How to Conduct a Successful HR Survey? Keep an Eye on These Areas
2026-06-15
Employee survey is one of the most effective tools for identifying what motivates employees, where they see room for improvement, and how they perceive the company’s operations and organizational changes. However, a seemingly simple questionnaire can hide unexpected challenges. Our experience with HR surveys shows that success often depends on details such as choosing the right time to collect data, consistently protecting respondents’ anonymity, support for managers, or the company’s ability to quickly communicate the results and translate them into concrete actions. So what should you watch out for when conducting HR surveys? We’ve prepared an overview of best practices to help you obtain high-quality and reliable feedback.
1. Steps to Take Before Launching Your HR Survey
Communicate clearly why you’re running the survey and how the results will be used
One of the most common mistakes we see in HR surveys is poor communication. Employees should know well in advance that a survey is coming, why the company is running it, and what it aims to achieve. It’s equally important to explain how the survey will work – when it will take place, who will conduct it, how respondent anonymity will be protected, and, above all, how the results will be used. If employees don’t see the point of taking part, or have doubts about whether their answers are truly protected, their willingness to participate and to answer honestly drops significantly.
Don’t forget team leaders and managers. They need to understand that the survey results will not be used as a performance evaluation tool or a basis for disciplinary action, but as an opportunity for improvement. Fear of negative consequences can make people reluctant to engage. The goal of the survey should not be to point fingers at individuals, but to identify areas where the organisation as a whole can improve.
Also monitor response rates on an ongoing basis, not just overall, but by individual teams. Follow up with managers of teams showing lower response rates to understand what’s getting in the way.
Timing matters
Choosing the right period for your survey is essential to maximising response rates. This will vary from company to company, but as a general rule, peak seasons are best avoided. Because when people are stretched thin, they are unlikely to make time for a questionnaire. The pre-Christmas period is a typical example. Similarly, the summer holiday season often brings lower response rates due to employees being on leave.
When should you use an addressed survey approach?
With an addressed survey, each respondent receives an email containing a unique invitation with a unique URL link. This approach offers greater accuracy and completeness of data, and ensures that each respondent completes the questionnaire only once. However, it places a strong emphasis on the need to protect respondent anonymity.
If you opt for an addressed survey, consider engaging a third-party agency. An agency applies a rigorous process to protect respondents:
The client has no access to the survey platform or to the raw data.
In the first step, all information that could lead to identification is removed from the data matrix, and only anonymised data is used going forward.
With a non-addressed survey, by contrast, a single URL link to the questionnaire is distributed to all employees. This approach gives respondents a greater sense of protection, since there is no possibility, even a theoretical one, of linking answers to an individual’s email address. The drawbacks are that a single respondent may complete the questionnaire more than once, and the link can potentially spread beyond the organisation.
2. How to Design the Ideal HR Survey?
Don’t underestimate design and language style
Questions should be clear and meaningful, and the questionnaire as a whole should speak the language of your organisation. If your workplace culture is very formal, reflect that in the language you use. The same applies if your company has a relaxed, informal atmosphere where everyone is on first-name terms. In that case, adopt the same informal register in the questionnaire and don’t be afraid to use colloquial expressions that will feel natural to your people.
“Some topics, however, require careful phrasing. Global concepts such as diversity or sustainability may be perceived by Czech society as foreign or artificially imposed, and they often carry strong emotional connotations. In this case, instead of eliciting open responses, they may provoke resistance or misinterpretation, because employees won’t know what to think of them,” explains Lucie Režná, HR Manager NMS.
Optimise your topics
When selecting the topics you want to ask your employees about, keep in mind all the job positions you’ll be surveying. Because different employees deal with different day-to-day challenges and have different needs. This is particularly true in manufacturing companies, where office-based staff (white-collar) and production workers (blue-collar) work side by side but have very different priorities. Asking a shift worker with a fixed schedule for their opinion on flexible working hours, a perk enjoyed by colleagues in finance or marketing, is more likely to cause frustration than to generate honest, relevant responses.
If you’re unsure which topics to include, or how to assign topics to different job types, don’t hesitate to consult an agency.
There’s no shortage of potential topics, but one important rule applies: less is more. The questionnaire shouldn’t overwhelm employees. Before adding any topic to the survey, define what you want to find out and how you’ll actually be able to use the data you collect.
