Why should our organization consider the option to customize the Job Role and Department demographics on the employee survey?

We offer the option for program participants to customize these survey demographics for a number of reasons:

If you list your organization’s unique Job Role and Department titles on the survey, then employees who come to those sections can more readily identify which titles are appropriate for them to choose. Employees will be less likely to simply select “Other” because they aren’t sure how to answer. As a result, your response data in the Job Role and Department demographic categories will be more accurate and more valuable to you in pinpointing individual areas of strength and opportunity.

Some companies choose to customize in order to maximize the amount of response data they’re able to receive for review. To maintain respondent anonymity, we do not report any response data for less than 5 individuals in any one demographic category. By grouping smaller roles and departments together, you will be more likely to capture 5 or more responses than if you had used the multiple categories found on the standard survey.

Customizing allows you to focus on any specific employee demographics that you would like to measure. For instance, some companies customize their survey to eliminate the Job Role and Department titles entirely and only capture “Exempt” versus “Non-exempt” demographics. Other employers designate separate geographic office locations instead of Departments.

The standard Job Role and Demographic survey categories can be found on the last page of the Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Survey (see the “Survey and Report Samples” link on the program web site). This link also contains a sample Employee Demographic Report so you can view how the respondent data will be presented.

If you have any further questions regarding customization of the employee survey, please feel free to contact Susan Springer, Director of Workplace Assessments, at susans@bestcompaniesgroup.com.