Month: December 2011

The Fine Art of Email Delivery

You built a survey so powerful that you sent test invites to all of your colleagues with the subject line, “Look How Amazing Linda Is!”  Your colleagues agreed, so you’re ready to launch your organization’s annual compliance study.  It is imperative that everyone participates because the data obtained must be shared with the federal government. This survey is a big deal.

Before you hit the “Send” button, however, ask yourself if you developed a launch plan and attended to the email delivery logistics.  If this sounds unfamiliar, here’s what you should do:

a) Determine a date and time to launch the survey, and inform prospective participants that the survey will be released then.  This way, people know to expect a survey and can contact you if they don’t receive it.

b) Inform the company’s email administrator that you’re planning to launch a survey and provide the specific date and time in advance.

c) Present the email administrator with the Zarca Readiness Plan.  This document includes valuable information to ensure email delivery.

d) After the Readiness Plan is implemented, confirm with the email administrator that both Zarca’s mail server and application server are white-listed.  (Essentially, you’re looking for a “yes” to both items.)

e) Speak with the email administrator about threshold limits to determine the number of emails the mail server is prepared to process at one time.  If you’re planning to send a survey to 10,000 people and the threshold limit is 500 per hour, you’ll need to consult with the email administrator regarding the launch plan.

Once the launch plan is in place and you’ve sorted out the logistics, send the survey to yourself and your colleagues.  Participate in the test run to ensure that everything goes smoothly and according to plan.  Once you’ve confirmed that everything works properly, distribute your survey.

Good luck and happy surveying!

Does Friday Feel Like Monday?

Everyone has a bad day at the office. Even the co-worker who greeted me daily with a way-too-peppy, “Good morning, Sunshine!” occasionally did so through gritted teeth. Nobody should expect to love their job every minute of every day.

But if you — or your employees — are having more bad days then good, and feeling an overall sense of dissatisfaction and lack of motivation, then action must be taken. According to Aon Hewitt, the global human resource consulting and outsourcing business of Aon Corporation, global employee satisfaction is at its lowest level since 2008. Worldwide, 44% of all employees feel a disconnection between their individual roles and their employers’ organizational goals.

It’s no wonder, then, that a majority of new visitors to the Zarca Interactive website are searching for information about Employee Satisfaction Surveys. Just in the U.S. alone, businesses are losing $370 billion annually to apathetic employees, yet 70% of leaders have no engagement plan or strategy.

If employee satisfaction is a topic of concern at your company, let Zarca Interactive help you get to the root of the problem so you can take appropriate action. We’ll work with you to ask just the right questions, monitor employee responses with real-time reporting, and create and run customized, powerful reports.

Get started by checking out best practices for conducting Employee Engagement Surveys. After all, the only thing worse than an office full of unhappy employees is an executive suite full of oblivious managers.

How to Increase Survey Responses: Understand Motivations

The critical ingredient for a successful survey project is a group of motivated respondents. There are some people who are naturally motivated to answer a survey, eager to share their opinions. Others couldn’t care less. So, how do you inspire every survey respondent to participate?

The study of human motivation has a long history in the fields of psychology and economics.  One prominent way for businesses to look at motivation is the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA).

Companies measure costs such as money, time, and reputation before sending a survey.  The benefits are usually measured in anticipation of increased business and improvements to the bottom line. Successful surveys do not just improve the company, they improve your customer relationships and communication practices.

Whether we realize it or not, we as individuals use CBA to make daily decisions. For survey participants, the costs are the time and effort used to complete a survey. However, the benefits for survey participants are often unclear or meaningless. You’ll always have narcissists who get a thrill at the chance to share their opinions. But, if you want to increase your response rate, then you need to share the benefits, or survey recipients won’t bother.

You may know the survey benefits for your company, but what’s in it for your respondents? What are their benefits of taking your survey?

Want to learn more? Please read my report: Maximizing Survey Participation