3. How to Make the Most of Your Data
Communication after the survey is equally important. Results should not end up gathering dust in an HR drawer. On the contrary, they should be shared with the entire organisation within a reasonable timeframe, ideally while the survey is still fresh in employees’ minds. Sharing findings also sends an important signal that the company takes feedback seriously. The presentation should include at least initial proposals or concrete next steps that will follow from the results. Without a visible response, employees may come to feel that their participation made no real difference.
Avoid comparing employees
Comparing departments or teams based on survey results is a sensitive matter that requires careful handling. In theory it can motivate better leadership and behaviour; in practice it tends to do more harm than good, creating tension between teams and eroding trust in the survey process. We generally advise against sharing a team ranking across the organisation, even in companies where sharing commercial results publicly is the norm. Such an overview should remain an internal tool for HR or senior leadership, to be used in a targeted way. For example, to offer specific managers or team leaders support and guidance on how to improve.
A survey is not the end of the conversation
HR survey should not be the only channel through which employees can flag issues in the workplace. Companies should also provide additional avenues for reporting inappropriate behaviour and situations that may undermine employees’ sense of safety and wellbeing.
Building trust in the reporting process itself is equally important. Fear of retaliation, inaction, or an insensitive response is often one of the main reasons employees don’t report problems at all.
4. What Tools to Use for an Employee Satisfaction Survey
When people think of a HR survey, many companies still picture a single questionnaire sent out once a year. But the employee experience is far broader than that. It is shaped by recruitment, onboarding, day-to-day work, development opportunities, and the way an employee eventually leaves the organisation. That is precisely why more and more companies are now tracking the full Employee Journey. This also informs the choice of research tools. There is no single universal solution that can answer every question.
Start with regular measurement
The foundation of most HR research is the online questionnaire. It allows you to reach large numbers of employees, track satisfaction over time, and compare results across periods. Respondent comfort matters too: employees should be able to answer easily from both their phone and their computer, and they must be confident that their responses will remain anonymous.
At NMS, we use our own survey platform, Askero, which supports one-off surveys, regular pulse surveys, and long-term tracking. Its advantages include automated distribution, multilingual capability, and the ability to engage employees through both personalised invitations and open-access surveys.
Data alone isn’t enough. We need to understand it.
Collecting data is only the first step. The real value lies in interpreting the results correctly and translating them into concrete actions. It pays to use tools that allow you to track key HR metrics over time, compare teams, and benchmark against the market. HR teams can then easily identify what’s working well and where intervention is needed.
At NMS, this role is filled by our analytics platform, Boardia. In addition to clear dashboards, it offers AI-powered support for working with open-ended responses — instead of manually reading through hundreds of comments, you can quickly identify the topics employees mention most frequently and understand what is driving a drop in satisfaction in a specific part of the organisation.
How to identify the real causes of problems
Questionnaires won’t tell you why a problem arose or how to solve it. In those situations, we recommend supplementing quantitative data with qualitative research — individual interviews, focus groups, or online communities where employees have the space to elaborate on their views and experiences in much greater depth. Online communities in particular have become an increasingly valuable tool for HR teams in recent years.
With a smaller group of employee respondents, you can, for example, test and discuss the introduction of new benefits or the design of new internal processes. Online communities can also be used to involve employees in testing products intended for your customers and clients, boosting engagement and giving employees a genuine stake in how the company operates. Kooperativa is one example of a company using online communities in this way, through a project they have named Hlas kolegy (“A Colleague’s Voice”).
“”At NMS, we have a comprehensive platform for online communities called Echonity, which functions as a space for ongoing dialogue with employees. It enables employees to co-create the future shape of their working environment,” adds Jana Svobodová, R&D Director NMS.
But essentially, it’s not about choosing a single “best” tool. Today’s most successful HR research combines regular assessments, ongoing trend monitoring, and deeper qualitative insights. Only by combining these different methods can we discover what employees are experiencing and understand why and how to truly improve their experience.
NMS Market Research is a research agency with over 20 years of history. In addition to market research, which it provides to hundreds of clients worldwide, it also studies political and social issues. In addition to the Czech Republic, it operates in other countries in Europe and Asia. NMS is a member of the international organization ESOMARand national organization SIMAR.
