Employee Listening suite: Employee engagement surveys

Table of Contents

• Intended use cases
• Creating a survey and distribution
• Sections
• Managing surveys
• Analytics
• Managing questions and themes
• Themes and questions toggle for survey results
• Responding to a survey
• Easier access to survey data export
• Survey reminder pop-up
• Best practices

As part of the Employee listening suite add-on product, Employee engagement surveys give a baseline measure of employee satisfaction and will provide actionable insights into improving employee experience.

They are large, comprehensive, anonymous surveys meant to be conducted on an annual basis. 

Unlike Pulse or All-purpose surveys, engagement surveys are meant to be sent out on an infrequent basis, and contain a large question set to gain a better understanding of employee sentiment and satisfaction throughout the year. 

Intended use cases

Employee engagement is a vital component of an organization's success, influencing factors such as productivity, employee turnover, and workplace morale. The engagement survey is designed to increase this critical element.

We’ve found that our customers and prospects desire a specialized survey type for engagement surveys, and using a non-specialized survey type is not sufficient to compete with standalone engagement surveys. Many customers will have an engagement survey tool tied to a ‘Best place to work’ scheme, as Simpplr does itself, but particularly for smaller companies, it will be advantageous to meet needs for an engagement survey tool as well. It will also have the benefit of completing the circle, as all relevant employee survey data can be completed within Simpplr. 

Creating a survey

To create a survey:

1. Go to your User menu, then Manage > Surveys. This will take you to the survey listing. Here you can select the Create survey option.
2. Choose Employee engagement > Create.
3. Name your survey accordingly. This can be anything you'd like, but it should clearly communicate what type of survey it is so your users get a good idea of what to expect from it. 
4. Choose the distribution audience. This can be the entire organization, specific Audiences, or members of a specific site in your intranet. 
5. Choose the default introductions message (shown below) or create your own. This will appear for all employees when the survey is sent out. This is another great opportunity to be concise and deliberate on your expectations regarding this survey. Tell your users why they're receiving this, and what you want the outcome to be from it.
6. Similarly, you can choose the default Thank you message, or insert your own custom message. This will be the first things users see once they submit the completed survey. 
7. Finally, before getting to the questions, set the survey schedule. Choose the date and time you want it to be sent to users, as well as the participation window. The recommended timeframe is 21 days, but you can customize this as well. 

Add your questions

Pick from a list of questions to build your survey or create your own. Questions can be changed or removed up until the send date. Employee engagement surveys can use multiple question types to give a baseline of employee satisfaction across your organization. Questions can be grouped into sections to improve the participation experience for employees. 

First, we'll look at the question bank. To browse through a list of pre-written questions, click Browse question bank. Here you'll over 100 categorized questions with various scale types to choose from. The Themes dropdown menu will filter questions based on the selected theme. This is great for grouping questions into sections (done once you add at least one question to the first section).

All custom created questions will be stored in the question bank as well.

Create your own question 

1. Click Create your own.
2. Enter a question and select an answer scale. Note, keep your questions as short as possible while still communicating the point of the question. While the character limit is a tremendous amount, users can run into errors with overly long questions.
3. Decide whether or not your question should be optional on the survey. A required question will have a red asterisk next to it.
   
4. Select a question theme. Click Next.

Sections

1. With engagement surveys, the best way to ensure users are completing them the way you intended is to split your questions up into sections. Once you've added one or more initial questions, you'll see the option to add a new section. Click it.
2. Title your section. This can be in line with the theme of this set of questions, or something as simple as "Part 2 of 5"; that way users know how much of the survey is left. 
3. Add an optional section description.
4. Note you can move questions around different sections simply by clicking and dragging them to the section you want. 

Managing surveys

As a survey manager, you can head to Manage > Surveys to view a list of all surveys created, including Pulse, All-purpose, and Engagement. Here you'll see an overview of all survey data, including number of active surveys right now, average response rate, and when the next survey is scheduled to go out.

You're able to edit, duplicate, or complete (if active) a survey at any time. To delete a survey, you must complete it first. An active or scheduled survey can't be deleted until it's complete. 

Note that Pulse surveys are the only survey type in the Employee Listening suite that you can pause.

The ability to duplicate surveys is useful in case you have a lengthy survey that needs a minor edit, but you don't want to recreate the whole thing. You can also retitle a duplicate survey to fit a different audience or theme.

Survey analytics

The main Survey menu has an overview dashboard of all scheduled, active and past surveys with a snippet of their metrics. You can filter by survey type, status or date sent.

To view the metrics of a specific survey, click the name of the survey in question. Here you'll see a dashboard with the stats from all surveys sent in the time frame set. There are two tabs; Themes and Questions. 

The Themes tab will highlight user sentiment from the survey(s) as well as participation from the audience. You're able to download a CSV file of all participation rate for better reporting. 

The Questions tab will give specific data on each question that was included in the survey. At the bottom of this page, you can download a CSV file of all feedback left by your participants (if applicable). Note this feedback is anonymous.

Managing questions and themes

Create custom questions for your surveys and group them for reporting in Manage questions and themes. Custom questions can be added by clicking Add > Question. Fill in the question text, then choose the appropriate scale based on the question's context. You can also make your question multiple choice or free text, which will prompt users to type in their answers.

You're able to edit your custom questions at any time (even during an active survey) by navigating to the same menu and clicking Edit on the ellipsis.

Themes are how you group and categorize your surveys for analytics, aggregating similar questions so that trends for key topics can be easily tracked and identified. Add a new theme by clicking Add > Theme. Or view the current list of themes by clicking the Themes tab. This is also where you're able to rename or disable any themes. 

Disabling a theme makes the questions within that theme unavailable to select when creating a new survey. If questions within a theme are currently being used in an active survey, you won't be able to disable the theme. This won't affect metrics past surveys that used the theme/questions. And you can always re-enable the theme.