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The main reason anyone would conduct a survey is to discover what other people think.  And therefore, understanding and interpreting survey results is a very important part of the process.

Whilst individual survey results are always interesting, the power of surveys is often to compare the results with previous surveys that have run to see what has changed.  This of course requires the survey questions to be the same from survey to survey, although our advice is that you keep a core group of questions the same, and then change others depending on priorities and circumstances.

The problem is that comparing survey results can be a time-consuming exercise, and often a very manual process. Ideally, the results of questions that are the same can be displayed next to each other simply and easily to instantly see what is changing over time, and this is what you get with Tandem.

The key to Tandem’s reporting power is the use of Tags.  Throughout the system, whether it be an audience that is uploaded into the platform, or individual survey questions, a ‘Tag’ can be added to almost anything in the platform.  A Tag is simply an identifier that links pieces of information together for the purposes of reporting, and you will notice that throughout the platform, there is a place for a Tag (e.g. survey questions, surveys and individual recipients).  For example, let’s say you conduct a survey in September 2023, and then again in February 2024.  You could add the tag ‘Sep23’ to the first survey, and ‘Feb24’ to the second survey, and then generate a report using each Tag, and then compare these surveys.

Instant comparison of data.

If you have any questions about comparing survey results over time simply and easily, please get in touch with us and we would be delighted to help you out.

If someone doesn’t believe that their answers in an employee survey are truly anonymous, your chances of getting to the ‘truth’ are significantly reduced.

There are a number of differences between surveys conducted with employees compared to other audiences like customers.  The main one is that employees have a boss who influences their day-to-day experience at work, whereas customers don’t.  A customer’s experience is all about your product or service, whereas an employee’s experience is as much about the people they work with, and their boss, as the company itself. 

This is an important thing to remember when designing an employee survey, because whilst customer survey’s rarely need to be ‘anonymous’, employee surveys are often described as anonymous to encourage truthful and honest feedback.   In our experience, a team member would rather give ‘good’ answers than face the wrath of their boss for giving ‘honest’ feedback.  Who wants to make their life any harder at work!

However, many employee surveys are not genuinely anonymous.  Whilst a summary report of the answers is usually an aggregate of all the responses, the survey software itself, in the database, offers survey administrators a detailed report of exactly who said what for each question.  And when this is available, there is always the possibility that a survey Administrator will be asked to reveal who said what in specific cases.  If employees feel like this is happening, the chances of them answering truthfully to describe situations where truth is important become much lower.  Or if a survey company is being used, the survey company can often see exactly who said what, and team members can feel that if pressed, they will reveal who said what.

This is why at Tandem, we have created a genuinely anonymous mode for employee surveys.   When anonymous mode is selected, even Administrators cannot see how each individual answered each question.  If someone doubts this, an Administrator can invite a person to take a look at the software itself.  It simply can’t happen.  With complete confidence that surveys are genuinely anonymous, you are likely to get access to what is really happening within your organisation with Tandem.

If you have any questions about anonymous employee surveys, please feel free to contact us.

In our last blog article, we suggested that a company’s people are a wonderful source of suggestions and ideas about how to improve what the company does, ultimately leading to better experiences for customers. Afterall, a company with a growing number of happy customers is one that has a bright future.

However, tapping into the Inner IQ of the company is not necessarily something that many companies do particularly well. Whilst many companies already do employee surveys, these are often mostly focused on an employee’s experience and less about how to improve what the company provides to customers. Whilst business leaders are often in a very good position to look at big picture improvements, it’s often the little things that can make a big difference. It’s the people who are doing their job every day, who are closest to the action, who are in the best position to suggest any number of improvements that could be made, but they are rarely asked in any meaningful way. Imagine how many simple and easy-to-implement ideas there might be across the entire company right now!

