We use employee surveys at work to measure employee satisfaction, gather confidential feedback, and uncover hidden issues and trends lying under the organization’s surface. Some companies spend money and time on expensive survey tools, but as long as the right questions are asked, the followup is more important than the method.

I personally like Google Docs as a tool for creating a quick and easy (and free!) employee survey. Here’s how to do it:

• Go to Google.com/docs
• Log in or create a free Google account if you don’t have one already.
• Click “Create”
• Click “Form”
• Enter the information you’d like your survey to contain
• Click the link at the bottom of the screen to view the published form
• Highlight the link, right click on the link text, and press Ctrl + C on the keyboard to copy the link
• Open an email and press Ctrl + V on the keyboard to paste the link into the body of the email
• Send the email to your employees!
• To view the responses to the survey, log into your Google Docs account and click on the survey in the document list to open the spreadsheet full of responses

There’s more to it than that short explanation, but that is the most basic way to create and distribute an employee survey in less than ten minutes. To give a little better illustration, I created this short screencast to show some of the steps involvled. Click here to open the screencast video in a new window. If you have questions on how to do this after reading the directions and watching the video, feel free to reach out to me for help.