Sunday, February 20, 2011

Are employee or customer surveys evil?

I am working on a book that I'm writing called "Making metrics matter: Transforming surveys into leadership tools." In part of the book I review a survey I did a few years ago on surveys.

Respondents in the leadership Pulse (see http://www.leadershippulse.com/) were asked a series of questions about the employee and customer surveys they use. One question was to rate to the degree to which their surveys were "evil" - and we defined evil as "a situation that is very unpleasant, harmful or morally wrong."

Now you may wonder why I would do such a thing - ask people if surveys were evil. Well, it was Halloween and what can I say - I was inspired. The funny thing is that there were people who said YES, our surveys are evil. In fact, even the more academic questions painted a pretty dismal picture of surveys.

Therefore, a few years later, I ask anyone to chime in with what your thoughts are today. I particularly would like to hear from people who are not survey creators or survey deliverers.

What do you think of employee and customer surveys?

Here's my latest rant. Do you notice lately that the minute you hit some web sites - before you can even read a single word on the page - a survey pops up to ask if you like it? That's about as annoying as can be - in fact, those surveys get the "evil" vote from me.

Thank you,
Theresa

2 comments:

customer surveys said...

This post is very informative and interesting about employee or customer surveys evil?"

Edmund Misango said...

Honestly, i dnt believe employee/customer surveys are all that evil, well its because for any informed decision on whether to develop employees or abt the product/service. We shall all agree that there is a need for proper information, believe me one way of correcting infor is by making such surveys however hectic they may seem to both partys.

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