EFS Employee: scope of the software solution

The survey process in the EFS Employee software solution is geared towards to the company’s organizational chart. This system considerably reduces processing complexity. All information required for the survey is either stored in the software beforehand or collected during the employee survey itself: The software can display the contact details of participating employees, information on their department and location, and their hierarchical position in the company.

Mapping the organizational chart in the software meets two criteria that are crucial to success: The stored information can be used to generate a customized questionnaire for each employee depending on his or her position in the company, while every report recipient is sent their relevant results report.

EFS Employee uses software specially designed for online questionnaires for the actual data collection process. As a fully integrated module in EFS Employee, it includes all the functions required to create and implement surveys in line with the company’s corporate design. Online surveys created with EFS Employee use filter technology to guide those being questioned through the questionnaire as quickly as possible. The software reacts to answers given and only displays relevant questions.

A further benefit of EFS Employee is the fact that it has been developed for conducting international surveys. The software facilitates the translation of questionnaire content into several languages and provides interfaces to common translation software solutions. This feature eliminates errors caused by manual maintenance and translating the survey content into different languages. The survey itself can be carried out in just about any language – even complex characters such as Chinese or Cyrillic are displayed without errors.

EFS Employee also manages the survey participants. Each employee usually receives a personal e-mail invitation to the survey. The software generates a unique access link for each participant. Although a survey participant cannot be identified from the results data set, during the data collection phase it is possible to determine whether an employee has already taken part in the survey or not. This prevents multiple entries. In addition, the participant is automatically returned to the last unanswered question if he or she is interrupted while completing the questionnaire.

EFS Employee has an extension option for carrying out paper-based surveys. After the online employee survey is created, a questionnaire is generated which can be filled out by hand. The results can be integrated automatically or manually (depending on volume) into an overall data set. Therefore, employees who do not have access to a computer at their workplace can still take part in the survey.

After the survey, the results data are aggregated. The software performs automatic data tests using definable parameters before displaying the results. For instance, an “anonymity threshold” can be defined. If the response rates in individual departments are so low that individual respondents could be identified from their answers, then the results for these departments are automatically masked and their answers are only included in the reports for the next higher hierarchical level.

All content is optimized for each recipient in accordance with the company’s rights and role system. The final reports are generated as easy-to-read, printer-friendly PDF documents in presentation quality and issued automatically. They are either e-mailed directly to each recipient or made available for download from a separate and secure download site. The automation of the reporting process is particularly important for employee surveys. All results reports must be prepared as soon as possible after the end of the survey. Only automated mass generation can ensure that large quantities of reports are drawn up quickly and accurately and made available to the appropriate authorized recipient.

After the survey and provision of results, EFS Employee helps organize and manage follow-up actions identified as a result of the survey analysis. Based on the company organizational chart, individual measures can be defined and their implementation monitored. EFS Employee makes it much easier for those with overall responsibility to manage and control follow-up processes and work together with the departments implementing their own specific measures, particularly in companies with a decentralized form of organization. There is also the option of conducting an online follow-up survey among all report recipients some time after the initial survey to assess whether follow-up actions were adequately communicated and changes perceived appropriately.