Employee Survey Tips: Is My Survey Representative?

I spent seven years leading methodology and data science for employee engagement surveys at Peakon and Workday. Over that time, I’ve worked with everyone from tiny tech startups to massive retail brands, mining operations, football clubs, and even government entities. Now that I’m no longer directly involved in survey creation, I can share my honest thoughts on the most effective ways to run employee surveys.

See the complete set of tips & tricks for running employee engagement surveys.

When it comes to employee engagement surveys, one of the most frequent questions is whether the results accurately reflect everyone’s views. Here’s what you need to know:

Short Answer: Yes

If you survey your entire workforce, representation is baked in. We talk about whether surveys are representative when we survey a small sample of a larger population, but since everyone has the opportunity to respond, your data naturally covers the full population. You might worry about things like a margin of error, but that will be negligible for companies with more than 100 employees.

If You’re Sampling

Things get a bit more complex if you’re only surveying a subset of employees. In that case, confidence intervals can be helpful, but make sure you have at least 30 responses per group to ensure reliable insights.

Don’t Overcomplicate It

If you’re sending surveys to everyone, you’re already in good shape. The main thing to do is encouraging high participation rates, as that is the best route to true representation.

Sunbeam

Sunbeam is a feedback analytics platform designed to make working with open-ended, text-based feedback as straightforward as working with scores. Too many organizations overlook the rich insights hidden in qualitative responses, and Sunbeam aims to fix that. By combining deep industry expertise with cutting-edge AI, Sunbeam makes it simple to analyze and act on text feedback, ultimately helping HR teams unlock the full potential of employee engagement data.