Reaching your deskless employees with a survey can be challenging, but it's essential. These workers often lack access to traditional communication tools, making it hard to reach them. In this article we're sharing practical tips to help you reach your deskless employees.

Consider giving employees an extra 30 minutes for lunch, or an early finish, to thank them for their time. This shows them that you want their insights and it’s important - and you’re happy to reward them with something meaningful.

To encourage responses from employees who work shifts or are away from their desks, encourage line managers to give employees time slots where they can spend some time completing the survey. Have communal devices like computers, tablets, and smartphones available to make the process easy.

It can take an employee up to seven ‘touchpoints’ before they complete their employee survey. Use every channel available to you to communicate with your employees about your survey, how they can complete it, and when the deadline is. Make the most of Stribe’s email, QR, survey links and apps to support this. Remember - for deskless employees QR posters and digital noticeboards are a really effective way to encourage survey participation.

Stribe displays the first question of your survey in the email and app notification - think about what that first question should be to make sure that it entices all of the employees in your audience to engage with your survey.

16% variation in team engagement due to managers, they’re a significant part of your employees’ engagement with you orgnisation. Whilst your survey is live, make sure your team leaders and managers are highlighting to employees the survey is happening, how they can access it, and the benefits of it. Monitor response rates so that you can identify and work with teams that have low response rates. We've shared our top tips here.

Include in every communication about your survey that employees’ anonymity is protected. It is one of the main reasons employees’ are hesitant to participate, so continuously reminding them that Stribe protects their anonymity at every step is important. You can send them our anonymity commitment here.

It’s a busy world, and employees are juggling many competing priorities. Make sure you send nudges at different times of the day and week so that everyone sees at least one reminder about the survey that’s live. See a step-by-step to do that within Stribe here.

Before deciding on your launch date, think about what else is going on for your teams that might cause a low survey response rate. For example, are staff on holiday, sick, on training courses, or have heavy workloads and deadlines?

Identify and empower employees within your teams to champion the survey and motivate their peers to participate. They could be involved in the design of the survey, as well as it’s launch and promotion.

External motivations linked to positive impacts such as charity donations or supporting sustainability initiatives can also increase your survey participation rates. For example, you could ask employees to nominate a charity that you will donate to if a certain response rate is achieved, or you could plant a tree for every response received. Including these incentives in your survey communications will show your commitment to the cause, and help employees understand the positive impact they can have if they take part.

Employees want to see visible changes as a result of their feedback. If they do, they’ll be more likely to keep responding in the future. Once your survey has closed and you have analysed the results, make sure you communicate with employees what changes they can expect to see based on their feedback. You can do that directly from Stribe here!

For advice specific to your team, get in touch with the Stribe customer success team today on support@stribehq.com.