Prior to commissioning and launching a study, it is important to formulate a communications message to staff indicating the intent of conducting such a study. Within the message, identify areas of concern the survey would like to address, the timeframe allocated to the study and how such a study would impact staff and their work environment. Following the conclusion of the survey when findings have been derived, it is important to acknowledge that all opinions have been recorded and received by the management team. This closes the gap in engaging staff to provide their opinions on issues that affect them in their work environment.

When commencing organization-wide initiatives, it helps to have executive sponsorship and endorsement for the project. This serves to communicate the message to all staff that senior leadership is concerned with their opinions and would like their feedback.

When an initiative such as this has been started, participants who are keen to express their opinions are conversely keen to be updated that their opinions have been heard. In our experience, failure to acknowledge their opinions does not close the loop and subsequent surveys typically do not gather full participation or honest opinions. We believe that if a survey is commissioned with no intent of communicating findings, it would be much better to halt the survey until a more appropriate time when the organization is more willing to share this information with their staff.

It is critically important to throughly consider the action steps to be taken after the findings of the survey have been presented. This may come in the form of an action planning register to allocate resources towards improvement of another area or even commissioning a secondary study to investigate any trends or emergent findings.