Employee survey pricing is, quite naturally, a key consideration for any prospective buyers. And there is a huge variance and diverse options to consider when you're looking to introduce a survey. The number of employees, desired methodology, preferred tech, complexity, and geography of the organisation are all determining factors that can greatly impact the overall cost.
The average cost of employee engagement surveys can vary, from free-of-charge and sub £5,000 for basic surveys to £100,000 for complex, enterprise-scale or customised offering. To help you narrow this wide range down, we’ve createdthis guide, which sets out tips and advice, and explores the possible costs of running an employee engagement survey. With our expert guidance, you can have an idea of what kind of bang you can expect for your buck before you go out to the market.
Employee Engagement Survey Pricing: How Much Do Organisations Spend?
Companies typically spend 1% to 2% of total payroll on their employee engagement efforts. To put this into perspective, an organisation with a monthly payroll of £400,000 will typically have a monthly employee engagement budget of around £4,000 to £8,000.
Don’t be put off from investing in employee engagement; failing to address employee engagement can result in a number of negative consequences, such as a decrease in employee retention, productivity, and general workplace happiness. Discover why employee experience matters more than ever on our blog.
Pricing Guide to Employee Engagement Surveys
While we can’t predict exactly what you’ll pay, we’ve applied our knowledge of the employee survey market to put together a guide. This should give you a good insight into what kind of functions and features you could get for your budget.
Under £10,000
- Fixed survey approach and questionnaire content
- Standard, pre-defined survey reports
- Little or no involvement from a consultant or project manager
£10,000 – £25,000
- Flexible survey content with fixed survey tools
- Reporting dashboards or flexible online reporting tools
- Some involvement from consultants in either survey design or results interpretation
- Some project support during implementation
£25,000 – £50,000
- Flexible survey content and tools
- Reporting tools enabling detailed analysis by multiple users
- Full-service consultancy support in both survey design and post-survey interpretation
- Project-managed implementation
£50,000 – £100,000
- Highly flexible survey tools with multiple survey methodologies and questionnaires
- Powerful reporting tools for ‘deep-dive’ data analysis and interpretation
- Provision of custom reporting elements, such as business or manager reports
- Full-service consultancy support in stakeholder consultation, survey design and business-wide analysis and action planning
- Project managed implementation
£100,000 and over
- Integrated survey programmes, incorporating self-service questionnaires and ‘pulse’ surveys
- Powerful reporting tools for deep-dive data analysis and interpretation
- Provision of custom reporting elements such as business or manager reports
- Consultancy partnership with support throughout the survey programme and in all post-survey interpretation, activities and communications
- Dedicated project management during implementation
Pricing Factors to Help Determine Employee Engagement Survey Pricing
So, now that you have a bit of a better idea of the different price ranges, how do you know which category your employee survey will fall into?
Consider the employee survey spectrum. First things first – what kind of employee survey or listening programme do you plan to run? Are you looking for a simple, no-frills survey for a team of 25 people or a complex, integrated one for a global team of 250,000?
Whether you’re at one end of this spectrum or the other, or most likely somewhere in between, will dictate the likely cost of introducing an employee engagement survey, and there is quite a range in what they can cost.
· Length of survey
The longer your survey, the higher the average cost of the survey. This one makes perfect sense – a longer survey will take more time to develop and analyse. However, be mindful that if your survey is too long, it may become less effective.
Think about it – your employees will get tired of answering questions if the survey appears to be never-ending, so they may pick random answers just to get to the end quickly. This means you’ll want to focus your efforts on creating a shorter, more effective survey where the results you receive are actually relevant and all focus on your key performance indicators.
· Number of survey participants
The higher the number of survey participants you have, the higher the employee engagement survey cost. You may be charged per employee as each employee will create more and more data to analyse.
· Cross-tabulations
The more cross-tabulation reports you want in reporting, the more expensive your survey will be.
Bigger companies may consider cross-tabulations in reporting, which helps managers observe how the results shape up across different demographic profiles. For example, cross-tabulation reports may focus on gender, age, tenure, and department. This can help managers discover how benchmarks like engagement and satisfaction weigh up against different groupings.
· Reporting on surveys
The data at the end of the survey type needs to be reported on – it’s perhaps the most important feature. You can opt for basic levels of reporting right up to advanced levels of reporting, with the more advanced obviously being the costliest.
Some companies will benefit from the most sophisticated options here, but you should always think about your own organisational objectives before splashing the cash. Find out more about employee survey reports and how to share results.
Is It Really Worth Investing in Employee Surveys?
Of course, employee surveys can be a significant investment - both in terms of time and cash. And the truth is that even the best employee surveys aren't a silver bullet for businesses; the real value and worth of a survey are in acting as a catalyst for business change. Here are a few more benefits of outsourcing employee surveys:
1. Access to bias-free questions
Sometimes, survey questions can unintentionally be written with bias – which is not something you want when trying to drive the best decisions forward.
Fortunately, survey design is included when you outsource to us, and we have years of experience in understanding what questions we should ask and how we should phrase them in order to retrieve the most accurate and relevant employee answers. This means that the results you get will help you gather the most useful insights and assist you in your future strategies and making marginal gains on employee experience.
2. Confidentiality and employee trust
When surveys are conducted in-house, employees sometimes fear that their survey responses are not confidential and may result in retaliation or other forms of consequence.
However, when you partner with a third party like ETS, we can help limit this doubt by creating a safe environment for employees to be honest. This may prompt more accurate and relevant answers that can help form your later strategies, such as improving employee engagement through meaningful conversations.
3. Access to insightful data to drive informed decision-making
As we’ve mentioned previously, employee surveys can be a fantastic way to earn insights into what your employees want and need. These surveys are supposed to aid your organisation in the long term, so putting impactful strategies in place based on accurate data may help more than you think.
Don’t forget – we go beyond offering basic, flimsy statistics, instead focusing on comprehensive reports and areas of improvement. By taking notice of in-depth survey results and reporting, you can start improving employee satisfaction, and, as a result, employee retention, productivity, engagement, and even customer satisfaction. We can provide you with actionable recommendations from an outsider’s point of view to achieve this.
4. Improved business performance
In terms of whether it's worth the necessary investment, there's compelling evidence that higher employee engagement leads to improved business performance.
As you may expect, executives often ask us, "How can we measure the ROI or business impact of our engagement survey?". We've carried out linkage analysis and other post-survey consultancy for various companies to help them prove the tangible and measurable value of higher engagement levels.
Case Studies from ETS
These are some good case study examples from our satisfied customers:
We workedwith the charity Cancer Research UK, developing an agile listening strategy that improved employee engagement. This approach incorporated various pulse surveys, enabling Cancer Research UK to adapt to changing needs and enhance its workplace culture. We found this resulted in:
· An increased focus on enablement, reward, and career aspirations
· Significant score improvements in leadership and inclusion compared to the year before
· Enhanced understanding of diverse employee experiences through demographic data analysis.
Our employee survey work with M&S involved us exploring, with them, trends in teams with higherlevels of employee engagement. Further analysis showed that:
· Manager scores in highly engaged teams were, on average, +10% higher.
· Customer satisfaction was higher in stores with higher engagement.
Hopefully, you now know more about how much an employee engagement survey costs and if you should take the next step in investing in one.
Be sure to refer to our employee survey buyer’s guide and use it to inform what you do and don’t need. This will help inform you even more about our process and you can even use this as the basis of the project brief you put together. Rememberto speak with your HR peers to obtain advice and recommendations from trusted people in your network, and get in touch with us if you have any questions or want to start your employee survey with us.
