How do I report and analyse an employee survey?

  Most organisations will have 2 reporting needs:

1. HR must know the common themes affecting join, stay and resign behaviours and
2. The management team must know which strategies and policies you want to change to improve retention as a result

Data collation

Open-ended questions results in better quality data. However, these types of questions also present challenges in collation.  A number of options are set out below.

Remember, we’re doing exit interviews so that retention solutions become obvious!  Approximately 20 interviews are needed before the major themes are able to be established.

There are at least 5 relatively simple ways to collate data.

Option 1: Question by question

Open-ended questions such as ‘What attracted you to the organisation?’ can be collated question by question. For example, gather all interviews and collect all responses to the first question. Review all responses to determine the main themes relating to that question. Then repeat that approach for each remaining question.

Option 2: To support an intervention

Collect all responses for questions that will guide a particular intervention. For example, if the organisation wants to test its employer branding, collate questions relating to why employees joined the organisation and what they would tell their friends. If the organisation wants to review its manager’s effectiveness, use the responses to any manager-related questions to guide those decisions.

Option 3: High value employees

Another collation alternative is to isolate interviews from key employee groups. For example, say you really needed to retain your sales people. Isolate all interviews from former sales people to determine issues affecting those employees. This approach works best when there are more than 10 respondents in a group, as fewer respondents means that common themes will not emerge.

Option 4: Demographic analysis

The demographic questions lend themselves to easier data collation and analysis. Demographic questions are those at the conclusion of the questionnaire which collect information about age, gender, location and so on.

Collate your interviews when you have at least 20, or a number that is sufficiently large that you’ll have enough material by which to draw reliable conclusions