Defining questions for your survey

Best-practice questions

When creating a new survey, you can select from our library of scientifically-backed question categories or define your own questions. Choosing our best-practice questions comes with several benefits:

• Professionals have phrased each question to elicit a response on a single dimension. In other words, you don't risk overlapping different aspects you want to learn about.
• You can ask every question on a 10-point scale or a 5-point Likert scale. 
• Question categories combine the results from questions focused on a particular topic, such as 'Engagement' or 'Goal alignment.' These are useful, higher-level indicators to help shape your analysis. If you use a 5-point scale, you will not see NPS data.
• We also provide industry-level benchmarks for these topics, allowing you to compare results (anonymously) with similar companies. Benchmarks are up-to-date. We only include responses from the last 12 months. As such, expect them to change from time to time. We try to include companies similar to your own automatically; as a fallback, we use a representative set of Leapsome customers. We recommend using a single scale for each survey; as with mixed scales, you will not gain a total score of your survey.

The majority of our best-practice questions are available in the following languages:

• German
• English
• French
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Dutch
• Polish
• Russian
• Swedish
• Slovak
• Chinese (simplified)

Custom questions and topics

To create your questions, click 'Add custom question' when setting up your survey. Custom questions can be:

• Open-ended: the respondent provides written comments to questions such as: "What do you think of the new remote work policy?"
• Multiple choice: the respondent chooses one or more items from a limited list of options.
• Scaled statements: the respondent answers on a 0-10 or a 0-5 scale, and can add an optional qualitative comment, such as "I feel I am given enough freedom to decide how to do my work." When using a 5-point scale, you can choose the scale labels (e.g., 'Very dissatisfied → Very satisfied').

Please Note: When all questions are using a 5-point scale, we'll show you the average score between 1-5. If the question scales are mixed (some with a 5-point scale and some with a 10-point scale) we normalize the 1-5 scale questions and calculate an average score between 0-10. 

You can add custom questions to one of the existing topics or easily create custom topics during the question setup.

After defining your questions, you can see a preview of how the survey will look at the bottom of the 'Questions' page. 

Please note: When using your own custom questions, no benchmark will be available. 

Translating Custom questions

You can translate your questions by clicking the alphabet symbol on the right side of the text field. A new window will open. Select the language you would like to translate your question into and enter the translation. Remember to confirm. Now your users will see the question in the language they chose in their profile. All text non-translated text is displayed in English by default. The results of the questions will be aggregated under one internal question so you can see all responses under one question. Note that the scales will not be translated. 

Question Rotation

We strongly suggest enabling question rotation for longer surveys, especially if you're running the survey on a regular and frequent basis. Shorter surveys will elicit a higher response rate and encourage deeper commentary. Furthermore, asking the same questions every time you run a survey can result in people simply responding out of habit instead of thinking about the question – hence, asking different questions each time can bring you more authentic responses.

You can rotate questions based on a set maximum number of questions or a maximum number of topics per survey round. Survey questions and topics get rotated in order of the complete list (this may be impacted if you move questions around in the survey setup).

If you would like to ask specific questions every round, you can also pin them regardless of the rotation. 

Survey Sections

For longer surveys, adding survey sections (headlines) to structure the survey into specific topics also makes sense. To add a survey section, click on 'Add section' at the bottom of the questionnaire and drag and drop them into the correct location in the survey. You can then drag and drop questions into different sections.