Surveying

What is Surveying?

Surveying is a data collection method that gathers structured feedback from a large group of people. Unlike interviews (which are deep but narrow), surveys are broad but standardized. They use a mix of rating scales, multiple-choice questions, and open-ended responses to quantify perceptions, measure satisfaction, and identify problem areas across an organization.

When to Use It

• •When you need input from more people than you can interview individually
• •When you want to quantify satisfaction, frequency, or severity across a population
• •Before and after an improvement to measure perception change
• •When gathering input anonymously would produce more honest responses

How to Use It: Step by Step

1. 1

   Define the objective

   What specific information do you need? Tie every question back to the problem statement or evaluation criteria.

2. 2

   Design the survey

   Keep it under 10 minutes. Use Likert scales (1-5) for quantitative data, open-ended questions for qualitative data. Pilot test with 2-3 people first.

3. 3

   Distribute and collect

   Send to all relevant stakeholders with a clear deadline. Follow up once. Aim for a 60%+ response rate for reliable results.

4. 4

   Analyze and report

   Calculate averages and distributions for scaled questions. Code and theme open-ended responses. Present findings with the data, not just your interpretation.

Pro Tips

• ✓Shorter is better — every additional question reduces completion rate by 5-10%
• ✓Always include at least one open-ended question — the qualitative data often contains the most actionable insights
• ✓Benchmark by running the same survey before and after the improvement
• ✓Share results with respondents — people are more likely to respond next time if they see their feedback mattered

Facilitation Guide

Hold a 60-minute idea generation session. Set ground rules: no criticism, quantity matters, build on ideas (5 min). Run silent brainwriting round — each person writes 3 ideas and passes to the next person, repeat 5 times (30 min). Read all ideas aloud and cluster into themes on a wall (15 min). Do a quick round-robin where each person adds one more idea inspired by the clusters (10 min). Count total ideas and celebrate the quantity.

Other Tools in Step 3