For many years I worked in the corporate environment in large organizations. These organizations had substantial Human Resource and Information Technology departments. When it came to running an employee survey it was only natural that they should use these vast resources. Typically response rates to employee surveys were less than 30%. These response rates were considered to be the norm and aside from a few comments lamenting the low response rate, no one paid much attention.

Today I am on the other side of the fence. I have worked with corporate clients for the past nine years providing various kinds of employee surveys. Recently, I had the opportunity of speaking with HR staff from several organizations. These organizations were scouring the internet to collect questions so that they could create their own employee survey. Once they assembled these questions they were planning on running their own survey process in-house.

At first blush this does not sound like an unreasonable approach. However, I asked the HR staff to consider the following.

Privacy and Confidentiality

One of the most significant issues from an employee’s perspective regarding employee surveys is privacy and confidentiality. It has been our experience that most employees have a low comfort level knowing that their responses to the survey are contained in their company’s computers. Despite a company’s best efforts to ensure that unauthorized access to the survey data is protected, the fact remains that it is company staff that are working with the data and conducting the analyses. In the minds of employees, confidentiality has already been breached. Whether it has or has not is not the issue. It is the employees’ perception of what may happen that will ultimately drive the response rate.

Several years ago Entec was faced with a situation where the company president said that he was prepared to move forward with an employee survey but since he was paying for the survey he wanted the database as well as the survey report we were going to prepare. We had no choice but to walk away from this project. We could not provide unequivocal assurances to the employees that their privacy and confidentiality would be secure.

These concerns can be significantly minimized when employees are advised that a third party will run the complete survey process. For example, in the pre-survey communications, Entec advises employees that there is a firewall between the organization and Entec Corporation. No employee can access our computers. No employee or company official will see or have access to our database. Any special requests by senior managers or anyone else in the company to look at the data is flatly rejected. Incidentally, this has happened on a couple of occasions over the past nine years. Privacy and confidentiality are serious matters and they cannot be compromised. Employee surveys are a two edged sword. On the one hand employees welcome an opportunity to provide feedback. On the other hand they will not participate or they will not provide honest answers if they feel in the slightest that their privacy can be compromised. Response Rates

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