As a user viewing and analyzing survey results, follow these steps to prime your understanding and extract meaningful and actionable insights.
Last Updated: January 20, 2025
In this article:
Overview
As a user viewing and analyzing survey results, follow these steps to prime your understanding and extract meaningful and actionable insights.Part 1: Understand the High-Level Results
Step 1: Review the Response Rate
Generally, a "good" response rate for an Engagement survey depends on the size of the organization, learn more:
- More than 500 employees: 70-80%
- Less than 500 employees: 80-90%
- If your organization's response rate is Below Average or has declined since your last Engagement survey, it's that employees can see how their feedback is being acted upon by the organization.
- To sustain a high response rate or improve a low response rate, make it clear to your employees that the survey has a real impact on the organization's decision-making.
Step 2: Evaluate Favorability
Overall favorability is the combination of Strongly Agree and Agree responses to the survey questions. Use overall favorability as a high-level view of your organization's engagement.
Generally, an overall favorability of 70% or higher is considered healthy. Why do we focus on favorability?
To sustain or improve favorability, focus on the survey's high-impact questions.
FAQ: What is a reasonable goal for improving overall favorability over the course of a year?
Target 10% of the gap from a perfect score. For example, if overall forability is 60%, then the gap from a perfect score is 40%, Thus, a 4% increase in favorability is recommended as a reasonable goal for the next year's survey scores.
Step 3: Understand the Organization's High-Impact Questions
The High-Impact survey questions have the biggest impact on your organization's engagement and should be the focus of engagement efforts. Learn more about High-Impact questions.
As you review the High-Impact questions, consider the following ideas:
- Common themes, i.e. do several results relate to confidence in the future of the organization, feeling acknowledged/valued, etc?
- What are the most favorable High-Impact questions, the greatest increase since the last survey, etc? Maintain the momentum for these High-Impact questions
- What are the least favorable High-Impact questions, the greatest decrease since the last survey, etc? These may be strong targets for team-level or organizational-level improvement efforts
Part 2: Level Up Your Analysis
Step 4: Compare This Year's Results to Your Last Survey
If applicable, when viewing the survey results, add a comparison for the last survey to see how responses may have shifted since the last survey.
As a rule of thumb, a 2-3% increase in favorability is meaningful for organizations with 250+ employees. For organizations with less than 250 employees, a 3-5% increase is considered a meaningful change.
As you analyze the survey results, consider the following ideas:
- Do the questions that improved in favorability align with your organization's engagement efforts?
- For questions that decreased in favorability, were there any organizational challenges or changes that could have influenced the decreased score?
- Are the comments left by survey participants verifying known challenges?
Step 5: Understand How Feedback Compares to Other Organizations
You can compare your employee feedback to external benchmarks to gain valuable insights.
- If your feedback is more favorable than the benchmark, it indicates a strength that sets your organization apart
- If your feedback aligns with the benchmark, your employees’ perceptions are similar to those in other organizations
- If your feedback falls below the benchmark, it may highlight an area of challenge that other organizations do not face
Learn how best to use external benchmarks.
What is the difference between Engagement and BPTW benchmarks?
Step 6: Examine Group-Level Differences Inside Your Organization
Use slices to compare different demographics within your organization and identify trends across groups. This helps you determine if employee perceptions are consistent or vary by group. You can uncover high-performing groups to share best practices or identify areas needing support.
Filters provide a focused view of a specific demographic or combination of demographics for deeper insights.
Step 7: Review Open-Ended Comments to Gather Context
Open-ended survey questions allow employees to provide context and examples, offering deeper insights into numeric data trends. However, employee comments can sometimes be distracting.
Learn our recommended approach to reviewing open-ended feedback.