Survey Fatigue

Survey fatigue - is a term often bantered around these days. In the world of market research survey fatigue or "respondent burden" has been a growing concern for over decade. With respect to employee surveys it is only starting to bubble to the surface recently. One HR professional told me that there is no way she would consider an employee survey now - "our employees are surveyed out." she told me, "technology just makes it too easy" she said.

That might be the case, technology does make it easy, with tools such as surveymonkey or zoomerang . But survey fatigue is not a result of too many surveys but a direct results of too many bad surveys. With today's tools deploying a survey is easy, deploying a good survey takes professional expertise. A skill most HR professional don't have time to acquire in their busy day to day schedule.

The following are 4 key factors that must be consider to combat survey fatigue:

1. Length of Questionnaire (Internet >30 min.)


2. Respondent Effort (don't ask for data you can get elsewhere)


3. Frequency of Surveys (not too often)


4. Respondent Stress (make the question clear)

A good presentation on combating survey fatigue can be found at http://tinyurl.com/surveyfatiqueppt .