Setting Up Engagement Surveys

Engagement surveys are a powerful tool that can be used as a practical way to check the pulse of your employees, prioritize upcoming initiatives, or even as part of a retention strategy. Engaged employees are happier, healthier, and more productive in what they do.

Enroll in our eLearning course or scroll down to learn more.

Additional Resources

Want to learn more about the analytics and reporting capabilities of engagement?

Feel free to explore:

Engagement Survey Reporting - Manager Check-In Usage for Administrators - Trakstar Perform

Engagement Survey Reporting - Opinion and Custom Surveys - Trakstar Perform

Engagement Survey Reporting - Manager Check-In - Trakstar Perform

Want some additional insight into how to leverage engagement in your organization? Check out our best practices for engagement.

What is engagement?

Engagement combines employee satisfaction with high performance.  When we look at performance, we zoom in on an employee's ability, opportunity, and motivation.  It's this motivation that sets a great employee apart.  So how can we measure what motivates employees?

Most organizations focus on extrinsic motivation.  They provide bonuses, awards, or acknowledgments for a job well done.  However, these short-term rewards are ineffective when employees deal with more complex problems.

The key here is intrinsic motivation - or personal fulfillment.  This is what keeps employees truly motivated and productive day after day.  We have found that the three pillars of highly motivated employees in any organization are:

• Mastery – There are resources for the person to develop the skills and knowledge to be good at their job.
• Autonomy – The person has significant influence in the decision-making at their work.
• Purpose – The person is aligned with the organization's mission and values.

Intrinsic motivation combined with ability and opportunity equates to a highly-productive workforce.  Perform engagement is designed to measure those key drivers.

Survey Types in Perform

• Company Pulse Survey - Capture employee engagement from a big-picture perspective.  This survey has ready-to-use research-backed questions designed to help you uncover how your employees are feeling.  This survey type cannot be modified.
• Manager Check-In - Improve communication with your team, and check in on priorities, career development, and more.  This survey has pre-built questions but can be further customized for your needs.
• Opinion Poll - Ask your employees about happiness, culture, or general topics.  This option lets you quickly gather a snapshot of your team on topics specific to employee satisfaction.
• Custom Survey - Create a custom survey from scratch to send to your employees.

Only admins can send out the Company Pulse Survey. The other surveys can be sent by admins (to any employees) and managers (to their direct reports).

Note: When sending out a survey, it will not be sent to you.  If you'd like to participate in the survey, we suggest creating a general admin user separate from your own Perform account for surveys.

Enabling Engagement Surveys

If you don't see the Engagement options in your account, an admin can enable engagement surveys via Settings > Company > Engagement Surveys.

All admins have access to engagement features.  You can also grant permission to Managers or Restricted Admins.

Creating a New Survey

Click on Engagement from the left navigation bar to create a new survey.  You'll see the different survey options and the past surveys you've sent here.  Click on the survey you'd like to create to get started.

Manager Check-In, Opinion Poll, or Custom Survey

Survey

The Manager Check-In and Opinion Poll are essentially custom surveys with pre-built options.  You can further customize, edit, and add questions to these surveys.  Or you can build one from scratch with the Custom Survey.

When working with the Manager Check-In or Opinion Poll, you'll see the pre-defined questions displayed here.  You can edit them however you'd like.  With the Custom Survey, you'll see a blank question ready for you to edit.

Let's go over the fields available for creating a question.

1. You can select what Answer Type you'd like to have - either a rating scale or a comment field.  You can also select if you'd like a 3, 5, or 10-point scale.
2. If selecting a rating scale, you can define which each point on the scale equals.
3. Selecting a rating scale can also have an optional comment section.
4. You can delete, copy, or move the questions within the survey, to fully customize it.
5. You can set any question as Optional or Required.

To add additional questions, scroll down to the bottom of the survey and click on Add Survey Question.

When you are done creating and editing your survey, click on Save & Continue.

Respondent

The respondent section allows you to choose to who this survey will be sent out.  You can select individual employees or groups.  

Select the employees or groups who you'd like to send the survey.   Groups are beneficial for reporting purposes!  Click Save & Continue when you're ready to move on. Learn more about creating groups here.

Review

The review section allows you to edit the settings for this survey.  We always recommend taking a look at these before sending a survey!

• Schedule - The date and time the survey will be sent out.

• Recurrence - Do you want this survey to go out on a specific cadence?  This is helpful for Manager Check-Ins - send it out weekly before your 1-on-1s to gather valuable information!
• Cutoff Date - When will this survey close?
• Anonymous Responses - This setting allows you to set the responses as anonymous.  Once this is turned on, it cannot be turned off.  You must receive at least five responses to view the responses when sending an anonymous survey.
• Email Reminders - When the survey is sent out, the employee receives an email with a direct link to complete it.  You can set reminders to go out if they have not completed the survey.

If you scroll down, you'll be able to preview the survey.  And when you're ready, click Schedule Survey in the lower right corner.

Company Pulse

Surveys

The company pulse survey is a set of twelve built-in surveys that can be sent to your organization at whatever cadence you want.  They capture employee engagement from a big-picture perspective, based on the three components of mastery, autonomy, and purpose.  

You can preview the surveys from the Surveys page after you've selected Company Pulse from the main engagement page.

The company pulse survey is a systematic survey - it will send each of the surveys listed here at the cadence you set on the Review page.

If you'd like to disable any surveys from being sent, click on the six dots on the right side and select Disable Survey.  This will remove the survey from this company pulse instance.

There are no further customization options with the company pulse surveys.  We've designed these surveys based on research from Daniel Pink to capture valuable data about engagement for your team.

Respondents

The  respondent section allows you to choose who this survey will be sent out to.  You can select individual employees or groups.  This process is the same as the other surveys.

Review

The  review section allows you to edit the settings for this survey.  We always recommend taking a look at these before sending a survey!  This process is the same as the other surveys aside from Recurrence.  Since the company pulse survey consists of more than one survey, a Recurrence cadence must be set.  

You will not see a preview of this survey if you scroll down, as with the custom surveys. When you're ready, click   Schedule Survey in the lower right corner, and you're all set!

Here is an example of your employee's email asking them to take the company pulse survey.

Accessing Surveys

To view all surveys, scroll down on the main  Engagement page.  You can view your Active, Drafts, and Archived surveys here.

If you'd like to take further action on your surveys, click on More Actions.

• Edit allows you to edit the survey.
• Copy allows you to copy it, so you don't have to start from scratch when sending a new survey.
• Archive will move the survey to the Archived tab.
• Delete will permanently delete this survey from your account, so be sure to save any data externally before doing this!