Creating a survey is simple these days, but getting valuable insights can be extremely difficult. Knowing what’s under the surface is critical.
Remember the last time your boss said to you, “Let’s send out a quick survey and see what happens” ? What happens next is pain. For you.
Common stages are:
- Quickly respond with a message like, “sounds good. I’m on it”.
- Panic. Sweating. Shakes. (No it’s not the coronavirus).
- Ask your team to go find someone with a surveying account.
- Bang a (bad) survey together.
- Send it to 50 people you know.
- Get about 10 responses.
- Spend 3 months debating what it all means.
- Spend 6 figures getting “the experts” in (you know who).
- Spend 2 years getting “the experts” out.
- Go work somewhere else.
I’m exaggerating, of course. But, even so, surveying is actually really tricky.
Sure, you can knock out a bad survey on one of the well-known cloud platforms really quickly. But getting valuable insights is another matter entirely. That’s where you’re going to burn time, money and valuable credibility.
Because surveys are like icebergs.
What’s going to get you killed is the bit you can’t see.
In fact, even the bits you can see are hard to do, particularly:
- Survey science and how to avoid bias,
- Analysing the data so it makes sense,
- Creating dashboards to help others understand,
- Segmenting the results by meaningful categories, such as regions or Personas.
What seems like a quick survey can quickly turn into a huge headache.
Ask yourself a question.
The first step to running a good survey is to ask yourself a question: what am I trying to find out. If you’re looking for valuable insights into what people think then a quick survey is one option, but it’s not the only option. And it comes at a cost.
If you want to know more about understanding what employees care about speak to Voxxify and let us and our full stack employee insights platform take care of all the tricky stuff for you. Quickly. Quietly. Reliably.
