Survey fatigue happens when employees are repeatedly asked to provide feedback and then that feedback isn’t acted on or even acknowledged. The trick to avoiding this is to write actionable surveys and plan ahead to share the results of your survey. Use our employee survey checklist to make sure you are prepared to write, implement, and follow up on every survey you send.
What is Survey Fatigue?
Survey fatigue is when an employee becomes exhausted by the process of being repeatedly asked for feedback and never seeing any response or acknowledgement of their feedback. Many companies cite fatigue as the reason why they don’t survey or get employee feedback as often as they probably should.
How Can You Design Surveys to Avoid Survey Fatigue?
Even though survey fatigue is a very real phenomenon, the solution to it is not to stop surveying your people. Instead, the best way to avoid survey fatigue is to design an actionable employee survey and response plan.
Here’s how that works:
- Keep your surveys as brief as possible. Try to avoid sending surveys that are long and arduous to complete. Employees are less likely to answer too many write-in and ranking questions because they are time consuming. You might even have success doing a combination of 1 – 3 question pulse surveys mixed with a longer survey once per year.
- Design your survey to be actionable. When you design an employee survey to be actionable, you automatically reduce the number of questions you ask. How? Because for every question you assess whether or not you can or are willing and able to react to the feedback. This can help you trim the fat.
- Create a follow-up plan. The ultimate cause of fatigue with taking surveys is a lack of response after surveys are completed. So, don’t send out surveys unless you are prepared and able to analyze the results, share the results, and create an action plan as a result.
Our Employee Survey Checklist Contains:
- Tips for writing surveys that give you actionable insights.
- How to implement your surveys and make sure you follow up.
- Advice for measuring the results of your employee survey.
- Ways to share your results to make the biggest impact
- How to create an action plan for every survey you send and prevent survey fatigue.
