Content 6
Preface 16
1 Characteristics and Types of Employee Surveys 20
1.1 Current Usage of Employee Surveys in Industry 20
1.2 Some Typical Cases of Employee Surveys 22
1.3 General Characteristics of Employee Surveys 24
1.4 The Purposes of Employee Surveys 25
1.5 Some Basic Types of Employee Surveys 27
1.6 On the Evolution of Employee Survey Types 36
1.7 Potentials and Risks of an Employee Survey 38
1.8 Employee Surveys and Naïve Models of the Employee 40
2 Positioning an Employee Survey 46
2.1 Positioning the Employee Survey 46
2.2 The Context of an ES 50
2.3 Positioning the Employee Survey through Top Management 62
2.4 Further Facets of Positioning an ES 66
2.5 Ethical and Legal Use of Individual Employee Data 70
2.6 Census and Sample Surveys 76
3 Coordinating and Planning the ES Project 80
3.1 Architecture 80
3.2 ES Project Plan 86
4 Content of Questionnaire 96
4.1 Approaches for Defining the Content of an ES 96
4.2 Standard ES Questions: The Individual Employee’s Perspective 110
4.3 Extending Standard ES Topics: Performance and Strategy 114
4.4 Extensions II: Further Psychological Topics 116
4.5 Topics Not Suited for an ES 119
4.6 Facets of ES Items 120
4.7 Importance as a Judgment Criterion 122
4.8 Typical Item Compilations 125
4.9 Demographic Items 126
5 Item and Questionnaire Design 128
5.1 Closed Items with Rating Scales 128
5.2 Response Criteria in Items 134
5.3 On the Psychology of Answering Survey Items 136
5.4 Items with Qualitative Response Scales 139
5.5 Comments 142
5.6 Open-Ended Questions with a Focus 145
5.7 Formulating ES Items 147
5.8 Scales and Single Items 151
5.9 Items in Different Languages 152
5.10 Collecting Demographic Information 154
5.11 The Structure of the Questionnaire 155
5.12 Layout of Questionnaire 158
5.13 Prognosis Questionnaires 165
5.14 Electronic Questionnaires 167
6 Processes of Questionnaire Development 172
6.1 Developing an Early Version of the Questionnaire 172
6.2 The ES Project Team’s Role in Questionnaire Development 174
6.3 Involving Stakeholders into Questionnaire Development 179
6.4 Pre-Testing and Pilot-Testing the Questionnaire 182
7 Sampling 188
7.1 The Population 188
7.2 Non-Random Samples 189
7.3 Random Samples 192
7.4 Sampling Errors 196
7.5 Sample Size 199
7.6 Response Rates and Nonresponse 202
7.7 Sample Construction in Practice 206
8 Information Campaign Before Data Feedback 210
8.1 Phases and Steps of the Information Campaign 210
8.2 Phase I of the Information Campaign: Before the ES 211
8.3 Bridging the Time of “No Action” After the Survey 217
8.4 Planning the Information Campaign 219
8.5 Style of the Information Campaign 219
8.6 Typical Questions and Answers 220
9 Data Collection 226
9.1 Survey Administration and Survey Logistics 226
9.2 Data Collection in Group Sessions 227
9.3 Data Collection by Postal Mail 235
9.4 Online Data Collection 239
9.5 Alternative Methods of Data Collection 245
9.6 Summary Comparison of Data Collection Methods 246
9.7 Measures to Increase Response Rates 247
9.8 Data Entry and Data Coding 256
9.9 Data Cleaning 257
10 Standard Data Analysis 260
10.1 Elementary Analysis of ES Data 260
10.2 Standard ES Reports 271
10.3 Focal Reports 272
10.4 Cross-Comparison Reports 278
10.5 Prognoses Reports 281
10.6 Standard Reporting of Answers to Open Questions 282
10.7 First-Results Reports for Employees 284
10.9 How to Organize Report Ordering 285
11 Designing Follow-Up Processes 290
11.1 Basic Components of the Follow-Up Processes 290
11.2 Approaches to Designing Follow-Up Processes 294
11.3 Communicating the Organization’s Official Response to ES Results 301
11.4 Creating Dialogue as a Response to Survey Results 303
11.5 Cultivating Individual Responses to Survey Results 305
11.6 The 7+7 Approach for Rolling-Out the Follow-Up Processes 308
11.7 Response Sequences for Individual Managers 310
11.8 Criteria for Planning and Evaluating Follow-Up Processes 311
12 Nonstandard Data Analysis 314
12.1 Interpreting ES Results 314
12.2 Experience-Based Hypotheses and ES Results 316
12.3 Benchmarking 317
12.4 Using Theory to Interpret ES Data 326
12.5 Deep Statistical Analyses 329
12.6 Business-Oriented Frameworks for ES Data Interpretation 337
12.7 Triangulation and Other Views onto the Data 340
13 Presenting Survey Results to Management 342
13.1 Structuring an ES Presentation 342
13.2 The ES Presentation Process 351
13.3 Adding Punch to the Presentation 355
13.4 Motivating Managers to Act 358
