Should you build your survey in-house or use a third-party? Many businesses base their decision on the premise that they already have the tools in place. If you’re running Office 365 you have Microsoft Forms, Google G-Suite provides you with Google Forms and products such as Survey Monkey offer a simple and low-cost option. If your operation is small and budgets are minimal, then solutions such as these will be worth considering.

However, areas such as employee engagement are likely to involve the input of expertise from HR and maybe other specialists. In a large organisation, scaling up a survey and implementing the necessary resources and knowledge is a challenge.

It’s not just bricks and mortar!

To use an analogy: You could build your own wall, saving cost, probably providing personal satisfaction and gaining knowledge of how it is constructed. However, you often don’t know what you don’t know until you start down this route – there will be building regulations to understand, safety issues, bricks and the right tools and mortar to buy. Similarly with an employee engagement, or other survey, there will be GDPR issues, technical security concerns and the question of how to ensure scale. The premise of your survey may be quite specific and you will need to understand the desired, and potential, outcomes and what you are measuring – in all, quite an academic exercise.

Once your survey is designed and set up, it needs to be executed and completed. People don’t always give honest answers to their own company! Therefore, maybe consider whether a trusted third-party can improve responses and help people feel freer to give their thoughts. Running your survey in-house may also prove to be more challenging when trying to keep responses anonymous – somewhere in the business individuals may be identifiable.

And when the data has been gathered, you need to do something with it. Gathering data can be fairly straightforward but ensuring a good level of response rates across the company needs communication and effort. It’s important to show you’ve done something with the results, which involves analysis and distribution to relevant managers, teams, Board members and other stakeholders. If you’re trying to measure engagement and do something about the issue, it will be necessary to measure it again later on to see whether you’ve moved the dial – what has the effect of your survey been? Otherwise doing a survey is just a data gathering exercise.

Ensuring accuracy and the right way to feed back, at a granular level, to the right people is critical to ensuring action can be taken at the point it’s needed which may not just be the directors at the top. And you need to consider the two types of data, quantitative and qualitative. The direct comments in your qualitative data will reveal more of the story but are hard to analyse and feedback – but being able to do this is important to help make the results meaningful.

We’d love to discuss your planned surveys with you to see if we can take on the effort of building that wall for you!

About any-3: your friendly builders

any-3 is an ISO2701:2021 compliant, UK-based company. We write, own and develop our own technology and are able to be flexible and innovative as a result. We have experience of working across a number of types and size of business and our Cloud-based software allows data residency in the appropriate region (UK, Europe, US or Asia etc.) and scalability as needed.

As a third-party, we’re well positioned to make sure that individuals can’t be identified in survey data sets to ensure they give honest feedback. All reporting is based on aggregated statistics.

Our platform is built and managed in-house, allowing us to easily adapt our proven technology to meet specific needs and, where required, integrate this with our clients’ existing systems and programmes.