Boosting staff response rates
We are often asked for our advice on getting staff to respond to surveys.
Easy access and timely reminders
How are you going to make it easy for people to access the survey?
Make the link or code easily available, remembering that people often miss information if it is buried too deeply amongst other notices; ideally a dedicated short message is best.
It can also help to put the link or QR code on a poster in the staff room or toilets.
If you are using our system to send the notifications, they will automatically get a final reminder the day before the survey closes. If you are sharing it yourself, put a note in your diary to do the same thing.
Allocate time for completion
Give people allocated time to do the survey, e.g. during staff briefing or during a staff meeting or training session. Surveys can be completed on any device, without a login being needed. Putting 5 minutes for it on the agenda somewhere will make it happen!
Do people trust the process?
Often people are nervous about completing surveys honestly and suspicious that responses will be traced back to individuals, particularly if previously surveys have been run through the school’s Microsoft or Google system.
Give people information about the survey. This one pager outlines who we are and why people can trust that it’s worth answering. The info could be attached or pasted into an email, and/or here’s an even shorter version:
We are using School Surveys by Teacher Tapp to run our surveys. This means that your responses are collected anonymously outside of our school system. Even the Teacher Tapp team has no way of identifying individual respondents. It also helps us as your responses are benchmarked nationally, giving us a truer picture of how we are getting on relative to schools in similar contexts (matched by phase and FSM quartile).
Make it meaningful
Most importantly, make surveying part of a meaningful communication cycle – try to incorporate ways to share “You Said, We Did” feedback, whether by email, newsletter or in person.
If sharing the whole report is too much or unhelpful, one or two screenshots can be useful. Sometimes you may explain things that you are not able to do, even though they’ve come up. It’s always better to say something, so people feel their responses have been acknowledged. See our longer advice article on sharing results with staff.
If you still need help, please get in touch at help@schoolsurveys.com or call us on 0330 043 4469 and our team will be more than happy to help.