Are you a freelance or independent consultant? Do you need to run an employee experience survey or 360 degree feedback for your clients?
We have the perfect survey platform for independent, self-employed or freelance consultants looking for a cost-effective way to run employee experience surveys or 360 degree feedback for their clients.
What are the survey platform options available to freelance HR consultants?
As technology progresses dashboarding or analytics software is becoming the norm – it improves the speed of access to survey results and the quality of presentation of the data so we find that clients are increasingly demanding a better solution. But where to start?
1. Use something like Surveymonkey
Several years ago we used to use SurveyMonkey to run surveys for our clients. We then had to download the data into Excel, spend ages manipulating it and creating charts before copying them into Word.
It took a lot of time and effort and meant that clients didn’t get the results of their survey for a couple of weeks.
It then limited the ability to drill into the data as we had to go back to the spreadsheet and filter the data to create a new report.
What’s more SurveyMonkey is not ‘free’. For the features you want you will need to pay for a licence, you will still need to do lots of data manipulation and you will not be able to provide your clients with any kind of ability to dynamically view or interrogate the data.
2. Build your own platform
Believe us, that’s not an easy option!
We’ve spent the last few years investing a huge amount of time and effort, not to mention money.
You will get exactly what you want, but it’s not easy. Or cheap.
3. Use someone else’s tech
Here you have two further options:
a). Invest in business intelligence software to build client-specific dashboards and reports.
This is never as easy as the providers’ websites suggest.
In our experience it is not ‘simple’ to make the connection between your data and then create ‘stunning’ dashboard visualisations.
It’s also expensive.
b). The second option is to work with a dedicated partner whose platform is specifically designed for freelance HR consultants or contractors.
Which is where we come in….
How can we help you?
Our survey software platform has a dedicated online reporting dashboard that not only looks great, but saves a ton of time when it comes to data analysis and reporting.
Ours is not a self-service solution. We know you will be busy and unlikely to want to spend time building surveys or configuring dashboards.
We will need to work on some things together, but we will do all of the survey setup and admin for you so you can focus on the client.
We will also support you to ensure you are comfortable navigating around the dashboard so you can take the lead when it comes to presenting the data to them.
All in all you can spend more of your time reviewing the data with your client rather than getting bogged down in survey admin.
Building your survey
There are generally two ways we will work with you to build your survey:
- You and your client might be clear on what the survey needs to look like. Great, let us have a copy and we will get straight on with it.
- You, or your client, might need some input on the best survey questions to ask. No problem, we have a comprehensive question library for both employee engagement surveys and 360 degree feedback so we can let you have those to begin selecting what you need.
We bespoke everything we do so there will be occasions where we need to create new content with you. We can also advise on things like the best type of survey rating scale and the best types of questions to ask.
Rest assured that the final product will look like it was custom designed for your client.
Administering your survey
We will talk you through the different options for deploying the survey, but the options are:
- to use an ‘open’ link where anyone with the link can complete the survey. The link can be sent out in a number of ways – via email, text message or QR code.
- to use individualised links. These links are sent out by us via email.
Once the survey is live we will provide you (and the client if necessary) with access to our reporting dashboard to enable you to begin monitoring survey completion rate and survey responses.
Viewing your survey data
There are some subtle differences in how you might want to view the survey data, depending on whether or not it is an employee survey or 360 degree feedback questionnaire.
Employee Surveys
For employee surveys our reporting dashboard is way more engaging than relying on static reports.
Once the survey closes you can review the survey data with your client using the reporting dashboard.
We will take you through the dashboard functionality, but we have built it in a way that is pretty intuitive to use – it doesn’t require any configuration from you and typically takes an hour and a half (at the most) to become comfortable using it.
Clients tend to be really pleased that this can be done so quickly and they enjoy the interactivity. These sessions are really useful for providing quick feedback to the client and developing the story they want to tell.
At this point either you or your client can start playing around with charts and creating reports, or we can create reports for you.
360 Degree Feedback
For 360 degree feedback it can also be really useful to explore the data through our reporting dashboard.
Our platform enables feedback recipients to have online access to their own 360 degree feedback data. We obviously manage how access is setup, but you can use the platform to facilitate the feedback session online. The functionality within the user’s dashboard means you can dynamically slice and dice the data and guide them through how their own ratings compare to their other raters etc. This makes the process much more engaging and is perfect for delivering remotely via video conferencing.
Your clients will probably be interested to see if there are any common strengths/development needs across their population, especially if you are using 360 degree feedback to support a leadership development programme.
Our platform makes it easy to aggregate 360 data and compare between datasets.
Generating reports
This will also differ, depending on whether you are running an employee survey or 360 degree feedback.
Employee Surveys
It is likely that your client will want reports in addition to being able to interrogate the data through the reporting dashboard.
Reporting is dead easy so either we can do this for you (bit of cost), you can do it yourself (less cost), or you might choose not to create reports at all (no cost).
We will create datasets for you that reflect the client’s organisation structure.
Creating reports is then simply a matter of selecting the appropriate dataset(s) and adding the charts and tables you want to appear in the report.
We can define custom report intro text and the reports will be branded with the client’s logo.
360 Degree Feedback
Our survey platform enables us to produce an individual 360 degree feedback report for each feedback recipient.
Again, either we can do this for you, you can do it yourself, or you might choose not to create reports at all.
Once reports have been created they can be sent to you or the client ready to facilitate the 360 degree feedback session.
Reports will then be permanently available through the reporting dashboard. Useful for when they get ‘lost’.
Group reports can be created in the same way as individual reports.
Benchmark your clients’ survey data
By using our survey platform you will automatically have access to our full survey database meaning you can provide your clients with a benchmark comparison of ow their survey data compares with other organisations.
Action Planning
Another key differentiator of our survey platform is that our dashboard has comprehensive action planning functionality built in.
Users can define specific actions as frequently as they want, set reminder dates and deadlines and update completion status.
What gets measured gets done
Our platform makes it simple to compare survey results over time. Whether that be a before and after 360, or comparing several pulse surveys, you will be able to quickly and easily see how the data is changing.
Our platform cuts out the need to do any manual data analysis, making it a really effective tool when it comes to helping your clients evaluate the impact of their interventions.
How much does it cost?
Firstly, we’re not looking for re-sellers.
We know that to commit to up front licensing costs and/or feel like you have to sell the product on to earn a commission is not for most people.
We aim for our platform to simply be a cost-effective and straightforward way for you to provide a more sophisticated survey solution to your clients.
With regard to cost, it’s difficult to state a single figure as there are a few things that impact cost, but our aim will always be to work with you to define a budget that works for you and for your clients.
The key things that impact costs are:
- There is a setup component to the cost, which is the time it takes to talk through the approach and create your online survey for you.
- Should you want to use our reporting dashboard there is a licence cost for that. We can either do this on a per survey basis or an annual licence basis depending on your anticipated need. The licence includes hosting, security and support. And be reassured our licence cost is nowhere near as expensive as companies such as Qualtrics!
- There is a dashboard setup component, which depends on the complexity of your clients’ needs to provide their own users with their own dashboard access. For example, some companies may only need to provide the HR Director with access to all of the survey data, which is inexpensive. Other companies may wish to provide dashboard access to additional users such as Area Managers or Site Managers, which is more complex as we need to create the access for each of those users.
- There is a reporting cost. You can create as many reports as you want through our dashboard for no extra costs. But where you want us to generate reports for you there is a cost per report.
There are a number of ways we can make it work so the best thing to do is get in touch and we’ll talk it through….