14 Employee Survey Workshops 362
14.1 Foundations of ES Workshops 362
14.2 Typical Design of an ES Workshop 366
14.3 The Participants of an ES Workshop 376
14.4 The Facilitator of an ES Workshop 376
14.5 Organizing and Preparing an ES Workshop 378
14.6 Discussing ES Results 382
14.7 Tips and Hints for Facilitating an ES Workshops 387
14.8 Variants of the Traditional ES Workshop 395
14.9 Alternatives of the Traditional ES Workshop 397
14.10 Planning Batteries of ES Workshops 401
14.9 Additional Follow-Up Work on ES Workshop Results 402
15 Action Management 408
15.1 Developing Ideas for Actions 408
15.2 Organizing Actions 411
15.3 Foundations of Action Planning 417
15.4 Simple Action Planning Tools 418
15.5 Planning Complex Actions 420
15.6 Controlling Action Implementation 423
15.7 Soft Factors in Action Management 428
16 Information Campaign on ES Results and Responses 434
16.1 Information on Results and Management’s Responses 434
16.2 Information on Actions 435
16.3 Planning and Organizing the Information Campaign 438
16.4 Communication as Part of Planned Change Management 444
17 Evaluating Employee Survey Projects 446
17.1 Project Evaluation and Learning 446
17.2 Evaluating ES Projects 447
17.3 Evaluation Methods 452
17.4 The Practice of ES Evaluations 458
References 466
Author Index 482
Subject Index 488

1.6 On the Evolution of Employee Survey Types (p. 17)

From a historical point-of-view, the UIMP and benchmarking ES are relatively modern types, whereas a climate ES or an employee poll are older approaches. Systemic employee surveys are the most recent developments. No ES type is obsolete, however. Most employee surveys today are really mixtures of different types. It therefore makes little sense to order different ES types along an “evolution” dimension (Higgs &, Ashworth, 1997). What is true, though, is that many progressive organizations have led the ES through an evolution from a passive monitor of mood to a proactive tool for implementing HR strategy (Hinrichs, 1991, p. 301).
In the literature, employee surveys are mostly positioned as instruments of organization development (Moorehead &, Griffin, 1989, Nadler, 1977), change management (Hellriegel, Slocum, &, Woodman, 1992), or as “survey-guided development” (Pacific Gas and Electric Company, 1991). This perspective is appropriate even if the ES officially only serves diagnostic purposes because the survey’s results will always influence management’s action—even without a step-by-step model of how the survey results are systematically transformed into such activities. Hence, it makes sense in any case to at least consider what needs to be done to feed back the results easily and reliably. What works in one organization, however, may not work elsewhere because the managers in one company, for example, may not have the skills to read a standard ES report or because the established reward systems in another company prevent using the ES results in certain ways.
Taking an organization’s specific context into account rather than using a standard questionnaire has become the normal approach not only in employee surveys, but in surveys in general. Indeed, in the 1970s the focus was almost completely on designing the measurement instrument, and a variety of standard instruments were developed and used over and over again in many different contexts. Little was done to optimize even the most immediate survey processes, such as methods of achieving a high response rate. In public opinion surveys such topics were first picked up by Dillman (1978) in what he called the total design method. The TDM simply studied the effects that different seemingly trivial design elements (e.g., the layout of the questionnaire or the letter of invitation) have on the total response rate. With the new survey administration possibilities, the TDM was extended to a tailored design method (Dillman, 2000). In the context of employee surveys, a tailored design perspective extends to a much wider action field, covering multiple processes for designing, participating in, and acting upon the survey. The way a tailored approach began in the 1970s was by carefully adapting the language of standard questionnaires to the specific jargon of the particular company under study, by adding company-specific items (e.g., on the company’s strategy or on certain hot topics), and by computing company- specific indices from the ES data.