Unlock honest feedback and drive meaningful change with these best practices for planning, executing, and following up on employee surveys.
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Employee surveys can be powerful tools for gathering insights, measuring morale, and generating ideas that help shape an organization’s culture. Not all surveys deliver meaningful results though. Some fail to inspire enough or fully honest participation, and others produce data that’s difficult to interpret or act upon.
To help you avoid these pitfalls, below are 10 ways to run more effective employee surveys – from the planning phase all the way through post-survey follow-ups. By incorporating these best practices, you’ll be better equipped to gather actionable feedback, respond thoughtfully, and foster greater trust within your workforce.
One of the most crucial steps in preparing for any employee survey is ensuring full support from your organization’s leadership (whether it’s the CEO, a board, or the executive team). When top executives or department heads visibly endorse the survey, participation rates tend to be higher, and employees feel more confident that their feedback matters. Leadership buy-in often involves aligning the survey’s goals with the organization’s strategic priorities.
For example, if one of your company’s objectives is to improve internal communication, your survey can include questions that ask about satisfaction with current communication practices and ask about areas for improvement. Make sure leaders understand how the survey fits into broader initiatives, such as retention, team development, and performance, so they can champion its value throughout the company.
In practical terms, leadership buy-in means they should:
Ok, you’ve got buy-in. Now to go about choosing a survey platform that will help you run your survey and analyze your results. Some platforms provide better reporting features and dashboards, helping you break down data by department, location, or other relevant demographics. When evaluating vendors, make sure you consider how many responses you may get and how much time you may have to spend assessing results and how a platform’s reports will factor in.
Peoplelytics, for example, is a comprehensive option that offers user-friendly interfaces for both survey creation and built-in reports for data analysis on your employee segments. It allows you to segment your workforce, compare different teams, and track changes in feedback over time. By selecting a platform equipped with these features, you’ll be able to more easily get to the heart of the issues positively and negatively impacting your workforce.
Look for a survey platform that provides:
Questions are the heart of your survey. If they’re too vague, too complicated, or fail to address key areas of concern, you’ll end up with useless results. Think carefully about what you want to learn. If you want to gauge how employees feel about support from managers, ask specific questions related to communication, recognition, or development opportunities. Avoid leading or biased wording, and consider a balance of both quantitative (rating scales) and qualitative (open-ended) questions. The open-ended questions often deliver the richest insights, even though they can take more time to analyze (thankfully tools like ChatGPT can help if you use those).
For instance, you might ask, “What’s one thing your manager does that really helps you succeed?” and “What’s one thing they could do to help you thrive even more?” These types of questions encourage constructive commentary, shining a direct light on strengths and growth areas.
In some cases, you may just ask one open ended question and let them empty all their thoughts there so you keep your survey more streamlined for maximum completion and limit potential survey fatigue.
If employees don’t clearly understand why you’re running a survey, how you’ll use the results, or when they’ll see outcomes, participation can suffer. Even just a simple heads up that a survey is coming and that you want their honest feedback is better than nothing. Many people worry that their responses might not remain anonymous or that nothing will be done with their input so why bother answering things anyway. Setting clear expectations can ease these concerns and encourage more honest, thorough feedback.
Some ways to go about this include:
A full list of ideas can be found here.
You can boost engagement with small, respectful reminders, ensuring you don’t overwhelm employees. If certain departments or teams have lower participation, consider having managers reiterate the value of the survey in a quick huddle or via email.
Generally, after 10-14 days of receiving the survey, those who were going to complete the survey will have completed it.
It’s easy to let good intentions slip through the cracks when you don’t have a structured timeline. Decide in advance how long the survey will remain open—often one to two weeks is sufficient. You should also consider if you plan to run the survey quarterly, bi-annually, or annually in advance as you can set expectations up front. Conducting them too often might lead to “survey fatigue,” causing employees to tune out your requests (monthly, as an example, would also make tracking and meaningful actions tough to complete on your end). On the other hand, waiting too long between surveys might result in outdated feedback by the time you’re ready to analyze it.
