Contents:
- Introduction
- Creating a Survey
- Templates
- Settings
- Questions
- Audience Settings
- Access Settings
- Summary Settings
- Editing a Survey
- Closing a Survey
Introduction
Surveys are the crux of Engage — these allow you to collect valuable insight and information from your employees about how they feel working at your organization. From there, you can take action on what is required for you to maintain a happy and well-oiled workforce.
This article will go through the various steps for creating a survey; providing in-depth information on what each of these steps entail.
To access the Surveys module, click the icon highlighted below within the left-side menu bar:
You'll be taken to the Surveys page, which will either be blank (if no one within your organization has created a survey yet) or list out any surveys that have already been created:
More on survey statuses will be covered later in this article.
Creating a Survey
To create a new survey, click the "Create New Survey" button in the upper right-side corner of the Surveys module:
The following screenshot shows the first screen that'll appear:
There are three options to choose from:
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Select a template: This option, when selected, will allow you to choose from various survey templates that come with their own pre-defined questions. Clicking on the "Preview" icon on each template will show you the entire question set, as well as the category for each question. For category definitions, see this article.
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Create your own survey from scratch: No template will be used — instead, you'll create your own questions, and choose the question types to your liking.
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Duplicate an existing survey: A drop-down menu will appear where you can select a previously made survey, which will duplicate the questions and other information into your new survey. Selecting "Link to this survey" will allow you to compare the results from the survey that you're creating, to the results from the survey you're duplicating from. After you link a survey, the word "Linked" will appear next to the survey name:
- When hovering over that tag, the name of the linked survey will appear:
Templates
Templates are an easy way to set up your surveys since you can choose one based on the category and they come with pre-defined questions. Templates will save you time on creating survey questions from scratch.
To start, there are three Employee Engagement survey templates, each with varying lengths:
- Mini (17 questions)
- Standard (30 questions)
- Extended (50 questions)
Depending on how much data and feedback you want to receive from your employees, you'll want to select the desired length for your engagement survey. Additionally, each template includes open text questions, where employees can provide their own feedback in addition to the survey question answers. We recommend conducting your engagement surveys on a quarterly basis to ensure constant rotation of feedback, which would ensure the most optimal workforce at your company.
Template questions are editable, so if you wish to remove, add, or edit questions within the template, that can be done. However, this may affect your ability to measure your results against the benchmark averages, should those be set up.
Additionally, there are five other template options:
- Employee Health & Wellness Survey
- Manager Effectiveness Survey
- Alumni Survey
- Exit Survey
- On-boarding Survey
- Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) Survey
The DEIB survey can be used to gauge your employees' satisfaction with how diversity and inclusion is managed at your company. As with the other templates, DEIB questions are part of the Engage question bank, so administrators can select them when setting up a new custom survey.
For more information on survey templates, see this article.
Note: DEIB questions do not have benchmarks linked to them.
Settings
When at the settings for a survey, the first tab you'll see is this screen:
From there, various information can be inputted for your survey:
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Survey Name:
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You can name each of the surveys you wish to launch. You have to enter a survey name no matter which method you selected when initially creating the survey (e.g. from scratch, template, or duplicating a past survey).
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Survey Type:
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Select the survey type from the drop-down. These are pre-defined. If you are creating the survey from a template, this part will already be selected and cannot be changed.
To learn more about about Survey Types, see this article.
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Survey Logo:
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Add a custom logo (or image) for the survey you're creating. This logo will appear on the survey itself when your employees are taking it.
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If no image is uploaded, then your company logo that was added in Engage will populate in the survey.
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Introduction Page Text:
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Your text entered here will display on the splash page (i.e. the first screen) of the survey when users launch the survey. The intro. text will give your employees context on what the survey will entail, to ensure they won't go into it cold.
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Merge tags can be used to personalize the message for your users as they take the survey. If you don't wish to customize the text, you can simply utilize the default text entered there. For example: by using the tag "{{participant.firstName}}", the system automatically picks the end user’s first name, and displays it in the first screen of the survey as an introduction to the user.
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Make Responses Anonymous (check box):
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By clicking this, the survey responses would not be shown manager and super admin users in the system. If checked, you will be able to view the results based on dimensions without specific employee name information.
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If this box is left unchecked, the survey results will give data along with user details such as email address and employee ID. Users will be notified if their email addresses are going to be collected in the survey results.
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Allow Participants to Skip Questions (check box):
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This option allows users to skip questions if they prefer. By unchecking this, the user would be required to submit a response to every question of the survey.
