Benchmarking the Cost of Engagement Surveys
(This came to me anonymously from a VP of a mid-size company looking for perspective - Steve)
Based on your experience, what is the cost of an employee engagement survey for 500 employees?
We want to have the following attributes from the survey:
- Executive summary
- Professional looking report with qualitative and quantitative data
- High and low scores
- Score variances from expectations
- Identifies strengths and shadows
- Organization, team and function analysis - Level analysis, etc.
I recognize that there are platforms out there. I was just quoted today somewhere between $80,000 - $90,000. That was surprising to me.
What are others seeing/experiencing? I'd like to benchmark the pricing options out there in the marketplace.
-
It often depends on the provider/vendor and what they may include.
Employee Engagement Surveys can take a lot of time and while you may want what you listed above - there are a few things that take up the most time...
- Initial Assessment and alignment with leadership on the purpose for the survey
- Ensuring you have the right questions for what area or areas of engagement you are attempting to drive towards
- The delivery, collection, and execution of the report
- Analysis and creation of the report
- Working through any next steps.
I can see some companies (Gallup, etc) and possibly even "Best Places to Work" also charging a large fee because of how they advertise to the external community.
However, there are also affordable options if you are willing to adjust how you want the execution, delivery and end result report to be.
Feel free to reach out to me if you want to discuss. Good luck regardless!
-
Like Benjamin said, there are a number of options out there that you can utilize to do an employee engagement survey. There are a number of tools you can use to do it yourself that gives you some flexibility but you need to have a very trusting culture for employees to feel safe doing a survey internally. Plus, there are full range of service provides that could do it for you. Things to think about are: do you want to use a canned survey so you have benchmark data for your analysis or would you rather have a provider that can customize the survey to the key issues you want to focus on? The results of each of these will be different and impact what you do with the outcome.
We've personally done the Best Places to Work Survey. It is based on the number of employees you have but it's worth finding out, especially if you want to use a canned survey to benchmark yourself against your industry or company size.
We've done a number of surveys for our clients of all sizes. Our tool is customized to the topics /issues you want to address. The cost will vary but definitely a fraction of what you were quoted.
I'm happy to talk through pros and cons for you of the various options to help you figure out which one is best for you. Feel free to email me at Robin@strategicHRinc.com to schedule a time to talk in more detail.