback survey are very different, especially with the latter one being more negative, then you need to understand that your employees find it difficult to speak up – which is a huge problem that needs addressing before any other problem that you find through the surveys.

There are best practices when it comes to asking employees about the workplace. You need to be emotionally connective, talk more about feeling (to understand how they feel), and avoid being confrontational. Doing a few wrongs might be actually destructive as you won’t be able to get respondents to answer honestly.

In a nutshell, both employee feedback survey and 360 feedback survey can help you gather the much-needed insights that can be used to improve the quality of the culture in the workplace. You should strive to take a deep dive into the behavior of the employees to understand the why instead of solely focusing in on the superficial metrics.

Breaking Down the Science of Analytics in Online Surveys

Analytics are very important when it comes to deploying, tracking, and controlling your survey campaigns. Many different online survey tools offer different services and functions for all three of the mentioned parts.

If you can’t do analytics properly, you won’t be able to maximize the effectiveness of your surveys. In other words, the proper functionality of a survey and its connection with the respondents is only fully explored when the analytical backend is strong.

Usually, entire teams work on analytics—including dashboard analytics—in big firms. Even in smaller firms, when surveys are deployed, proper analytics ensures that the responses are used to their full potential. Monitoring the distribution channels of the surveys is also extremely important and it falls under analytics.

At more advanced stages, the more sophisticated survey administration companies leverage advanced technology to facilitate the automatic tracking and monitoring of survey data. These can also dispatch useful information, trends and usage patterns, valuable insights, and customer response pattern to the administrators at regular intervals. Such automation saves a ton of time.

Analytics can also include the tracking of user behavior. For example, one could determine which age group responds more favorably to certain items. In other words, do respondents have a positive, neutral, or negative outlook on that matter?

All this information will help you scale your product, service, experience, or initiative better. But you need to ensure that the target base is broad enough to support a variety of opinions within the narrowed-down user segment that you choose as the ideal respondent.

The creation of a dedicated business intelligence dashboard is the recommended next step for better analytics. A business intelligence dashboard is basically a portal where all the key performance indicators, usage patterns, recorded responses, and metrics collide. Together, they form a network of information displayed via a variety of data visualizations. These visualizations help to accelerate the insight gathering process, and consequently, helps organizations more quickly adapt to different changes.

Generally speaking, analytics comprises the tracking of metrics and KPIs. Each survey campaign will have multiple objectives. All of these objectives have to be in perfect alignment with your business goals while also being emotionally appealing to the respondents.

The data from analytics are not to be handled improperly. Information from dashboard analytics is very useful and it should be channeled properly to be used effectively for the benefit of the business. In fact, many businesses and survey administration companies are quite effectively connecting survey data and insights to measuring their or their clients’ KPI value. That is, they are evaluating how effectively and swiftly a company is achieving the high priority business goals.

To fully maximize the insight-gathering potential of your surveys, dedicated analysts and survey project managers, such as those found at Ambivista, are recommended.