In the April issue of Random Samples, HealthStream Research published an Ask the Experts article on employee response rates.  Randy Johnson, Director of Personnel for Northeast Georgia Health System, a healthcare system located in Gainesville, Georgia, shared their best practices for achieving high response rates on employee survey research.

• When improvements are made as a result of survey, promote that the changes were made because of employees’ requests as expressed in the last survey.
• The month before next survey, remind employees through your employee newsletter, message boards, intranet, etc. of all the various positive changes that were made because of the last survey.
• Indicate to managers that senior management will assess their departments’ participation rate as one of the indicators of the level of engagement and commitment of their employees.
• Give managers talking points to share with their employees in their department staff meetings just before the survey, stressing the importance of expressing their opinions through the survey.
• Just after the survey, thank employees (across all available modalities) for their participation in the survey.
• Promptly share results with employees from the survey.  (Note:  HealthStream Research has published a Discovery Paper on the importance of reviewing survey results with employees)