Many companies opt for an annual or bi-annual comprehensive survey. Some companies will supplement this with shorter “pulse” surveys throughout the year to keep a finger on the organizational pulse or even just a simple quarterly eNPS survey to have a single metric tracked multiple times through the year. Whatever frequency you choose, plan for it in advance, and communicate your plan so employees know what to expect. And so you can prepare for the prep work and the post survey work.
Great, your survey was sent out, and you got responses back! …Now what?
Once your survey is completed, you’ll (hopefully) have a wealth of data at your fingertips. The real work, however, is turning those responses into meaningful action. Below are five best practices to ensure that this next stage is taken care of in a timely fashion, transparently, and effectively – and that it aligns with what you communicated to your team up front.
It’s tempting to skim the top-level metrics, like the average employee satisfaction score, and call it a day. But to truly make data-driven decisions, you need more. This is where the analytics dashboard and ChatGPT can be incredibly useful. By having a systematic approach to comb through both numerical and written feedback, you ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
You may find it helpful to look for patterns in numerical scores and then compare these with the open-ended remarks to see if they align. If you have employee segments in your reports, those can be easy places to find initial call outs. For example, if your sales department reports high levels of stress but also mentions a desire for more flexible hours, that could point to a straightforward policy change that might boost morale and reduce turnover.
As you look through the results, themes will likely emerge, both uplifting and concerning. It’s important to celebrate positive feedback, especially if it highlights areas where your company excels or has invested, such as strong team camaraderie or robust professional development opportunities. Reinforce and expand on those strengths to keep them alive and well and make sure you communicate these so it’s not all just bad news.
At the same time, pay attention to potential blind spots or areas that multiple employees cite as needing attention. Identifying these recurring concerns early is the first step toward making strategic improvements. The more you can pinpoint exactly where these issues are arising (by department, management level, or specific processes) the more targeted your solutions will be.
Depending on your survey, some of these findings may require additional follow-up actions to gain clarity.
After identifying the key themes, you’ll likely want to gather more information to understand the root causes of any issues and how pervasive they may be. Follow-up actions could include:
These are just a few options. The aim is to keep the conversation going, ensuring employees understand that their survey responses are catalysts for meaningful change.
This goes hand-in-hand with #8. Once you have all the data and additional input from follow-up discussions, it’s time to craft a clear action plan. Detail what issues you’re addressing, what changes will be implemented, and the timeline for these changes. Assign responsibilities to specific individuals or departments to ensure accountability. Be realistic about what can be accomplished in the short term versus long term. Even modest, incremental improvements can have a lasting impact if they address employees’ most pressing concerns. Consider if you need budget to accomplish any of these items as well and even consider setting this as a potential need up front with leadership when embarking on this journey so it doesn’t come as a surprise.
For instance, if your survey results repeatedly mention the need for better work-life balance, you could propose a pilot flexible-hours program. Or if employees frequently mention a lack of career advancement opportunities, you could create a formal mentorship or leadership development initiative. We’ve got a full guide on post-survey next steps here.
The final step, and arguably one of the most important, is closing the feedback loop. Let employees know what you learned from the survey, what you plan to do about it, and when they can expect to see changes. This open communication builds trust and demonstrates that their voices truly matter. If some changes will take time or prove challenging to implement, be honest about that. Likewise, celebrate any quick wins or simple fixes you’ve been able to enact right away.
Be sure to involve your leadership team in these communications so that everyone’s on the same page and employees see unified support from the top down.
Employee surveys are most effective when you invest as much effort in planning and leadership alignment as you do in data analysis and follow-up. By securing leadership buy-in, choosing the right platform, crafting purposeful questions, setting clear expectations, and establishing a realistic timeline, you’ll set yourself up for a successful survey process. Once you’ve collected the responses, don’t let the data sit idle. Review it thoroughly (possibly with the help of AI tools), identify key themes, conduct further discussions where necessary, build an action plan, and communicate your intentions and progress openly.
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