Blueprint: Survey setup

How do I set up the ideal Employee Engagement Survey?

To make sure that you make the most of our survey module, we summed up the ideal survey set up for you:

• The survey should run on a monthly basis and contain max. 10 questions to keep participation high
• If you have more topics you want to cover and run your survey at least quarterly, we suggest rotating your question catalogue, so that not the same questions are asked in every round
• There should be at least one open question that participants can use to give feedback not related to any specific question
• The questions should be asked anonymous and the anonymity threshold should be set to 3

Setting up the Engagement Survey in Leapsome

When you are setting up an ongoing employee engagement survey, we recommend setting up the following best practices:

1. Set up a backup owner in case one person leaves the company or is out of office - however, bear in mind that they will be able to see all the results and change the settings

2. We offer a wide library of best practice questions for employee engagement surveys clustered by different categories

3. For the first engagement survey, we recommend using a longer survey containing all areas that are relevant for you. We would recommend choosing about 30 questions.

4. Add open questions at the end

   1. What is going well?
   2. What would you like to improve?

5. We recommend sending the survey once in full length to have all questions covered and after the first iteration change the timing settings as follows:

   This way the survey would run every 4 weeks, stay open for 7 days and just contain 10 questions (after the first round). Hence participation rates are more likely to remain high.

6. In the menu point 'participants', set the participants to 'send survey to all active employees' if you want to run a company-wide survey. The default visibility setting is that the survey is anonymous. 
   
7. After round 1, each new round will give you an update on the trends and scores for each category.
8. Identify improvement areas and derive action items based on them.

How many questions should the survey contain? 

Depending on your cadence we suggest the following maximum number of questions:

• Weekly: Max. 5 questions
• Monthly: Max. 10 questions
• Quarterly: Max. 20 questions

If you want to find out more about how much value engaged employees are to your organization, we recommend reading our blog article on "Measuring the ROI of Employee Engagement". You will also have access to a ROI calculator that allows you to measure the ROI of your employee engagement.

For further reading on survey best practices:

• Download our Engagement Survey eBook.
• Read our Playbooks on:
  • "How to Run an Employee Engagement Survey",
  • "How to Create an Employee Pulse Survey" and
  • "How to Run a Diversity Survey for Your Company"
• Dive deep into best practices around survey analytics and how to interpret the results. 

Who should be able to see what survey results?

Once most of the survey is set up, the last step before kicking it off is setting the visibility. The last tab 'Visibility' will allow you to define which groups should see what.

Here, you will be able to define visibility for multiple stakeholders with varying access. Survey owners and super-admins, and Survey participants are the default groups. You can create more visibility groups and customize who belongs to them and what visibility they can have.

To create a new group, click on 'New visibility group'. In the pop-up, click on 'Filter' and select who would be the target group.

You can then select the checkbox 'Settings from this visibility group overwrite other matching visibility groups'. Please note: This setting makes a group 'exclusive' and its visibility will take priority over any other group where same members might belong. If an employee matches multiple 'exclusive' groups, the exclusive group latest in the list will take priority.

Under 'Whose results are visible', you can decide what kind of results this group should have access to. The options are: 'All employee results', 'Specific employee results' or 'Only their own results'.

Please note: If you choose that specific employees' results should be visible, a checkbox 'Also use current demographic data for granting access' will appear. By default, access is granted based on user demographic data at the time of answering the survey. If you enable this option, then group members will see results from both historic and current user demographic data.

Lastly, choose what kind of analytics views should be visible. You can either toggle on the option 'All views, benchmarks and filters'. Alternatively, disable the toggle and customize the settings.

By disabling it, you can decide which analytics views will be shown; What demographic filters can be used. This allows users with access to group and see, for example, the aggregated results of members of a specific team, location, or direct reports of a specific manager; And what benchmark data should be available. There is a company-wide benchmark (i.e., comparing a team's responses to the company average) and a benchmark of comparable, external companies.

While the choice to make survey results visible to different stakeholders depends on your company’s needs and policies, the most typical visibility settings we notice our customers use are:

For default visibility: 'Teams which group members are part of' or 'Teams which group members are leading'.

This visibility setting promotes transparency across your teams and helps your employees see what concerns other teammates are raising. It also offers visibility for any survey action plans created based on the concerns that were raised, allowing employees to feel valued and heard.