As a business leader, you know the value that employee feedback can have for improved workflow and corporate expansion. While it may seem like you’ve won half the battle after creating a survey, you’ve only just begun.
The next step is getting people to participate in the survey that you’ve just created. The last thing you want is a meeting with employees on their phones, merely pretending to take a survey that you put tons of thought into. You want them to not only pay attention to your survey, but actually participate in it.
How do you do that? Some simple psychological tricks and tips will ensure you can not only have a higher participation rate but do so with minimal effort.
At MeetingPulse, we’re here to provide you with the tools and human resources for valuable surveys at your business meetings and events. Let’s have a look at some easy methods that will help get people to take your survey.
Related: Is Your Company a People Company?
1. Have Them Want To Take Your Survey
Creating a message that conveys that the audience is being heard or makes them feel special is a great way to get them to take your survey. By incorporating messages like “We want to know what you think” or “Please take out 10 minutes to fill out our survey”, you convey two important things.
First, you create a sense of requirement and necessity, and second, you provide the user with an estimate of the time it would take to finish the survey.
A message like this makes the audience feel valued and gives them a clear idea about how their opinion is beneficial to you. This is an especially important survey element for companies looking for employee feedback about workplace environment and productivity.
2. Provide An Incentive
Incentives like money, reward or recognition motivate people to take action. The same can be applied while convincing someone to take a survey. Instead of taking them begrudgingly, they’ll open up their laptops enthusiastically. Even if there’s a promise of a small reward at the end of the survey, users are more likely to take it as they feel that it justifies spending their time on a survey.
To get people to take a survey, incentives can range from a tech upgrade to monetary benefits such as discounts or gift cards.
Related: Leverage Incentives – Increase Employment Engagement
3. Keep It Short
Did you know that 45% of people don’t want to spend more than 5 minutes on a survey?
Keeping your survey short and the content precise will result in more participation and reduce the percentage of people leaving the survey midway. Curate questions that will result in maximum interest, relevance and serve the purpose of the survey.
4. Precision Is Key
What happens when your questions are wordy and too elaborate? Surveyors end up getting confused, and either end up selecting the inaccurate question or leaving the survey. The percentage of erroneous answers due to confusing questions is as high as 40%.
How do you solve this? By giving people “an out” early on ensures you aren’t wasting their time if the survey isn’t applicable to them. Not only does this give you more accurate data, but it also keeps the end goal of the survey intact.
A good “out” is including an option like “Never Used” or “Don’t Use” at the beginning of the survey.
Selecting the type of questions also plays an important role. 87% of people prefer answering multiple-choice questions over open-ended ones. Multiple-choice questions typically prove easier to process for data analysis, although it can be helpful to include a written feedback section at the end of the survey.
5. Use The Internet To Your Advantage
With the majority of modern-day consumers shifting their focus online, it’s time for marketers to do so as well. Only 3% of people prefer sending their surveys through the post, which brings your attention to the remaining 97%.
Be present everywhere. Your audience receives many emails throughout the day, even if they don’t want to, your survey is more likely to get ignored. How do you tackle this? The art of omnipresence. Apart from emails, there are many channels you could use to get people to take your survey.
Embedding them into your social channels or messaging boards for employees are some options that you can consider.
Surveys are more effective when the user “finds” them. It is important to keep in mind that you don’t spam them with suggestions and keep a healthy balance of requests. It is also important that you exclude those who have already participated.
Timing Is Key
Instead of sending out messages online and hoping your employees will notice your surveys, a better option is to invite employees to complete surveys during meetings and conferences.
You can even incorporate surveys into Powerpoint. This provides a centralized place and time for people to fill out surveys. Otherwise, employees will gloss over a survey to fill it out at “some later date” (in other words, probably never). Have employees take surveys five minutes before an event is over before they are already leaving.
6. Ensure Low Disqualifications
On the point of keeping your surveys relevant, it’s crucial to make sure that the surveys are sent out to the right people or departments in your business. To get people to take your survey, you need to be precise in ensuring the surveys are reaching the right people.
If someone, for example, gets disqualified twice or thrice, they’re highly unlikely to participate in your survey again. By ensuring that this doesn’t happen, you’re encouraging people to participate in the surveys that you send out.
In Conclusion
The core agenda of these tips is to get people to take your survey and provide accurate data while doing so. By following these steps, not only do you ensure that the surveyors are motivated to take your survey but also that the answers provided are as accurate as they can get.
Whether it’s employee satisfaction or customer review, you want to understand how your audience is feeling or how they’re likely to react in a particular situation. Ensuring your communication is clear and that your survey is a quick one, you’re paving the way for a smooth survey experience. Thus, you’re more likely to come to accurate conclusions based on the data presented.
By increasing the number of people taking the survey with these small tweaks, you’re left with more data, higher chances of accuracy and a large focus group that otherwise would’ve not been the case.
Understanding the needs and motivation of employees for taking a survey and then drafting a clear message that is sent through multiple channels will result in higher participation and a positive brand image in the minds of your consumers and audience. Optimize the timing of your survey to increase the likelihood of a high response rate.
At MeetingPulse, our way of incentivizing employees to take surveys is through live polling solutions. With MeetingPulse, you can create interactive and engaging surveys to gain insightful feedback from your valued employees.
Related: Leading with Compassionate Communication
