The Staff Survey Cafe: We never close
Obtaining staff feedback not a 9-5 job
Are you serious about wanting to know what your staff think? Then adopt the customer service focus of a convenience store: fast, easy, and open 24 hours. Without this philosophy, your internal survey efforts will languish, say survey experts.
"If you’re addressing people who work the night shift, don’t try to interview them on the day shift. Don’t ask them to stay early or late. Go in and meet them at 3 a.m.," advises Joane Goodroe, RN, MBA, president of Goodroe & Company, an Atlanta-based health care consulting company.
Aside from ensuring convenient survey formats and techniques, administrators should also involve key staffers in creating and administering surveys. For the very best response, bring surveys to departmental meetings where there’s a captive audience and have employees fill them out on the spot.
Involve key staff
Employees are most likely to cooperate with surveys if those who are impacted by the survey’s outcomes are included in the survey’s creation or help gather the survey results. Their enthusiasm will help encourage other employees to participate in the survey, says Goodroe.
"If process owners are involved in creating the questions, they’ll have ownership in getting people to participate," agrees Sharon Donahue Hellwig, EdD, RN, coordinator of the quality program at the 369-bed Easton (PA) Hospital. "Having a group of administrators create it is not the way to go."
When the purchasing department at Kaiser Permanente/Sunset Medical Center in Los Angeles wanted to see which departments used the most gloves and which used the most costly gloves, it created a core group of 10 staff from departments with heavy glove use such as intensive care, the perioperative unit, and the medical/surgical unit, says Irene Kuwaki-Chuman, RN, PHN, CIC, a hospital infection control practitioner and group member. The goal was to find the best, safest glove for each job while reducing high glove costs. While the survey itself was developed by Baxter Healthcare Corporation’s glove management program in Valencia, CA, the core group facilitated gathering the information and educated employees on the survey’s importance, she says. This helped fire up enthusiasm for the survey both on the part of the core group and among survey respondents.
Keep it short, sweet
A survey is not the time to be long-winded or complicated. "Get to the point and don’t be too academic," advises Hellwig. Make the survey user-friendly with clear, concise language, she says. For fun, include catchy artwork on the survey.
Avoid generic questions, Goodroe says. "Anything done generically will fail because it won’t seem important to those involved," Goodroe explains. To help tailor questions, develop surveys along product lines, Goodroe recommends.
Assign individual team members the responsibility for administering the survey and bringing back the responses. Kuwaki-Chuman’s group went out to department administrators with the questionnaire and asked them to target employees to participate. Some group members sat down one-on-one with employees and helped them do the survey, she says.
Tell employees why the survey is being conducted and how it will impact them, says Goodroe. "People are willing to spend the time if they understand what you’re trying to get at. People are tired of answering things they don’t feel have any relevance to them," she says.
When administering the survey, the more up close and personal the better. One-on-one surveying works well, whether it’s sitting down with an employee in the office, conducting the survey over the telephone, or using what Hellwig calls the mall clipboard method popular at Easton. The mall clipboard method is personal and efficient. Task force members who create the survey station themselves in the hospital hallways or approach people in places such as the library, the cafeteria, or the lounge. "They say, I have 10 questions; it will take three minutes for you to answer, would you mind?" Hellwig explains. "Each team member gets 15 to 20 to do." Hellwig did not have exact figures on the response rate for surveys at her hospital but noted that anecdotal evidence shows participation is high.
Not all departments will buy in
Despite best efforts, don’t expect a high response rate from all departments. For instance, Kuwaki-Chuman’s group did just about everything right. Members created a short survey two-pages and the answers were checked off. They had buy-in from key staff, plus enthusiastic team members who went out and conducted surveys one-on-one. Yet, the response rate varied dramatically. The response rate from the operating room (OR) staff was 90%, but the response rate from all other departments averaged 40%, she says.
The OR response rate was high because Kuwaki-Chuman’s group got to them when they were virtual prisoners of the hospital bureaucracy at a staff meeting. The group conducted a presentation on why the survey was being done and how it would impact employees. With this information fresh in their minds, staff were asked to answer the survey right there in the meeting.
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