Our suggestion is to do this by creating what we call a Performance Improvement Drumbeat. Rather than conducting a single survey, think of it more as a repeatable process to help collect valuable information on a regular basis as part of a continuous improvement program. Tapping into your company’s Inner IQ.

The first step is to decide on whether this is something that you are willing to commit to properly. There is nothing more frustrating for team members than being asked to identify potential opportunities for improvement and then nothing is done with this information. People will not participate in the future, and the opportunity will be lost. You are better off not doing anything at all, than conducting any form of data collection and not doing anything with the results.

If the answer is yes, this sort of exercise is something the company should be doing and is willing to take action, the next step would be to communicate this to everyone. It can be as simple as spreading the word through teams and asking them to be on the lookout for things that don’t make sense, or are getting in the way of them doing a great job. You want to tap into the expertise of the entire team, and a great way to start is to get them thinking about these sorts of things in advance of any official activity being conducted. Anything they are noticing is likely to be relevant because they are closest to the action.

The next step is to set up a simple survey in Tandem asking for their suggestions and ideas. The trick is to not create a situation where people are just complaining about things, we want to ask in a way that ensures everyone is offering constructive suggestions that will not only improve their own experience, but also lead to the company creating better products, services and experiences.

Within Tandem, you will find a library of just a handful of important questions that you can ask all team members. These are all open-ended questions, which is a really important because context is extremely important. It’s the only way to do this properly, however the issue with this is usually that it is hard to analyse large amounts of text data.

We at Tandem have solved this problem with our paid membership plans, which come with our text analysis tool. Not only will these answers be automatically summarised, Tandem will also be able to offer suggestions about what to do next.

And of course if you need our help, you can always get in touch with us and tap into the expertise of our experienced team.

If you are a business owner, leader or manager, chances are your day to day working experience is heavily influenced by the current performance of the business.  If things are going well and customers are buying your products and services at profitable prices, this usually correlates with a happy team who are able to keep doing a great job.  Your job is enjoyable.

However if pressure is high and there is constant talk about cutting costs and discounting prices, team member worries and anxieties can consume their attention, reducing their ability to do their job well.  The irony is of course that when things aren’t going well, this is when you need everyone to be at their best. These are the times when your isn’t all that enjoyable.

So how can we help?  Think of Tandem as your solution to collecting important information about important things.  Instead of just thinking about doing a ‘survey’ that collects information about the experience of customers and employees, you can also use Tandem to support a process of continuous improvement to build a better business.

How to use Tandem to build a better business?

One of the biggest opportunities missed by most companies is to engage the company’s greatest asset – it’s team members – in a way that helps to keep improving the company and building a better business. For example, most companies do an employee survey that focuses on asking team members about their experience. Whilst this is not a bad idea, it can be a missed opportunity. Most of your competitors are probably relying on leaders and managers to make all the suggestions about how to improve the business, but you can build a better business by asking for their suggestions for how to improve things. You see, every team member in your company plays a role in producing what the company offers to customers. Because they are so close to the action, they are the most likely people to be able to spot a potential problem BEFORE it ends up disappointing customers.

By implementing a regular process to tap the inner intelligence of your company on a regular basis (we suggest quarterly), it means you are creating a performance improvement drumbeat that keeps improving things. These improvements don’t need to be expensive things that take ages to implement, it’s the benefits of many small improvements right across the company that can make a very big difference to your overall performance.

In our next blog post, we will look at the questions you can ask as the basis of your continuous performance improvement drumbeat.

Over the last few decades, business leaders have sought out more and more sources of data that can help support decision making.  Surveys have become a common example of this, and with online surveys being an incredibly efficient way of collecting opinions from people, they are used for many different purposes.  For example, many companies will send surveys to their customers and employees to gather feedback about satisfaction, experience, safety, culture, and more, often using different surveys. 

The challenge of course is that, like we have highlighted in other articles, survey fatigue is a real thing.  We are all constantly being asked for feedback about various aspects of our lives, and the reality is that people are less likely to engage with you if you keep asking them what feels like similar questions over and over again.  They have plenty of other things to do with their time.

