Things to Discuss With Your New Provider
Discuss what went well and what didn’t. Perhaps you got a great response rate throughout your organisation’s hierarchy to your last survey, but administering it was a logistical nightmare. What could be done better?
With response gathering, you need to decide whether your current method works, or whether it needs to change. If your response rate is 75% or above, you’re probably doing fine. Any lower, and you may need to change your administration tactics, either through new ways of response gathering or improving communication.
And with reporting design, how do your current reports resonate with executives and with managers? Are they positive? How much investment has gone into teaching managers how to use and navigate reports? What works and what doesn’t in your current reporting structure?
Working on the Questionnaire
Decide whether you want to keep your old questionnaire and model, or change it. Look at the items and ask the following questions:
- Is there still room to improve within an item set? Very high scores on all items mean that it’s probably time for a refresh.
- Is this item set still relevant and in line with current organisational priorities? There may be new initiatives or values you want to include.
- Do you measure managers or business leaders against item scores? We don’t recommend this, but if you do, you’ll need to consider how changing items will impact scores and therefore their measurement.
Mapping Old Data to New Data
A good employee engagement provider will be able to stitch together your old and new data if needed. When you make the transition to a new survey, you may want to compare it to previous survey scores.
Provided you’ve kept the same item structure, you’ll be able to do a like-for-like comparison.
To find out if this is worth doing, consider how long it has been since your last survey. If more than three years, there has probably been so much change that it may not be comparable now. If a lot of change has occurred, such as a major restructure, comparing results may not be at all valuable.
It’s possible to take your old survey data across to a new provider so you can keep comparing your results with previous years. You’ll need to have kept the same item structure and run your surveys frequently to make it worthwhile.
What You Need From Your Previous Provider
If you want to provide full historical comparisons back to your last survey, you will need your previous provider to deliver raw (individual response) data from your last survey.
Although this isn’t something you’re likely to have already, providers hold it and are obligated to make it available to your new provider on request.