What can I do to improve the response rate?

Your employees' participation is dropping? It´s high time to do something about it.

Basic tips & requirements

  • Clear goals are important: Let your employees know what you as a company want to achieve with TeamEcho and why their feedback is so important to you? 
Possible goals could be: "Improve together" or "Build a sustainable and positive corporate culture" or even (well measurable) "At least 80% satisfaction".
  • Anonymity: Some employees may have doubts about anonymity which can be a reason for decreasing willingness to participate. Try to emphazize that TeamEcho only stores responses together with the fact that an employee has already voted. TeamEcho does not store any data that would link a specific user to a certain answer he or she has given. And what's more, TeamEcho is fully GDPR compliant and values data sparsity.

  • Signaling a willingness to change is essential. If your employees are not convinced that there will be actions, then the willingness to participate will drop massively.

  • As a company communicate that you value the feedback of your employees and you want them to take an active part in the companie´s improvement 

  • Work with your results. Do not ignore them. Integrate the TeamEcho results into your regular meeting structure. In this way, any ambiguities or conflicts that arise can be promptly addressed and resolved. This encourages your employees to continue to provide feedback.

  • Celebrate improvement: Changes that happen because of feedback in TeamEcho should always be made noticeable or visible to the employees. Show them that their engagement is paying off. 

Rethink survey day and time

The majority of employees participate in TeamEcho surveys when they first open their invitation, which means that the timing needs to be well chosen. If there are fixed recurring deadlines in your company, then you should make sure that the surveys do not collide with them.

Is your chosen interval is too short?

If you think that your employees don't have enough time or can't take the time to complete the survey within 2 weeks, then extending the interval could theoretically have a positive effect on your response rate. In reality, however, the majority of TeamEcho users vote within about 3 days on average. 

Don't forget about the fact that if the polling interval gets longer, your employees will have to answer more questions per poll.

Tip: Switch on the "automatic reminder"?

You can automatically remind employees about open surveys. All you need to do is to check the "Automatically remind team members about the current survey" checkbox in the company settings " Team options".

Reminders will be sent for all surveys (regular as well as ad-hoc) three days before expiration only to the employees who have not yet voted.

You have to be aware, however, that with isolated, particularly skeptical employees, additional nudging can possibly lead to more rejection.