Designing the questionnaire to use in your upcoming employee survey might seem like a daunting process, but it really can be a very simple one.

If you really want to spend a lot of time and money (we aren’t suggesting this alternative) you can hire a high-priced consultant and spend a few months doing focus groups with your employees and reviewing literature on the subject.  We think our way is better.

Over the years we have worked with hundreds of companies.  We have developed a series of base questions we know work well for most organizations.  We interview each client to understand the employee issues facing them, the organizational goals, the benefits package and anything else the client can bring to the table that might affect the questionnaire design.  We craft custom questions to address the issues raised.  Clients sometimes suggest specific questions, which we evaluate to make certain they are properly worded.  We then exchange Microsoft Word versions of the questionnaire with the client, making revisions until we have a final draft.  We then program this draft for the Internet.

This results in a questionnaire that is both customized to your needs and includes questions for which we have collected benchmark data from hundreds of thousands of people.

A typical questionnaire will include between 50 and 70 scale questions (questions asking the user to select a rating from a discrete set of choices, such as a one-to-five scale), a handful of demographic questions (such as department and role in the organization) and two or three open-ended questions to collect employee comments.  Once programmed, such a questionnaire takes 15 to 20 minutes, on average, to complete.

Each time a client resurveys their employees, there is the opportunity to make modifications to the questionnaire.  Clients sometimes suggest ideas that have surfaced.  We also review the prior period’s survey results to see whether the comments made by employees suggest new questions and whether there are questions that can be dropped based on the quadrant analysis we conduct.

The entire process usually takes a few days,  It can be shorter or longer depending upon the approval process within  the client organization.