My interest as of late as turned to surveys that support employee loyalty, however, today’s topic applies just as well to consumer or B2B market research. As a research professional, I find it useful to keep my feet on the ground and participate in surveys where feasible. This keeps me grounded in the respondent experience. Be wary of the researcher who strays too far from what he or she is asking their respondents to do.
One of the easiest ways to increase survey abandonment and reduce the overall quality of your data is to lose sight of respondent engagement. This can easily happen when we ask lengthy and often repetitive questions. The rank-order exercise below was part of an overall assessment of employee satisfaction. Keeping your employees satisfied offers numerous benefits to the business.
With that said this exercise was buried two-thirds of the way into the survey. What challenges me is the length of the exercise, as in number of options to rank. Best practices would be to keep this to five to seven items. By placing a limit we are minimizing the cognitive load placed on the respondent. We are also preventing items deeper in the list from being glossed over.
This may not be possible in all scenarios. However, a workaround would include breaking the list into two groups, randomizing the order within each question and then randomizing the order of the two questions. This would yield two lists from which you could extract the top three from each list and then ask the respondent to select his or her final order. Yes, this sounds like more effort because it is, however it breaks the overall task down into smaller discrete tasks.
Another option would be to employ a technique such as MaxDiff (short for Maximum Difference Scaling). This approach is akin to conjoint analysis and requires the respondent to make a series of most/least important tradeoffs. MaxDiff is very robust, but does require special programming to implement.
Cvent will be hosting a webinar, Avoiding Awkward Moments in Employee Feedback, Tuesday of next week with an encore session on May 1st. If you'd like to learn more about ways to improve your survey engagement (which results in more meaningful data and higher participation rates), regsiter today!
