The Dos and Don'ts of Administering Psychometric Surveys: Tips from an Experienced Virtual Assistant

Online survey and psychometric tools administration, particularly when carried out on a company-wide scale or for large workshops, can be very time-consuming when done properly. A virtual assistant with expertise in this area can save you a lot of valuable time and also improve the quality of the survey output.

Drawing upon over 13 years' experience of setting up and running psychometric tools and feedback surveys for clients, here I outline some techniques I have developed which will ensure the success and smooth running of your psychometric tests and surveys.

1. Factor in just the right amount of time for questionnaire completions

After many years of psychometric survey administration, I am acutely aware of the importance of a well planned out survey schedule. It is essential to factor in adequate timescales to ensures a high completion rate, particularly in cases such as 360 degree feedback where there are multiple reviewers per reviewee. This, in turn, facilitates the generation of well-balanced survey reports in a timely fashion without any last-minute scrambles for feedback. If you allow survey participants too long a time frame to complete the task, they can become complacent, leaving it until the last minute. If you don’t allow enough time, you risk not being able to collect sufficient feedback to create a viable report at the end of the process. For most 360-degree feedback surveys, the ideal formula follows a 1-2-1-1 schedule such as this:

• Factor in 1 week for reviewees to make their reviewer nominations (or the client organisation to submit the reviewer details for uploading)

• This is followed by 2 weeks for the collection of feedback data from reviewers, along with reviewees' self-reviews (with a soft deadline)

• Allow 1 extra week for chasing any late feedback (with a hard deadline)

• And finally, 1 week to generate and send the reports to the client.

This is a tried and tested formula, perfected over many years of psychometric survey administration, which has yielded great results for my clients, irrespective of which business sector they come from. Be aware, however, that if your data collection process falls over the course a public holiday or during half-term when participants may be away, it would be wise to factor in some additional time. 

2. Make the necessary IT checks and provisions

There’s nothing worse than having a significant period of valuable data collection time elapse only to realise that none or few of your participants have actually received their instruction emails because the client’s firewall has intercepted the email before it could even be delivered, or because it got automatically filtered into a spam folder. To prevent this from happening and to ensure no valuable data collection time is lost, you can take the following steps:

• Send your survey participants a personal email message requesting that they white-list the survey tools instruction email domain so that the instruction emails don’t get filtered into spam folders.

• If participants are nominating their own reviewers, it is a good idea to advise them to personally contact the reviewers they plan to nominate in advance to seek their agreement to participate in the feedback process. This way, survey invitation emails won’t come as a surprise to reviewers and are therefore less likely to be regarded as unsolicited and suspect.

• For large-scale surveys, it is important to liaise with the IT department of the client organisation to ensure that survey participants will be able to receive emails from the survey provider, that the survey domain email is white-listed, that the firewall doesn’t block the survey login URL and any proxy servers do not drop or timeout browser sessions to the survey login URL. The IT set up for companies with multi-national offices can vary from location to location, so if your survey is being run internationally, it is important to ensure that all IT regional contacts are involved in the testing process.

• When running large-scale surveys it is also advisable to trial a mini-survey within the IT department of the client organisation, and if running an international survey, setting the main IT contact from each country as a mock reviewee. This is to check that the emails are received, the participants can log in, the survey website stays live long enough to complete the form, and the form can be submitted.