How often have you completed a survey and then forgotten all about it as you never heard anything else about it? Or even worse, run a survey with your team, but then been so overwhelmed by the feedback that you’ve received that you’ve put in the “later” pile and it’s never seen the light of day. Rest assured, you’re not alone and there are 4 easy steps you can take to make sure your survey feedback gets actioned.
A key factor in the success of any survey is the post survey actions. Below is an outline of the steps we suggest you take to ensure the results of your survey are implemented, improvements identified and real change is affected and felt by your project team and/or organisation:
1. Assign an owner to ensure accountability
Ensure you have one person who is going to drive the survey process. This person is not responsible for actioning all the feedback, but ensuring that the feedback is brought to the attention to relevant owner, actions assigned, followed through and communicated to the wider organisation.
2. Share the results and communicate the action
It’s important that you share the results of the survey to the survey participants, project team, department and/or organisation as soon as you receive them. Whether you email them or present the findings at a staff briefing or morning tea, this allows the participants who took the time to complete the survey a chance to see and hear what others thought, what action management is taking and to find out what the next steps are.
3. Action the feedback
Assign the feedback to the relevant owner and then send the consolidated feedback, actions and response to the entire organisation. If staff know that you have taken the time to respond to their suggestion and concerns, it encourages future feedback as well as closing the loop so it doesn’t just become “another survey/waste of time”
An easy and effective way to do this is to follow the below template:
| Key Result Area (KRA) | Feedback/Issue | Owner | Response/Actions |
| Culture | Having the office split in different locations is causing silos and an “us and them” mentality. Is this going to be looked at? |
Anne Smith | Space is at a premium and although we would prefer for us all to be located together, we are unable to until our new office space is ready at the end of this year. In the meantime, we are starting regular staff briefings which will be shared between both office locations, and for those that are working remotely we are implementing a new video conferencing tool that will allow us to communicate more effectively in real time. If you have any more ideas of how we could improve this, please speak to your manager or myself. |
By ensuring each KRA owner is assigned to the relevant feedback, it doesn’t become a time consuming exercise as we share the load, empower people to action and staff see that their feedback is being responded to. You will also guarantee a great participation rate by staff in future surveys as they will see action and improvement happening.
4. Regular Monitoring, Retesting and Reporting
A one off survey isn’t going to allow you to track what the progress is, how the initiatives you have implemented are working, and won’t track future improvement. By regularly running the diagnostics, it will allow you to see the trends and identify areas which need attention as soon as it occurs, not when it is too late. Ensuring that each time a new cycle is run, you remind people of the importance of providing feedback and include some of the initiatives that have been implemented since the last cycle allows for greater buy in. What gets measured gets improved and what gets focussed on will deliver tangible change to the staff on the ground.
By taking these easy steps you’ll be well placed to make sure that you’re that your survey results are actioned and the feedback sticks, allowing improvements to be made. And after all, isn’t the whole point of the survey to identify your areas for improvement and to make the changes necessary?
