Attitudes and opinions drive behavior, so understanding your employees' attitudes and opinions is critical to predicting how they are likely to react to different management messages, policies, initiatives, or inaction on a whole range of matters. With today's fluid workforce, attitude and opinion trends in your workplace change as often as employees turn over. That's why strategic employee polling is critical to predicting and affecting behavior with success. Follow these seven simple steps to conduct an effective poll.

Step 1.
Answer the question, "Why are you doing a poll?" Always focus your inquiry on determining the opinions of the decision-makers whose behavior you wish to predict or affect.

Step 2.
Get your arms around the universe of potential respondents. Once you know whose opinions you want to measure, you need to create a database of potential respondents (often referred to as a "sample") and a method for communicating with them.

Step 3.
Decide which issues to probe in your questionnaire. Always keep front and center the question, "What do you want to learn, from whom, to guide what actions?"

Step 4.
Create the questionnaire. The format of a poll is determined by the method of delivery: A printed form, a telephone interview, or an online survey.

Step 5.
Implement the poll. There are three primary methods for delivering an employee survey to the universe of potential respondents: (1) Telephone interviews; (2) Paper questionnaire; (3) Online survey.

Step 6.
Crunch the numbers. There are three basic approaches to tabulating and reporting the statistical data from a poll: (1) One dimensional; (2) Two dimensional; and (3) Multiple layered cross-tabulation.

Step 7.
Analyze the data. Figure out what the numbers mean and use your analysis to define action steps.