Is it time to spruce up your surveys?

One service provider says employers should look to gamification when issuing employee engagement surveys.

Employee engagement surveys can provide valuable insight to employers – but what if your workers just aren’t interested in answering the questions? One tech expert says HR may be receiving skewed data as a result of dull and disengaging surveys.

“When a survey is really long and drags on, participants stop taking it or get bored and answer ingenuously,” says Natasia Malaihollo, CEO of Wyzerr. “That’s when you get a really obvious pattern like someone marking off all the Cs in a survey.”

Malaihollo is a champion of the short, sharp surveys – often called pulse surveys – which have been growing in popularity recently.

“Because they’re so quick, employers can survey people at different time frames and there are even certain surveys that you can take daily,” she explained.

“If an employee answers a quick survey on their screen when they get to work – even if it’s just one or two questions a day – that gives huge insight into the department over time,” she added.

According to Malaihollo, tracking employee engagement in a more immediate sense means HR has the power to react when issues first arise – rather than months down the line when workers are entirely fed up.

“We run our employee surveys once a month and any time there is a slight deviation in anything, I’m probably overly responsive to it,” she told HRM.

“With the current job market, employees have a lot more options now. There are lot of places that pay a lot more and there are a lot of places that offer a lot more perks so having employees that are happy with their jobs and keeping them happy becomes really critical,” she stressed.

Wyzerr itself is working to craft surveys which are not only quick and easy but also fun to complete.

“Games are getting the highest engagement so we thought; ‘Why not make surveys look like games?’” she told HRM.

“We look at not just mobile games but also social media apps that consumers like using or have high engagement,” she revealed. “Things like Apple Music, Trivia Crack, Angry Birds – anything that has high retention and high engagement.

“By making it much faster and more fun people actually enjoy taking the survey so they complete it properly, she told HRM.

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