Betting On a High Response Rate

By Frank Basile

Recently Voice Project was engaged to deliver an employee engagement survey within an Australian university. The university had previously run their employee surveys internally but wanted to switch to Voice Project to take advantage of our extensive sector benchmarks. In a pre-survey planning meeting, I met with Henry, the employee who was responsible for implementing their previous internal surveys. In the meeting, Henry described how they had never achieved a response rate higher than 20%, which meant they couldn’t be entirely confident in the accuracy of the results. He believed the low response rate was simply due to a lack of interest from staff and didn’t think it would make a difference to have an external provider involved on this occasion. He was so confident that we would fail to exceed 20% that he challenged me to a bet over a case of beer. Now I’m not a gambler or a drinker, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

In pre-survey focus groups, I learnt that there was a degree of truth behind his comment about a lack of interest from staff. One staff member claimed there was no point in responding because management had “never done anything with their feedback in the past”. We commonly hear this concern when exploring why staff choose not to respond to staff surveys. However, it couldn’t be further from our experience, as most organisations we work with use their survey results constructively to make significant improvements to their workplaces.

This was certainly the intention of the management team of the university. But they admitted that they hadn’t ever made a public commitment to action in the lead up to previous surveys. So this time, in addition to clearly articulating the purpose of the survey, they were transparent about when and how post-survey communication and action-planning would take place.

But this wasn’t the only resistance factor. Within most surveys you will find a set of demographic questions which typically ask for personal information, such as age and gender. In the focus groups, one staff member highlighted her fear around this. “I’m the only female aged over 50 in my team. Clearly I can be identified by the demographics”. Whilst she had a desire to express some strong opinions, she felt that if she expressed her views honestly it would likely come back to bite her.

This was essentially an issue of trust. Now, one way to increase trust is to procure a third party organisation to run your survey, which is what this university did by contracting us. But it’s not sufficient to just take this step and think your response rates will look after themselves. Clear communication about how a staff member’s confidentiality will be maintained and who (if anyone) will see their individual responses is critical. For the university, we made a promise to staff that we would not provide group data back to management unless 10 or more people from a particular group responded, thus ensuring safety in numbers.

But what’s to say that the survey company won’t break their promise to staff? If a manager wanted to go on a witch hunt, couldn’t they bully the provider into releasing an individual’s responses?

You’ll find that most surveying organisations have their reputation at stake and wouldn’t be willing to take such a risk, despite them having the power to do so. At Voice Project we take this further. As all of our consultants are registered or provisionally registered psychologists, we are bound by the Psychologists Code of Ethics. This means that not only is our organisation’s reputation at risk if we break confidentiality promises, but also our personal reputation. The university took the extra step of reinforcing this point to their staff.

These were just a couple of steps they took to attempt to boost their response rate. Other steps included ensuring management buy-in at the survey design phase, placing large posters around campus, hosting a series of launch barbeques, including incentives both for groups and individuals and sending regular reminders.

Fast forward a couple of months and we completed the survey, with almost 70% of their workforce choosing to take part. We stuck to our confidentiality commitments and the organisation stuck to their post-survey communication and action-planning commitments.

As for the bet… Henry, if you’re out there, I’m still waiting for my case of beer!