Yearly Archives: 2024

One of the common mistakes that people make when conducting surveys is forgetting that people are giving up their time to answer your questions.  Even if you are paying them an incentive to compensate in some small way for their time, the reality is that they are still giving up their time for you and what you want to know from them.

Their responses are often invaluable, but only if they actually respond!

You see, it is easy to think of the people answering your survey as merely ‘respondents’.  When this happens, chances are that the survey being created for ‘respondents’ is going to be all about you and the questions you want to ask.  It is easy to expect that respondents will simply answer any and all questions you send their way.  Afterall, the job of a respondent is to respond, right? 

But this is not really how it works.

The people you want answers from are constantly being offered plenty of other things to occupy their time and attention, and if a survey hasn’t been developed with this in mind, you are highly likely to lose them during the survey, or not even have them start the survey.

There is nothing more deflating than creating a survey and putting it out there to the world, and nobody responds.

Think of respondents as ‘customers’ of your survey

This probably sounds like a simple idea, and it is.  Instead using the term ‘respondents’, think of these people as customers.  Like any customer, you want to delight them, take care of them, and make it all about them.  Simply by doing this, you start to reduce the chances that you will create a survey that nobody wants to respond to.

With this as the starting point, you are in a better position to collect better information and be able to make better decisions.

The main reason anyone would conduct a survey is to discover what other people think.  And therefore, understanding and interpreting survey results is a very important part of the process.

Whilst individual survey results are always interesting, the power of surveys is often to compare the results with previous surveys that have run to see what has changed.  This of course requires the survey questions to be the same from survey to survey, although our advice is that you keep a core group of questions the same, and then change others depending on priorities and circumstances.

The problem is that comparing survey results can be a time-consuming exercise, and often a very manual process. Ideally, the results of questions that are the same can be displayed next to each other simply and easily to instantly see what is changing over time, and this is what you get with Tandem.

The key to Tandem’s reporting power is the use of Tags.  Throughout the system, whether it be an audience that is uploaded into the platform, or individual survey questions, a ‘Tag’ can be added to almost anything in the platform.  A Tag is simply an identifier that links pieces of information together for the purposes of reporting, and you will notice that throughout the platform, there is a place for a Tag (e.g. survey questions, surveys and individual recipients).  For example, let’s say you conduct a survey in September 2023, and then again in February 2024.  You could add the tag ‘Sep23’ to the first survey, and ‘Feb24’ to the second survey, and then generate a report using each Tag, and then compare these surveys.

Instant comparison of data.

If you have any questions about comparing survey results over time simply and easily, please get in touch with us and we would be delighted to help you out.

If someone doesn’t believe that their answers in an employee survey are truly anonymous, your chances of getting to the ‘truth’ are significantly reduced.

There are a number of differences between surveys conducted with employees compared to other audiences like customers.  The main one is that employees have a boss who influences their day-to-day experience at work, whereas customers don’t.  A customer’s experience is all about your product or service, whereas an employee’s experience is as much about the people they work with, and their boss, as the company itself. 

This is an important thing to remember when designing an employee survey, because whilst customer survey’s rarely need to be ‘anonymous’, employee surveys are often described as anonymous to encourage truthful and honest feedback.   In our experience, a team member would rather give ‘good’ answers than face the wrath of their boss for giving ‘honest’ feedback.  Who wants to make their life any harder at work!

However, many employee surveys are not genuinely anonymous.  Whilst a summary report of the answers is usually an aggregate of all the responses, the survey software itself, in the database, offers survey administrators a detailed report of exactly who said what for each question.  And when this is available, there is always the possibility that a survey Administrator will be asked to reveal who said what in specific cases.  If employees feel like this is happening, the chances of them answering truthfully to describe situations where truth is important become much lower.  Or if a survey company is being used, the survey company can often see exactly who said what, and team members can feel that if pressed, they will reveal who said what.

This is why at Tandem, we have created a genuinely anonymous mode for employee surveys.   When anonymous mode is selected, even Administrators cannot see how each individual answered each question.  If someone doubts this, an Administrator can invite a person to take a look at the software itself.  It simply can’t happen.  With complete confidence that surveys are genuinely anonymous, you are likely to get access to what is really happening within your organisation with Tandem.

If you have any questions about anonymous employee surveys, please feel free to contact us.