More about the GRM

The insights in this report are based on key indicators from your company that allow us to assess viability between your operational infrastructure and your team's psychological condition. Measuring between these two factors allows us to visualize your ability to actually capitalize on the opportunities in front of you but the suggestions we give are based on best practice for your circumstance. The suggestions we make for improving your business may need clarification or adjustment to your particular business environment. We use a combination of Likert scale testing, common sentiment statistical algorithms and ML based sentiment analysis to give us the least bias in results possible. We aim to be able to show what is real while removing as many human bias opportunities as possible. If you would like more information about some of our base data practices, feel free to ask your assessor. The human psychological assessment side of our tool has been analyzed by multiple independent mental health practitioners to give us a clear view into group psychological dynamics.

The Employee

Confidence Survey

Reading your survey

The Employee Confidence Survey asks questions using a Likert scale approach. Those results are then converted into a percentage scale that represents the overall sentiment amongst the respondents. Raw survey results are always included in the report.

About the survey

An Employee Confidence Survey is a version of a Climate Survey. Climate surveys are a tool used to solicit and asses employee opinions, feelings, perceptions and expectations regarding a variety of factors pertinent to maintaining the organization's climate, such as opportunities for growth, management, working relationships and environment, etc. Climate surveys can measure a wide range of employee sentiment but this particular survey is designed to answer questions related to 7 strategic areas of employee sentiment.

  • Physiological resourcing

  • Cognitive  safety

  • Interpersonal connectivity

  • Individual  development & growth

  • Individual actualization

  • Communal actualization

  • Cultural perpetuity

The goal of the ECS survey is to specifically assess a quick and basic  understanding of underlying employee sentiment and deliver enough results for understanding where action or further questioning is needed to be engaged.  It essentially is built to give a quick “pulse” on employee sentiment. The ECS is usually followed by a one or two actions:

  • If a particular question is returning a concerning sentiment, a qualitative approach may be needed for understanding the issue, this can look like further, more in depth questions or interactions with staff in an effort to understand that result. Recommended action in the return of concerning results is to follow up with more targeted questions and interactions that allow for a more comprehensive understanding of an underlying issue. 

  • The questions are also designed to give insight into what areas of the company need solutions. The results will highlight areas where solutions are needed or need to be more effective. The results can be presented to a company's leaders or implementation teams to help impact which areas of development are needed to solve true sentiment in the company. 


A note about the ECS bias

Different survey types are hindered by different and varying challenges with information fidelity, bias and accuracy.. The ECS’s inherent bias is acquiescence bias. This typically means that the survey results may skew slightly in favor of the surveyor. In the ECS, this could look like more “Agree” options being selected. This bias is partially removed  by a “neutral” option where respondents can not agree but also not disagree. Because of the framing of this survey, a high functioning organization will typically return “agree” results in most categories. This information is helpful but positive results need to be viewed as if they potentially have a slight bias. 


Sources on Climate Surveys (other examples included)

​​https://www.heflo.com/blog/hr/organizational-climate-survey-questions/

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/questions-ask-workplace-climate-survey-11761.html

https://www.affirmity.com/blog/how-to-use-climate-survey-understand-diversity-and-inclusion/

https://www.questionpro.com/survey-templates/job-climate/

https://www.gnof.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Sample-Climate-Survey.pdf

https://www.alchemer.com/resources/blog/employee-satisfaction-15-questions/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw1ZeUBhDyARIsAOzAqQIqreiv1E8BLJHTTZfCnwNqB-8AkkfGYQ4d4bHrhUQnqGZNlcbCMVIaAsuREALw_wcB

Transparency on Likert Scale surveying

Agree/Disagree or Item-specific Response Surveying

The frame of the question allows respondents to openly answer their agreement with a given topic. Essentially, an agree, disagree scale is a range of answer options that go from strongly agree to strongly disagree. It allows respondents to answer more precisely and it provides you with more nuanced survey responses to analyze.


Pro’s

  • It allows respondents to answer more precisely and it provides you with more nuanced survey responses to analyze. This allows a surveyor to target specific details to return quantifiable information. It’s best used for short form data gathering.

  • The A/D format allows for fewer leading questions as long as you are not limiting the range of their desired response. 

  • They can typically be responded to quickly.

  • The amount of response variance between A/D and Item-specifc responses is not high enough to result in inconclusive results. 

  • They are good for quantifying sentiment, vague concepts and emotional subjects needed to create general actions and assumptions. IS is typically better when the subject has a large comprehension of the topic.


Con’s

  • They are not good for basing market or business performance decisions on. There are better in depth survey methods when used for making financial or investment based decisions.

  • The key inherent issue with an A/D scale is that they introduce acquiescence response bias. This essentially means that people (especially when not anonymous) will want to be agreeable. This bias has a tendency to skew information towards an “agree” bias, especially with the statements. To collect more accurate data, a variety of the questions should be introduced that have a negative frame. 

  • If agree/disagree surveys are too long (over 10 minutes), respondents can result in straightlining. This is the practice of just filling in all of the same answers to get to the end of the survey, avoid this by not going over 50 questions in an agree/disagree survey.


How to apply agree/disagree questions well. 

  • A/D questions need to be built with equal response types for both positive and negative or else it can introduce scale-bias leading responses or assumption-bias leading responses. To prevent leading questions, agree/disagree scale, make sure the respondent is given the opportunity to equally agree or disagree with a statement. 

  • It is recommended to tailor the response to the question. This increases time spent on the question allowing the respondent to assess their answer more effectively. If a survey is formatted for matrix results, this may not be required. 


Sources on agree/disagree questionnaires. 

https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/likert-scale/

https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/2-tips-for-writing-agree-disagree-survey-questions/

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/managingemployeesurveys.aspx

https://pprg.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010_srm_saris_comparing.pdf

Confidence Scoring Equations

Converting Likert Scale testing to a single measurement tool

We utilize industry standard equations to convert Likert Scale results to a common scale equation.

Sources:

https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/72338/Enz67_Scale_Construction.pdf?sequence=1

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1224012.pdf

Our testing utilizes a slightly more complex version of Top Boxing

https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/top-2-box-scores/