What's Changing in Employee Surveys

Things are changing when it comes to the ways organizations think about employee surveys. While employee engagement continues to be the dominant paradigm in employee surveys, our members regularly tell us they are moving away from the traditional employee survey approach in favor of new alternatives.

For example:

• Members who attended the i4cp 2015 Conference in Scottsdale this spring heard Chris Broderick, head of workforce analytics at IBM, describe how, in response to direction from the CEO to do something new, IBM implemented changes in its survey methods that included an enhanced all-employee survey process, a myweekin3words pulse-style feedback approach, and internal and external social media sentiment analysis.
• i4cp member T-Mobile, as part of its path toward adopting powerful brand-aligned HR practices, has created Employee Voice, a hybrid approach that features an integrated, flexible combination of an all-employee survey, pulse surveys, and internal and social-media content tracking and analysis.

Survey vendors too, aware of changes in customer preferences, are positioning their new offerings as non-traditional. Qualtrics, a popular research and survey platform, recently offered a webinar on employee engagement best practices that attacked "the traditional engagement program and the disengaging engagement survey."

Additionally, survey options readily available as alternatives to the traditional approach have expanded as new companies such as TinyPulse and CultureAmp offer innovations in survey design, reporting, and timeliness.

In an effort to get a better view of the changing survey landscape, i4cp is hosting a study to better understand the state of contemporary practice in employee and organizational surveys. The goal of the study is to collect, analyze, and publish up-to-date information on survey practices that would be of interest to survey project sponsors and practitioners.

You're invited participate in the study (which closes Friday, November 6). Help us explore and understand how survey practices are changing and why. Take the survey now.

Feel free to forward the link to interested colleagues. i4cp will produce a report of what we learn and all participants in the study will receive an overview of study findings.