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Free sites like SurveyMonkey can be a great way of getting started in employee engagement surveys but free survey software will always be limited in terms of flexibility, support and customization possibilities.
Bespoke engagement surveys such as the Engage system offered by CR Systems offer a number of benefits over DIY systems:
- The one-survey-fits-all approach is not suitable for many businesses. A complete bespoke solution is more flexible and allows you to design a survey that will exactly fit your personal requirements.
- The Engage survey system is totally brandable to match your corporate intranet and literature.
- Full support is provided for both building the survey and analysing the results.
- Analysis is also flexible and results can be delivered in an organized way, which is easy to understand.
- A number of different languages are supported in the Engage software.
- Participation rates are increased (some employees may not take surveys on free websites seriously).
- Anonymity is assured. SurveyMonkey and other sites do offer anonymous surveys but it is down to the researcher to select this option in the survey settings.
- Data can often not be held confidentially in free software systems.
- It is not possible to verify the identity of anyone completing surveys built on free software and can be difficult to exclude certain groups.
- Most free survey systems have limits on the number of people who can fill out the survey
- Downloading of data files for offline analysis is also not possible on most free platforms.
In general, free survey systems may provide an adequate solution for many small businesses wishing to carry out a basic engagement survey with their employees. However, in order to maximise the effectiveness of such a study, bespoke software will always be more appropriate and may be your only option to survey a large number of employees.
Additionally, free survey sites like SurveyMonkey may well contribute to the claims that employee engagement doesn’t work. Several business publications have recently published articles discussing the possibility that conducting an engagement survey may be a waste of time and money.
In fact the conclusion of most of these articles is not that engagement surveys don’t provide valuable information, but that it is simply not acted upon. It is all too easy to throw up a quick online survey and then do nothing with the results.
For an employee engagement survey to be a worthwhile activity, it is vital that it is designed to provide the most benefit for your particular business needs and that the results are analysed properly and acted upon.
CR Systems can help your business improve employee engagement with our Engage software – a bespoke survey system that is fully customisable depending on the needs of your organization. We provide you with full support along the way and offer fully flexible analysis. Benefit from our experience in measuring employee engagement and work with the Engage system to help you in constructing an effective action plan, not just a set of meaningless data.