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Once you're done completing this page, click on the "Next Step: Questions" button in the bottom right corner to advance to the next screen. Additionally, the "Send Survey Preview" button next to it can be clicked on at any moment, which will allow you to send a preview of the survey you're working on to anyone within your organization:
If the "Email" checkbox is selected, an email message will be included with the reminders sent out to your employees about the survey you're currently editing. By default, Engage's generic text will be populated, but you can always customize it to your likely. Merge tags can be utilized here to provide a more personalized touch as well.
Once this option is selected, the audience of the survey will receive the email notification asking them to complete the survey, along with the email body text entered. This email will continue to go to participants (more on that later) who have not yet taken the survey, until the stop date for reminders is reached.
Additionally, the "Beekeeper message" option is included if you wish to send a message to that HR platform regarding this survey.
Whichever messaging option you select, you can set a cadence for often reminders about taking the survey is sent:
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"Send reminders every": The number set here will send an email reminder every x days to users who have not taken the survey yet.
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"Stop the reminders after": The total number of days set here will determine how long the survey needs to be active (unless it's manually closed before the due date). The system will keep sending reminders during this period. After the maximum number of days specified is reached, no further reminders will be sent from Engage.
Questions
The next step in survey creation is where you will see default questions (if you've chosen to create the survey based on a template), as well as the option to enter your own custom questions.
If you created this survey by selecting a template, the default template questions will appear first:
Template questions cannot be edited. You'll notice under each question, there are descriptor words to describe the question. The first one is the question type, and the second is the category:
Six question types are included for you to choose from in Engage. Here are descriptions for each of them:
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Likert: Answers for this question type make up a spectrum from Strongly Agree, to Strongly Disagree. There is a maximum of 7 answers that can be entered for Likert questions. The text for each answer can be defined in App Settings. The favorability score can only be shown for Likert questions. For more information on category favorability, see this article.
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Multiple Choice: Allows users to select one answer from a multi-answer bank. Up to 15 options can be added for this question type. Favorability scores will NOT be calculated for Multiple Choice questions.
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Multi-Select: Unlike multiple choice, multiple answers can be selected for the same question. This question type is useful for challenging your employees and testing their critical thinking skills. Up to 15 options can be added for this question type. Additionally, you can display the maximum choices that a user can select for the question.
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eNPS: Employee Net Promotor Score has a range of 0 to 10 that employees can choose from. This answer type is on a scale that users can choose from, 0 meaning the worst/strongly disagree, and 10 meaning best/strongly agree.
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Yes/No: Answer choices are limited to Yes and No.
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Open: This answer type allows users to enter their own custom text answers.
Engage has a list of predefined categories that you can pick to assign to a question, or you can assign a custom category. Categories give context to the user as to what the topic of the question is.
When hovering your cursor over a question, the "Edit" and "Remove" options will appear on the far right. "Edit" allows users to rename the question, edit the question, answer type, and more. "Remove" will delete the question from your currently worked on the survey:
Keep in mind that template questions cannot be edited or removed since they are part of the template you selected at the beginning of the survey creation process. However, custom questions can be edited or removed.
1. To add a custom question, click the "Add a question" button at the bottom of the page:
2. After clicking that, a pop-up message will appear with two different options:
3. Pick from our question bank:
4. The "Select Source" drop-down menu allows you to either select template questions, or "My Questions" which will populate all questions you've created in Engage. The answer choices will appear there as well.
Various options at the bottom are also included, which we'll go over in the next section.
- Custom Question: Adding custom questions of your allows you to come up with your own questions that may be better suited to gathering the information you want from your employees. Custom questions can be added or removed during the survey creation process. There are multiple fields here for you to enter:
- Question: Add your question text in this field. All questions must have a minimum of 10 characters.
- Category: Select the preferred category for your question.
- Question Type: Select your desired question type.
- Allow Comments: When selected, this will allow employees to submit text responses along with their answers to a particular question. This may be utilized if you wish to gain further insight into employees' feedback or opinions.
- Include Verbatim in Sentiment Analysis: Check if the answers to this question need to be analyzed for sentiment.
- Set as Driver Impact Analysis outcome question: Check if this is a question that implies the outcome of the survey. This will be used in the Driver Impact Analysis.
- Include in favorability calculation: This will by default be enabled for all Likert-type questions.
Audience Settings
The following screen in the survey creation process is where you will determine which participants/users in Engage will receive the survey. This page also defines who will receive notifications to take the survey.
There are various options that one can select as far as who will receive the survey.
- Send a survey to everyone:
- By default, the checkbox “Send to everyone eligible” will be selected. This will enable the survey to be triggered to every active employee loaded in the system:
- Sending a survey to a targeted audience:
- Uncheck the “Send to everyone eligible” box, which will change the page to the following:
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- This will allow you to add certain criteria to your audience selection by taking specific dimensions (i.e. Department, Location, Reports To), and selecting certain values to make up your audience for the survey. This way, your survey will only go out to those included in this particular criteria, set up by you.
