Quick and Easy Commuter Surveying Using E-Mail

Thanks to our friends at NJ TRANSIT for this idea.

Surveying employees is often seen as difficult and expensive, but NJ TRANSIT uses a simple and effective e-mail survey that captures how their employees commute. This is a simple way to determine if you are meeting the 14 percent employee participation rate.

Microsoft Outlook e-mail offers an option for messages to incorporate "voting buttons". Other e-mail programs may have a similar feature.

Here's how to set it up in Outlook.

1. Create the "voting buttons". In a "New Message" window, select "View," then "Options," then check "Voting Buttons". Enter the wording for each button, separating them with a semi-colon. You won't see the buttons on your draft, but they will appear when recipients receive their e-mail messages.

2. Draft your e-mail message with instructions. A typical survey message is shown below. Craft the e-mail message to emphasize how quick and easy it is to respond and to further explain the voting button choices. Be sure the survey questions direct recipients to select the one single option that best describes their commute, as multiple selections are not allowed.

3. Send the e-mail. Your e-mail system may allow you to broadcast an e-mail to "all employees" so one click distributes the survey to everyone.

4. Receive and tally the replies. One click by each recipient then sends the reply back to you. Outlook tallies all the replies in your original message in the "Sent Items" folder. In order for the system to count a reply, you must open the reply message. You can also print out a listing of all the replies to document the survey.

NJ Transit had a 60 percent response rate (over 700 replies) in less than six business days. It took minimal effort to capture a wealth of employee information. Using this system they eliminated the additional time and expense to physically distribute the surveys and tally results, while enhancing the speed and accuracy of compiling the votes. They incurred almost no survey-related expenses and had a great response rate.

If you are not a Microsoft Outlook user or your e-mail system does not offer this feature, you can find other self-survey solutions on the Web.

Example Survey using MS-Outlook

PDF files must be downloaded and viewed with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0.