Manufacturer Triples Employee Survey Response Rates With A Third-Party

A large corporation reached out to Drive Research to conduct an employee survey. The idea for the employee survey was to conduct a short, 10-question survey with employees every three months. 

The survey would include some employee survey key performance indicators (KPIs) that would be measured in each survey, as well as other questions to address new ideas/topics for improvement.

Initially, the company conducted employee surveys internally but saw low response rates.

Drive Research finds that improving employee survey response rates is due to 1) ensuring the questions asked were engaging and actionable and 2) ensuring employees understood the survey was being conducted by a third party and their responses were kept anonymous.

The employee survey process with our third-party market research company often includes a kick-off meeting, survey design, third-party survey invitations, data cleaning and analysis, and a debrief meeting to discuss how to take action with the results.

For this project, one of the keys to success was the pre-survey notice and the survey invite. Employees must know their responses will be collected by a third party and will be kept confidential and anonymous.

The pre-survey notice should be sent to employees from the leader of the company a few days before the first invite is sent. This sets the tone for the research, let's employees know who to expect the invite from, and confirms anonymity. 

While the survey results remain completely confidential with the client, our employee survey company was able to get more than triple (3.6X) the number of responses compared to when the survey was conducted in-house. 

Truly, our secret to success is setting up clear communication with employees to confirm the employee survey will be conducted with a third party company.

The pre-survey notice can be customized and sets the tone for the research. The survey echos the sentiment from the pre-survey notice ensuring employees of their anonymity.