- You can also add multiple criteria and narrow down to a specific group of people. Example - You can add the Departments "Finance & Accounting" and "Product & Tech" (as shown in the animation below), so the survey will be launched to very specific few people who fit in the criteria:
Some key points:
- For Onboarding and Offboarding surveys, the eligibility criteria counts calendar days when selecting how many days to send out the survey after hire/termination date of the employee.
- If the eligibility date happens to fall on a weekend (outside an organization's normal Monday to Friday business hours) then the survey invite for an eligible employee will send out the following Monday.
When launching an onboarding survey for the first time, you may want to include new hires that started longer ago than the amount of days you're setting in the criteria. This may also be if there hasn't been new users added to your Engage User Management in a while. By default, when calculating which users from your organization will be sent survey invites for an Onboarding Survey, the system will take the number of eligibility days entered and double them. Here are some examples:
7-Day Survey:
An Onboarding survey launches for the first time on November 1st, with 7 days set after an employee's hire date set as the eligibility criteria for when a new hire gets the survey.
7 days before November 1st is October 25th; 7 days before October 25th is October 18th.
Therefore, anyone hired between October 18th and October 25th will be included in the survey audience.
However, if this a new survey launched after a previous onboarding survey was launched, then it would not include employees that were hired more than however many days the eligibility criteria was set for the audience.
30-Day Survey:
Onboarding survey has already been launched, with 30 days after hire date set as the criteria. A new user file, which has not been updated in a few months, is uploaded on November 1st.
30 days before November 1st is September 28th; 30 days from there is August 29th.
Engage will include everyone who has been hired since August 29th and is at least 30 days post their hire date, in the survey audience.
Therefore, on November 1st, anyone hired between August 29th and September 28th will be included in the survey audience.
- Add recipients by email:
- The last method to create your survey audience is by clicking the "Add Recipients by Email" button at the bottom of the screen. Doing so will allow you to add users one by one from a drop-down menu, or by inputting the email addresses yourself. Multiple email ID can also be added, comma-separated:
Access Settings
This fourth step allows you to define who can access to the survey results once that is collected.
By default, SuperAdmin users are the only ones with access to the reporting for a particular survey.
By checking the checkbox for “Give ‘View’ access automatically to all auto-defined managers as well?”, you will give reports view access to all the reporting managers of the employees. The number of users included in that criteria will appear on that row item, as shown below:
If you don't wish to give "View" access to all managers within the system, you can provide access of the survey results to certain individuals by manually adding their email IDs, or selecting them from the drop-down menu as shown below:
After you add users to the list, you can define if they should get "All Access" or "No Access" in the drop-down menu to the right:
Providing all access to a user will allow them to access survey reports, private messages, and even edit the survey settings.
If any users added to the Access page do not having "Insights" access enabled from User Management, a message will pop up asking if Insights access can be granted for those users:
Hovering your mouse cursor over the blue-colored text that will show the emails of the users that don't have Engage Insights access. Up to 25 users can be displayed here, and further numbers will show "+ Y" more if there are "Y" number of users left that need Insights access.
Summary Settings
The final step in creating a survey takes place in the Summary Page, as shown below:
From here, you can review all details of the survey before officially launching it by clicking the Launch button in the lower right corner. Everything you've entered in the previous pages during the survey creation process will be summarized in this one area.
Editing a Survey
After launching a survey, you can still edit various settings by selecting the Edit button on the right side of the Survey List. Depending on the status of the survey, different editing options will be available. Clicking Edit will take you back into the Survey Creation screen for the survey.
To access this button, be sure you are clicking it next to the appropriate survey you want to edit. If the survey is still in Draft status, it will take you back to the survey creation steps outlined previously in this article.
If a survey has already been launched, and you go back to edit it, the editable options are more limited. These are the things you can edit post-launch:
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Update introductory email body text
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Update reminder frequency
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Add participants to the survey audience (Note: existing respondents cannot be removed)
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Add, edit or remove access permissions
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Update questions to allow or disallow comments
Closed surveys have already been launched and responses are no longer being accepted. Because of this, the only editable option is the ability to add, edit, or remove access permissions for users.
Closing a Survey
To close a survey, go to the desired survey in the Surveys page, and click on the Edit button next to it:
After clicking "Close", the following confirmation screen will appear:
Click "Close", and then the survey's status will change to reflect that. Once a survey is closed, no additional responses from users can be submitted. From then on, admin/manager users can view the relevant survey reporting.