Incorporating Past Employee Attitude Survey Results in a New Survey

The time and money you put into deploying an employee attitude survey is not just a short-term investment. Rather, the responses you collected on your employee attitude survey can continue to be of use to you and your organization in the months and years to come.
Employee attitude surveys are a snapshot of a particular point in time in your organization. Therefore, it is expected that attitudes will change over time—hopefully for the better as a result of the data from your survey. This means that you should issue a new employee attitude survey on an annual or semi-annual basis. You can also roll out shorter surveys on a more frequent basis, depending on your current corporate environment (e.g., downsizing, mergers).

The beauty of conducting employee attitude surveys on a frequent basis is that you always have relevant results to incorporate into your next survey. For example, a past employee attitude survey may have revealed that workers were unhappy with communication between upper management and their departments. In this case, you would definitely want to include questions on this topic on your next employee attitude survey.

You can also use past results from an employee attitude survey to establish internal benchmarks. Internal benchmarks are an effective way to compare where your company stands today versus in the past. These benchmarks are based solely on past employee attitude survey results from your company. By comparison, external benchmarks are based on an average of the data collected from many companies of different sizes from different regions and in different industries. Therefore, the data used to create the benchmarks may not align as well with your individual business. You will be able to use your previous results as a starting point for measuring improvement. Take the results from the previous employee attitude survey and decide how much improvement you’d like to see this time around.

If you’ve used an employee attitude survey in the past, there are several steps to take in order to incorporate your past results into your new survey. First, look back at the data. Let’s continue using the previous example of management-employee communications. In this case, you would refresh the HR department and other team members about the findings. How did people feel about the communications between upper management and employees? How strong were their beliefs about these issues? How did their opinions color their overall attitudes about the company?

Next, review the action plans that your team created as a result of the survey’s findings. What did you say you would do in order to improve employee attitudes? More importantly, did you actually do it?

You’ll now be able to craft questions for your new employee attitude survey. It’s important to ask the same questions as you did on the previous survey so you can have a direct comparison of results. You’ll also be able to ask questions on how your actions were perceived by employees. Did they notice a difference in management-employee communications? Were they aware of programs or initiatives that were created as a result of the last survey? These types of questions will help you evaluate the success of your prescriptive actions and will help you create more relevant action plans in the future.
The more often you use employee attitude surveys, the more you’ll be able to track your progress on certain issues over time. When you can show improvements in areas of concern to your employees, you’ll possibly see a corresponding improvement in their attitudes. They’ll feel as though their opinions matter, and they’ll be more likely to continue participating in employee attitude surveys.
Flex Surveys can help you incorporate past results into a new employee attitude survey for your company. We want to see you succeed, and our surveys are designed to be flexible to your particular needs.

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