The way employees experience their work environment is related to their engagement with the organization and to the company’s success. Understanding this motivates more and more companies to listen to their employees, using organizational surveys.
When you decide to conduct an organizational survey, you first need to define the type of survey you wish to conduct (in methodological terms: the research question). This methodological stage is the primary step in every survey and must come before you decide on the specific survey indicators (in methodological terms: variables) and certainly before writing down the survey questionnaire.
Many times, especially if your company don’t hold a structured survey plan, you have many ideas as to what you want to examine: organizational engagement, job engagement, internal organizational service, internal communication, managerial climate, values assimilation, overall organizational mood, employee satisfaction and so on. In fact, every question concerning employee attitudes and social dynamics in the organization can be the basis of an organizational survey.
All organizational surveys have a common goal: to measure the climate in the organization and help the organization’s management understand what the employees are thinking and feeling. But to get the most out of them, surveys must fit as much as possible to your specific organizational need (in methodological terms: survey validity).
So, how do you choose the correct survey, one that will help you answer your organizational question? Simply googling “organizational survey”, “engagement survey”, “employee satisfaction questionnaire” and so on, reveals huge number of surveys, most likely not all fit what you had in mind, and now go figure out which is the right one for you.
To organize the process of selecting the most appropriate organizational survey and help managers validly examine the organizational issue they wish to focus on, I grouped most common organizational surveys into five series, which I refer to as “Organizational Surveys Typology”:
Series 1: Organizational engagement and employee experience surveys
Series 2: Direct manager and managerial climate surveys
Series 3: Internal service experience surveys
Series 4: Employer branding surveys
Series 5: New work world surveys
In my book Measure up I present this typology of common organizational surveys and discuss the main surveys in each of the five series.
This typology is aimed to help managers to navigate in the endless sea of organizational surveys ideas and types, and to make the correct first step in the wonderful process of the organizational survey.