So what is one to do when survey data is so valuable?

One thing you can do to is to plan survey activities in a way that respects the people you want to survey.  Instead of doing three surveys to a particular audience, do one.  And highlight just how important their feedback is on that occasion.  It’s a small gesture, but it will certainly help to make sure you are not annoying people.

But won’t this make my surveys too long?

And herein lies your challenge.  We have also suggested in other articles that long surveys are never really a good idea.  The more questions you ask, the less likely someone is to finish answering all the questions.  This is where survey design becomes a form of art, because often you can ask one great question that will give you loads of great feedback instead of asking several.

Long surveys will not work for you.

Luckily at Tandem Surveys, we have a lot of experience in helping to create highly effective surveys that are not too long to engage your audience.  If this is something you need help with, simply get in touch with us.

The whole reason for doing a survey is to collect the opinions of many people and then analyze the results in a way that leads to taking appropriate action. Otherwise why would you do it in the first place?

However, survey data analysis is a bit of a murky field sometimes, especially if the analysis wasn’t considered at the same time as the survey design. Once you have sent a survey out to people and they have answered it, it is extremely difficult to get them to re-do it if the survey wasn’t designed appropriately with the analysis in mind.

So in this article, we will explore a few simple ideas to ensure your survey can be analyzed in a meaningful way.

What is the purpose of your survey?

Generally speaking, surveys can serve a number of different purposes including measurement (how well is something happening or not happening), context (to explain why something is or isn’t happening), or confirmation (is this thing happening or not). Most surveys serve these and more at the same time, however it is important to consider from the outset what your primary goal actually is. This will help you to ensure you are asking relevant questions and are not making the common mistake of adding too many irrelevant questions that just make the survey longer.

Consistency of displaying scale questions

A scale question is simply where you ask people to rate something on a scale of say, 1 to 5, where each end of the scale is assigned a value on a continuum. For example, from 1 Strongly Disagree to 5 Strongly Agree. Notice here how the lowest value is the ‘negative’ option, whilst the highest number is the most favourable option. Often, a number of scale questions are used one after another, and they are a simple way to answer questions, good for the survey taker. Some people would suggest mixing up the scales to ensure people are paying attention, but our recommendation is to keep scale questions displayed consistently so that the unfavourable response is on the left, and the favourable response is on the right. This will ensure that there has been no confusion on behalf of the survey taker, and that your results will be easier to analyze.

A little bit of context is better than none

When you start to design a survey, it is very easy to keep adding questions because you will keep thinking of things to ask. The thought process is usually something like ‘whilst they are answering, we may as well ask them everything at the same time’ which is actually counter-productive. If a survey is much longer than 10 minutes, most people will switch off by then. So instead of asking lots and lots of scale or multiple choice questions, you might ask a question and follow it up with an open ended question. For example, if you were to ask How likely are you to buy from us again? Very unlikely, unlikely, not sure, likely or very likely ( a five point scale), you might simply add a follow up open-ended question like ‘Why did you give that answer?’. The context you get from this question will be invaluable and will reduce the length of the survey.

There are many other factors to consider when designing a successful survey, but if you start with these you will at least put yourself in the position to be able to generate results that are easier to analyze and interpret.

And of course if you need some help, simply get in touch with us.

In the world of surveys, there is a term called ‘survey fatigue’ that describes the feeling of people who are asked to do too many surveys.  If you think about it, almost every company in the world is trying to gather feedback from their customers and employees (and other stakeholders), which adds up to a whole heap of surveys being sent to people.  And this leads to survey fatigue.

The reality is that grabbing someone’s attention to do a survey is not necessarily easy. Even when incentives are offered, there are a few things to consider to ensure your survey won’t be instantly ignored.

So how do you increase your chances of having people answer your surveys more regularly? Here’s a few expert tips…

• Use everyday language.

