Survey Management Tools

When it comes to survey management tools, the anticipated functionality is to collect accurate feedback and usable business data. The tool should also be easy to use, for both the person building the survey and the person answering it. In terms of measuring compliance and risk, surveys are an excellent resource to utilize. Companies implement surveys to track internal or external compliance with required policies, standards, or best practices. These stem around issues such as information security, anti-bribery, employee safety, and physical security, to name a few. Managing surveys ensures that you are not only compliant, but that your business is running safely and efficiently.

Key Responsibilities in Survey Management

The survey process can effectively be broken down into five main categories that need to be managed: planning, creation, execution, collection, and analysis. Before creating the survey, you first need to determine the purpose of the survey so that you can plan accordingly. Who will be answering the survey, where are they located, and what does the survey encompass? These questions set a solid foundation for you to start. Once you’ve determined the purpose of your survey, you need to create the questions! If you’re testing compliance to a government required standard, for example, you’ll need to make sure your questions and answers are able to give you the information you’ll need to determine compliance, but also are easily answerable. Once you’ve created your questions, set the answers, and determined value, send out your survey for completion. While collecting your completed surveys, you’ll tally the results for each area/facility. This is where survey software is most useful as it saves you time on analyzing each individual file. As you analyze the results of your survey, you can successfully determine compliance and useful data trends. Perhaps one particular question proved problematic across numerous surveys, thus indicating your procedure on IT security is lacking in regard to personal devices. Use your data to help you reach compliance, but also to learn more about your company’s procedures and problem areas.

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Survey Benefits

Mainly, surveys are very familiar and easy to use. Rather than requiring people to complete complex analysis, surveys gather your vital information in easy-to-answer question formats and are flexible in how questions are asked. Survey’s also reduce observer subjectivity with a standardized stimulus. Most importantly, you gather precise results. With set answers, you can quickly calculate responses as compliant or not. Data that isn’t accurate is useless! Survey execution can be a time-consuming task that requires a lot of resources to ensure that your questions accurately determine compliance and risk. If you are using a manual process with spreadsheets and standard emails, you’re going to have a difficult time. Despite this, surveys are a preferred method of data gathering by many people. They are extremely efficient and easy to manage when software is utilized. Check out a list of advantages and disadvantages here.

ComplianceWatch

Okay, so here is my shameless self-promotion. If you utilize surveys or know you should be, read how we can help you out. Our platform, ComplianceWatch, is fully automated to support your survey management needs. Enter the emails of the staff that will be completing your surveys, and the software automatically sends them a welcome email that links them to their assessment and explains everything they will need to complete their task, even offering a customizable welcome message if you want to clarify the intent or purpose of the survey. Just make your assessment and you’re done. Save time creating your assessment by using our content libraries, where we’ve already crafted questions to determine compliance with over 35 government required standards and best practices. Don’t worry about performing an analysis of your findings or data reporting, as ComplianceWatch completes these tasks for you with a click of a button.

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