When HR manager Theresa Lane wanted to find out what employees liked and didn’t like about HR’s policies, she decided to do a survey. Problem: People weren’t responding — until she figured out an irresistible, and inexpensive, hook.
Her story:
Whenever we made changes in benefits and HR policies, we liked to get employee feedback to ensure everyone was on board with our ideas.
The typical way of doing that was to send out an employee survey and then tally and analyze the responses.
Problem: Before you can tally and analyze the responses, you have to have some responses. People either just weren’t filling out the surveys or were taking forever to get them back to us.
It was frustrating, but we understood that employees were busy and kept putting the surveys on the back burner. We had to give them a good reason to respond.
Let’s do a good deed
We got an idea when one of our employees talked about taking up a workplace collection for a local charity.
Our suggestion: The company will make a small donation to the charity for every completed employee survey.
That gave us a champion for the cause – the person who was collecting for the charity and would “talk up” taking part in the surveys – and gave employees another reason to complete and return their surveys to us.
And it worked. We got back more surveys than we’d ever gotten before, giving us valuable info on which to base decisions. Plus, we did a good deed by donating to the charity.
(Theresa Lane, HR manager, Cutler, ME)
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