How to increase your response rate

A guide on increasing your response rate

Are you about to roll out an engagement survey, workplace assessment, eNPS, etc.?

Then it is a completely unavoidable part of the process that you, first of all, decide when the survey is a success. Without a set goal, you can quickly find yourself groping blindly for what you really want to achieve with the effort.

One of the parameters you can define is how high a response rate you want to achieve in your survey so that it can be characterized as being a success and can be called representative of the company. This article covers the following points, as well as gives a number of tips on how to increase your response rate and achieve your goals with a survey:

• How high should the response rate be?
• How to improve your response rate?
• Guide the employees through the setup
• Avoid the spam filter!
• Help the employees - Allow time for answering the survey

How high should the response rate be?

How high the response rate should depends on several factors:

For a large company with more than 200 employees, it can of course be difficult to reach the high end of 80-90%.

In this case, it can be relevant to look at how high a response rate you want per department.  This is to avoid that your company doesn't only have a good response rate of 79% overall, but there are individual departments where the response rate is as low as only 20%.

If, on the other hand, it is a small company with 20 employees, a high response rate would be preferable to ensure that the survey is representative of the entire company. At the same time, there will usually not be as many different departments either.

In Woba's overview, the response rate is displayed as in the image to the right. The response rate in the overview is characterized as being high, moderate, or low based on the following response rates:

• Above 80% gives a high response rate.
• Above 50% gives a moderate response rate.
• 50% and below gives a low response rate.

How to improve your response rate?

There are several different parameters you can look at to improve the response rate of a survey. At Woba we have some different tools that make it easier to get a high response rate:

Reminders: You can set up reminders that are continuously sent out to employees who have not yet answered the survey. This way, you can ensure that no one forgets to answer the survey and you can act encouragingly and proactively during the answering process.

Anonymity: When you as an employee have to answer a survey, it is important to be comfortable with your answer and to be correctly and clearly informed about whether the survey is anonymous or not. In Woba, you can set an anonymity limit, which automatically informs the employee whether the survey is anonymous or not.

Ask about the right questions: It is important to ask relevant and well-formulated questions that do not cause confusion when an employee has to answer them. This can both contribute to a better response rate and better data as the questions are understood and taken seriously by the person who answered them. At Woba, we have many predefined and research-based templates for various survey types, all of which comply with this.

Prepare your employees: Before a survey is sent out, it is a good idea to inform your employees that they will be invited to answer such a survey, what framework it is based on, and how the individual employee must answer the survey. It might seem excessive, but better too much explanation than too little.

In addition, also prepare your employees for when and where the survey comes from, what format, and underline the importance of them participating actively and letting their voice be heard. It is especially important to explain why a survey is relevant at all and why the employees' answers are so important. In this case, it is okay to spell it out and make it more than clear that e.g. an engagement survey is made for the employees, to give them an anonymous voice, so that problems of any nature can be dealt with.

The handling itself also plays a major role. Tell e.g. the employees that their responses will be taken very seriously and that all well-being issues will be taken very seriously.

Guide the employees through the setup

When the employees receive the email with the link to the survey, it will be explained in detail how to get started.

To ensure that the employees are fully on board, you can also send a link to our Help Center internally. It is in our Help Center that you can find guides and articles that can easily be shared for situations like this.

This way, you can avoid confusion or doubt and ensure that the employees know how to e.g. log in and answer the survey, etc.

Avoid the spam filter!

In some cases, it is necessary for you to whitelist emails from Woba so that they are not caught in spam or security settings.

Below is the information you need to check whether you need to whitelist us before starting a survey in Woba:

• Invitations and reminders to employees are sent from noreply@woba.io
• Support emails are sent from support@woba.io
• In rare cases, there is a need for our email service to also be whitelisted: smtp.postmarkapp.com

Help the employees - Allow time for answering the survey

If the employees need to be even more, it is certainly not an unwise investment to put aside some of their working time for the survey.

Help the employees set aside time in their working day so that they can see participation in the survey as a little break. The surveys do not take much time and are the perfect match for a cup of coffee in the meantime.

If you have a lot of employees who work out of the office, on sites, or are constantly on the move, you can combine it with a workshop or an already planned team meeting where everyone is in the office beforehand.