Survey best practice

Surveys are becoming an almost daily experience. We are asked for feedback regularly when we come into contact with businesses. Providing your participants with an easy survey experience can help improve both participation rates and the quality of the data gathered.

Here are some best practice tips by topic:

Survey questions

Your survey audience will be diverse. They'll bring a range of perspectives to your survey and a range of literacy skills. So it's important to keep this in mind when writing survey questions. You need to ensure your survey questions can be understood by as many people as possible. This allows you to capture as many perspectives as possible.

Recommendations

• Limit question types: Try to use a consistent response format that allows people to focus on the question’s meaning rather than learning what all the answer options are.
• Write great questions: Everyone who takes your survey benefits from clear and simple questions. It supports people with varying levels of literacy but it also reaches much wider than that. If people are clear on what you're asking, the more robust the data you collect will be. Take a look at our guide on how to write great survey questions.
• End with a positive or open question: Finish the survey with a question that either allows participants to think of something positive or allows them to have carte blanche to share anything that the questions may not have covered. E.g. 'What is it that you like most about working for our organisation?' or 'Please add any comments about anything else you wish to tell us'. This way, participants will feel that they have had an opportunity to have a voice.

Survey length

It's tempting to try and ask as many questions a possible, but research shows that long surveys are likely to decrease the quality of responses as well as participation rates.

If a survey is too lengthy, participants might lose interest and start "satisficing". This is when the more questions asked, the less time people will spend providing thoughtful answers, hence reducing the value of the feedback.

It is important to be mindful of participants' workload and to design the survey to fit in with this rather than add to their stress levels!

Recommendations

• Limit the baseline survey to a maximum of 60-70 scale-based questions: This usually keeps survey completion time to under 15 minutes.
• Limit free text questions: Most organisations will want to add a few free-text questions to act as a catch-all for additional feedback as well as to provide qualitative data to support some scores. We recommend no more than free-text questions for a full baseline survey to avoid significantly increasing the estimated time to complete the survey.

Survey content

When creating a survey, make sure to have a clear idea of what you want to find out. Do you want to get a picture of your organisation's general performance?  Do you need to focus on a particular topic such as Leader Effectiveness, Project Management or Health and Safety? An AskYourTeam survey template exists for most topics, which will give you automatic access to a list of focused survey questions.

You might also want to use a set of questions that are specific to your organisation or to support a particular initiative or project. You can use the Build Your Own survey template to do this and add up to 20 custom questions.

Recommendations

• Demographic information and report filters: Add demographic information to your survey will determine how you can review your results once the survey closes.  Demographic categories/options become your report filters when viewing reports. Do you want to compare results based on gender, location, people leader or department? Add these as your demographic options when creating the survey.