In annual employee surveys, it is sometimes allowed for a subordinate manager, who has not received a sufficient number of responses in their department, to access the department above.
The purpose of this is to create engagement and insight for the manager and the team in question.
This approach works well in annual employee surveys where the same questions are sent to the entire organization during the same period. It also works in centrally controlled pulse surveys, where the same questions are sent to an entire organization at the same time.
However, in decentralized pulse surveys, where different departments are sent surveys with different question areas at different times, this approach is inappropriate.
The reason for this is that we want to create credible results that can be read consistently and protect respondents from being identified.
- If the same question areas can be sent during different periods, it may be that the individual department with too few responses has a department above it that completely lacks responses for the period.
- Even if there are responses for the department above, access will be controlled over which period the user sees in the results portal.
For example, responses in February may lack sufficient response quantities in the individual department, while in January and March, there are sufficient response quantities to obtain their own results. This raises anonymity issues, such as the manager being able to see the responses if they change the period (January - March, but not only for February). If the manager can see the results over different time periods. Additionally, it will be inconsistent which part of the organization the manager sees, creating interpretation issues. Sometimes it's their own department, and other times it's the department above. Results will be perceived as changing inconsistently, making the system messy, reducing credibility, and reliability in the approach.
Therefore, Quicksearch does not allow managers to access results from departments above in ongoing surveys (e.g., Exit and Recruitment) or in decentralized pulse surveys.