5 ways to gather better employee survey data

The more effort you put into cleaning up your data, the more it’s going to tell you.

This is certainly the case for employee engagement surveys. If you don’t take the time and effort to create representative demographic groups, your data will be all over the place and won’t tell a complete story.

Here are five common mistakes organizations make, along with course corrections to consider:

Mistake:  Avoid grouping employees into generic demographic groups such as age, tenure and gender. Broad segmentation can yield some useful insights, but having such wide parameters makes it difficult to take meaningful action on behalf of workers.

Solution: Consider how your organization functions, and break employees into tightly targeted groups such as division, department, job level and location. This will more accurately pinpoint organizational strengths and weaknesses, and it’ll help you gather more substantive, relevant data.

Mistake: It’s also misguided to segment workers into hyper-specific groups based on job title. For example, your organization might have employees with the roles of “Director of Insights,” “Senior Analyst,” and “Analyst.” They’re all doing similar work but are separated in your demographic breakdown.