There is almost nothing more boring than receiving a survey that has no personality.  If the wording is boring and it doesn’t feel like it is ‘speaking to me’, then there is a strong chance it will be ignored.  There are so many other things that someone can do with their time, so you want to try to connect with people in a voice that they feel speaks to them in their language.

• Check for errors and spelling mistakes

If someone asks you to do something but then they haven’t thought it through, it can be frustrating.   The same goes for a survey.  If someone sees an obvious spelling mistake or an error in the survey, they will stop doing it and you will struggle to get their attention in the future.  They need to know you have carefully considered everything before asking the to invest time answering questions.

• Share back the results

One of the biggest criticisms of surveys is that they become a very one-way conversation.  Someone gets asks a bunch of questions and then doesn’t hear anything about how their contribution made a difference or changed anything.  Most people won’t engage in one-way conversations for very long, whereas sharing the results will often increase the chances of someone participating again in the future.

• Most importantly, consider whether you would do it yourself

Probably the best tip we can offer is to complete the survey several times yourself as if you were the recipient. It sounds obvious, but it is possibly the thing most commonly ignored. If you do the survey and get bored or aren’t engaged in the process, imagine what others are going to think when they receive it. Put yourself in the shoes of the person answering it, and you will know what changes you need to make to the survey before you send it.

And remember, if you have any questions about creating and designing surveys or need some general assistance, simply get in touch with us here at Tandem Surveys.

Whether you are a small or medium-sized business, gaining feedback from your customers and employees is extremely important, and surveys are a great way to do this.  A common question is how to make sure you get the most out of any surveys you conduct.

One approach is to employ the services of an external consultant to write the survey, manage it and analyse the results.  Whilst this is likely going to provide you with important expertise and an excellent outcome, sometimes the cost of doing this is prohibitive for a small or medium sized business.  Especially when budgets are tight.

Another approach is to purchase a subscription to an online survey platform (like Tandem Surveys), and do it all yourself.  This is usually the most cost effective approach, however many of our customers find that this also takes quite a bit of time, more time than they would have initially expected.  They also find themselves doubting their own ability to create the right survey and make sure they get the answers they need.  There is certainly an art to getting the best from surveys, and it is extremely important to ask the right questions. It is really easy to accidentally ask questions that don’t provide the answers you need, which wastes the survey exercise.

At Tandem, we have created a third option which provides the best of both of these worlds.  We call it Do-It-Together.  In other words, you can do some of the work which helps you to save on costs, and we can provide our expertise at various critical points in the process (like checking your survey, and helping to understand the results).  You get the benefit of our many years of experience without having to pay for doing everything.

Since offering this as an idea to a handful of our customers, it has become an extremely popular approach for small and medium sized organisations who care about gaining accurate feedback from their customers and employees. It is also something that we really enjoy supporting.

If you are unsure about whether the survey you are about to run is going to give you the best result, perhaps consider doing it together with us. To learn more, simply get in touch with one of our team here at Tandem Surveys.

When it comes to doing surveys with Employees, one of the most important things to remember is that you will want honest feedback.  The problem is that with many survey platforms, the person who is managing the survey can see the answers of each person who answered.  In this situation, employees will often be worried that if they provide honest feedback, but their answers are taken in the wrong way, they might get into some sort of trouble.

And so they just give the answers that they think people want to hear.

But not with Tandem Surveys.  We have something that we call Anonymous mode, and you can select this at the time you create the survey.  What this simply means is that any reports will not display the answers alongside the people who answered them.  There will be no way to identify people, and this gives respondents the confidence to answer with confidence.

With Tandem Surveys, you can honestly tell your employees that the survey is anonymous, and that their answers will be reported in aggregate only.  You won’t be able to identify their answers.

If you need help with Employee Surveys, or are looking for ideas about how to run really effective surveys, simply reach out to us.