Surveys are commonplace in organizations, with more than 70 percent of US organizations using them regularly (1). R&D managers can use surveys to understand the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behavior of scientists, project managers, teams, customers, suppliers, and others. Information from some surveys can be used as a measure of employee attitudes and morale. Other surveys can provide baseline measures for benchmarking of processes and behaviors. Still others can provide information for identifying organizational gaps and for driving organizational change (2).

The quality of the information you will receive from a survey depends on the quality of the questions you ask. It may seem simple and easy to develop interesting questions, send them to people and ask them to answer; but developing a good survey is a complex effort and requires a great deal of attention, thought and care (2, 3). This article offers advice on how to develop good surveys, as well as some tips on administering them and analyzing the information you will get.