Employee Surveys in Management - Theories, Tools, and Practical Applications

1.6 On the Evolution of Employee Survey Types (p. 17)

From a historical point-of-view, the UIMP and benchmarking ES are relatively modern types, whereas a climate ES or an employee poll are older approaches. Systemic employee surveys are the most recent developments. No ES type is obsolete, however. Most employee surveys today are really mixtures of different types. It therefore makes little sense to order different ES types along an “evolution” dimension (Higgs &, Ashworth, 1997). What is true, though, is that many progressive organizations have led the ES through an evolution from a passive monitor of mood to a proactive tool for implementing HR strategy (Hinrichs, 1991, p. 301).
In the literature, employee surveys are mostly positioned as instruments of organization development (Moorehead &, Griffin, 1989, Nadler, 1977), change management (Hellriegel, Slocum, &, Woodman, 1992), or as “survey-guided development” (Pacific Gas and Electric Company, 1991). This perspective is appropriate even if the ES officially only serves diagnostic purposes because the survey’s results will always influence management’s action—even without a step-by-step model of how the survey results are systematically transformed into such activities. Hence, it makes sense in any case to at least consider what needs to be done to feed back the results easily and reliably. What works in one organization, however, may not work elsewhere because the managers in one company, for example, may not have the skills to read a standard ES report or because the established reward systems in another company prevent using the ES results in certain ways.
Taking an organization’s specific context into account rather than using a standard questionnaire has become the normal approach not only in employee surveys, but in surveys in general. Indeed, in the 1970s the focus was almost completely on designing the measurement instrument, and a variety of standard instruments were developed and used over and over again in many different contexts. Little was done to optimize even the most immediate survey processes, such as methods of achieving a high response rate. In public opinion surveys such topics were first picked up by Dillman (1978) in what he called the total design method. The TDM simply studied the effects that different seemingly trivial design elements (e.g., the layout of the questionnaire or the letter of invitation) have on the total response rate. With the new survey administration possibilities, the TDM was extended to a tailored design method (Dillman, 2000). In the context of employee surveys, a tailored design perspective extends to a much wider action field, covering multiple processes for designing, participating in, and acting upon the survey. The way a tailored approach began in the 1970s was by carefully adapting the language of standard questionnaires to the specific jargon of the particular company under study, by adding company-specific items (e.g., on the company’s strategy or on certain hot topics), and by computing company- specific indices from the ES data.