About Surveys

By Scott M. Smith Ph.D.

Employee attitudes, burnout tendencies, passion factors, loyalty, workplace climate, and competitive intelligence are key indicators for employee satisfaction, retention and productivity.

Qualtrics employee tracking will increase employee satisfaction and reduce employee turnover, thereby strengthening your organization. Many companies waste their organizationís HR training and mentoring efforts because employees are dissatisfied and leave. Employee satisfaction can be identified, tracked and improved with timely and accurate survey information.

Key Measures in an Employee Satisfaction Survey

The front line employee is where company meets the customer. The front line is critical to your business. From the customer's perspective, your front line employees are your business. Your organization depends on their service quality, productivity and passion to meet the needs of your customers.

Employee satisfaction surveys help your front line employees to coming together to achieve productivity goals and to provide high quality customer service and help your company achieve excellence.

Employee Satisfaction measures will help craft effective people strategies using our powerful and unique management tools to track indicators of quality, dissatisfaction and customer turnover, and precede actual employee decisions by months. Qualtrics has the most powerful survey software in the world we can help you learn more.

Find Out How to Measure Employee Satisfaction

By conducting an employee satisfaction survey with Qualtrics, you'll gain valuable information from the people most important in your organization — and fast. The Qualtrics do-it-yourself online survey tools are supported by experts in the survey and HR industry. Our experts will help you determine how to best measure employee satisfaction and answer questions like:

Scott Smith is the founder of Qualtrics.com. He is the James Passey Professor of Marketing and Director of the Institute of Marketing at Brigham Young University. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing and Quantitative Methods from Pennsylvania State University.

Building or creating a great survey is a struggle for most researchers. Understanding how to build a survey starts with understanding the research process. The most important step is simply properly formulating the problem that you are trying to understand. Simply stated, if you don't formulate the problem correctly, you can never build the optimal (or even good) survey or questions.

The best approach to build a survey is outlined in the following steps:

1. Review the basic research objectives of the study.
   • What is at the heart of what you are trying to discover?
   • What actions do you want to take as a result of the survey?
2. Visualize all of the relevant information items you need.
   • What will the output report look like?
   • What charts and graphs will be prepared?
   • What information do you need to be assured that action is warranted?
3. Prepare a written list of the topics in items 1 and 2 and order them according to their value in solving the research problem. List the most important topics first. REvisit items 1 and 2 again to make sure the objectives, topics and information you need are appropriate. Remember, you can't solve the problem if you don't ask the right questions.
4. Next, ask yourself "How easy or difficult is it for the respondent to provide information on each topic? If it is difficult (they probably don't know, can't remember, can't access the information or won't take time), then ask yourself if there another way to obtain the information. Perhaps asking another question or using another data collection technique.
5. The fifth step in building a survey is to review the sequence of topics to make sure they are unbiased. Do the questions asked first influence or bias the results of the next questions? Sometimes providing too much information. Perhaps asking another question or using another data collection technique
6. Determine the type of question that is best suited to answer the question. We must also think about the type of data produced by a given question type.
   One easy way to do this is to create a table in MS Word or Excel that has three columns:

   Question	Answer Format	Type of analysis to be conducted
   Enter the questions	Enter the possible answers and their answer format: Categorical, Ordered, Ranking, Rating. open-ended text questions, dichotomous, multiple choice, rank order, multiple choice matrix, Likert or Semantic Differential scales, constant sum, conjoint, side by side	Percentages, frequency counts, means and standard deviations, cross tabulations and statistical tests (chi-square, t-test, ANOVA, regression, multivariate analysis).

   In column 1, we enter the questions. In column 2, we indicate the possible answers and their format: open-ended text questions, dichotomous, multiple choice, rank order, scaled or constant sum (ratio scale). Finally, in column 3, we determine the type of analysis (percentages, means and standard deviations, cross tabulations and statistical tests). Do the question and answer formats provide enough robustness to meet analysis requirements.

7. Write the questions. You will need to write several versions of each question when you are building your survey. Building a great survey and building great questions often take six or more drafts. Select the best one.
8. Review the question sequence for bias and logical flow.
9. Repeat all of the steps above to find any major holes. Are the questions really answered? Are the answers what you really need to know? Have someone review it for you.
10. Time the length of the survey. A survey should take less than five to ten minutes. At six questions per minute, and depending on the question difficulty, you are limited to about 30-40 questions. When building a survey, remember that one open end text question counts for three multiple choice questions.
11. Pretest the survey to 20 or more people. Obtain detailed feedback . . . critically look at their responses.
    • Do they make sense, or do they have a different frame of reference than you had imagined.
    • What were they unsure about?
    • Did they have questions?
    • Did they have trouble understanding what you wanted
    • Did they take a point of view not covered in your answers or question?
12. Revise your questionnaire and pre-test again or begin data collection.