If the Stanard & Associates Employee Survey is identified as the best option given a company’s objectives, survey planning is much less involved than for a custom survey. However, issues of survey coding, distribution and administration must still be addressed. Also, the off-the-shelf survey affords the opportunity to provide up to 15 additional items and the opportunity to create a customized cover page for the survey.

If a company wishes to create a customized survey, Stanard can proceed in several ways. Stanard can conduct a number of individual interviews with key constituencies to identify primary topic areas for potential inclusion in the survey. The issues can be summarized across interviewees and presented to a survey project team to determine final issues to be measured in the survey. Or, Stanard can conduct a focus group with a survey project team to identify the important issues and can then start to select survey dimensions and items with the team. After that, the psychologist creates a draft of the survey and provides various drafts until it is approved.

In most cases, Stanard uses items from its item database to include on a survey. In some cases, we write custom items for a client if none of the items in the database relate to the issue(s) being measured. Stanard follows some simple guidelines when writing survey items.

• Ask what you want to know in the simplest way possible.
• Cover only one topic per item.
• Use familiar phrasing and terminology; avoid jargon and confusing language.
• Make sure the items apply to everyone rather than a specific group.

Feel free to contact Stanard if you would like recommendations on how to phrase items that measure issues of interest to you.

An essential part of the survey process is determining the classifications for which you want to receive results. You might want to receive results by location, division, department or supervisor. Respondents will be asked to code their surveys so you can get results for these subgroups, so it is to consider this very carefully. It is not possible to get results for a subgroup for which there was no important code prior to survey administration.

When Stanard works with its clients to create coding structures, it asks the client to consider a couple of things. First, what is the size of the group that will be using the code? In order to preserve anonymity and survey integrity, reports are not generated for groups of less than five people. Creating coding systems that continually request small groups of employees to identify themselves can create concern about the anonymity of their responses. Typically, groups of less than five employees are combined with another group for coding purposes. Second, make sure there is a code that everyone taking the survey can use and that each employee can use only one code in each classification.

Pre-survey communication and post-survey communication are also discussed in the planning phase. Stanard usually provides clients with suggestions and samples of these forms of communication, but we have found that the messages are most effective when they originate from within the organization itself.

Once the survey instrument and process have been planned, the next step is survey administration.

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