AN INTRODUCTION TO EMPLOYEE RESEARCH TECHNIQUES
Electronic/Web-Enabled versus Paper-Based Employee Surveys
Increasingly, organizations are starting to move towards electronic methods of surveying their employees and the most common method is hosting a web-enabled survey. This type of survey offers many benefits including:
- Cheaper and easier to administer than a paper-based survey,
- Availability of real time response rates,
- Giving each respondent a unique access password prevents employees from completing more than one survey,
- Allows employees to be routed to certain questions based on their type and/or their responses to certain questions without them knowing they are being routed,
- Ensures all respondents answer every question they are asked.
However, before deciding that this is all too good to be true and that a web-enabled survey is the best option, consideration should be given to the following questions:
- Do all employees have, or have access to, a PC that has external Internet access?
- Are all of the employees sufficiently computer literate to complete a web-enabled survey?
- Do you have field-based employees and, if so, how would they complete a web-enabled survey?
- Can your IT Department provide the necessary assistance with the survey?
- Is the culture in place for it and would it adversely affect the response rate if the survey were web-enabled?
If some of these problems exist, then it may be more appropriate to initially administer a mostly paper-based survey with a small scale web-enabled pilot in the most appropriate parts of the organization. In future years, the web-enabled element can be increased until it completely replaces paper-based completion.
Insightlink Communications offers both web-enabled surveys and paper-based surveys that are customized to each individual company's needs.
|
|
