Create employee engagement surveys

A PDF version of this guide has been made available.

Introduction

This guide will focus primarily on the project setup for employee engagement surveys, and is suitable for organizations of all sizes. Although there are many different ways for an organization to collect employee engagement feedback, the approach described in this guide offers rich features in Blue such as:

• distributed reports to stakeholders that update automatically as the organizational hierarchy is updated.
• dashboard analytics that support filtering, breakdowns, and thresholds for safe querying of each employee's respective results.
• mapping projects together in reports to provide unique insights and identify any trends in improvements.

In this project, managers will be allowed to adjust the evaluation schedule, select departmental questions, and monitor response rates in real-time. Once the engagement survey has been completed by employees, the feedback will be analyzed in reports shared with managers and executive leaders such as department heads, division heads and the CEO/President.

Is this approach to employee engagement surveys right for my organization?

If you answer yes to all of the following questions then chances are this approach to employee engagement surveys is right for your organization. Do you wish to:

• Allow each manager the ability to add their own departmental questions?
• Delegate the timing of the engagement evaluation for each manager?
• Empower each manager to follow up with their direct reports if the response rates are low?
• Allow co-managers for the same organizational unit to ask different questions to their direct reports?
• Grant report access to each manager and executive leader (at every level) for their respective organizational units?
• Grant access to dashboard data to each manager and executive leader (at every level) for their respective organizational units.

What we are building

A process that allows each employee to evaluate engagement for their respective organizational unit(s) and manager(s) with delegated options for managers, such as which departmental questions to add and when to open and close each evaluation.

Our choices

The following parameters will be applied throughout this guide:

• Multiple projects: Multiple projects are used to launch engagement surveys for each yearly assessment period.
• Managers can choose to opt out: Each manager can opt out to having engagement for their department assessed for the evaluation period. If they take no action, their engagement surveys will automatically launch.
• Multi-level questionnaire: The questionnaire will be categorized into three sections: core company questions, divisional questions, and questions chosen by the manager. Core company questions will be common for all surveys, while divisional and manager questions will be based on the organization's hierarchy.
• Distributed reports: Individual reports are shared with managers, and can optionally be shared with executive leaders. Aggregate reports are shared with executive leaders such as department heads, division heads, and the CEO/President.

What is needed for setting up this type of evaluation project:

General overview of steps

1. Add datasources - Include the data for the organizational units being evaluated, the people involved in the feedback process, and their relationships to each other.
2. Create the Definition - Select what type of evaluation structure to use.
3. Define groups and privileges - Create the groups that will participate in the evaluation and assign privileges to them.
4. Create the project - Select the project's Definition, audience type , confidentiality level, and automatic update option for groups.
5. Verify subjects and members - Check to see that the right subjects and group members have been automatically included in the project.
6. Build the questionnaire - Create and configure the core company questions to your specifications and allow managers to select from a list of validated questions.
7. Configure tasks - Apply initial task settings.
8. Schedule tasks - Set the schedule to collect the feedback.
9. Publish project - Set an overall schedule for the feedback process and publish the project.
10. Create reports - Analyze the feedback in reports to provide a summary and record of the review.

Common terms in employee engagement surveys

Depending on your region, the terms used in your organization may vary. Common terms that are used in employee engagement surveys:

Co-manager: A co-manager is an employee who shares the management responsibility of other employees with another manager in an organization.

Direct Report: A direct report is an employee that reports directly to another person in an organization. Someone who has direct reports (typically a manager) is responsible for designating them with work and providing them with regular feedback.

Employee Engagement: Employee engagement describes the level of dedication, confidence, and trust that an employee possesses towards an organization and it's goals. Employees who are engaged have a sense of professional responsibility and are able to express themselves mentally, physically, and emotionally while on the job.

Executive Leader: An executive leader refers to the head of an organization, division, or department. Specific terms used for executive leaders include "CEO/President", "Vice-President", "Division Head", "Department Head", "Director", etc.

Hierarchy Level: An organizational structure is typically subdivided into levels for chain-of-command significance, such as Company (level 1) > Division (level 2) > Department (level 3) > Sub Department (level 4). These levels can vary in number and in nomenclature depending on the organization.

Organizational Unit: An organizational unit is one of the many essential business functions that reside at a particular level of the organization (e.g., “Division” of Finance, “Department” of Accounting, “Sub Department” of Expenses, where each of these are org units within a division, department and sub department respectively).

Step 1 - Add datasources

The first step is to add datasources containing relevant information on the organizational units and employees that will be involved in the feedback process. We have included a sample CSV file for each datasource that closely mimics the data of a large organization performing employee engagement surveys.

What you need for datasources:

Example of Entity Relationship Diagram for datasources:

Step 2 - Create the Definition

The next step after adding datasources is to create the Definition.

What you need for the Definition:

Step 3 - Define groups and privileges

As part of the Definition, you will also need to create the groups of individuals that will be participating in your engagement surveys, and assign them privileges.

What you need for groups and privileges:

Step 4 - Create the project

The next step after defining groups is to create the feedback project.

What you need for creating the project:

Step 5 - Verify subjects and group members

Get started by navigating to the MEMBERS - EXPORT/IMPORT tab and select export members to download a CSV file of all subjects and associated group members in your project. For more information, see Export or import project members.

Example of exported data (organizational units and their paired group members):

Step 6 - Build the questionnaire

The next step after creating the project is to build the multi-level questionnaire. The questionnaire will be categorized into three sections: core company questions, divisional questions, and questions chosen by the manager. To learn more, see Build and manage a questionnaire.

What you need to know about building the questionnaire:

Example of setting up an employee engagement questionnaire:

Step 7 - Configure tasks

The next step is to configure the tasks associated with each privilege so that those tasks can be performed by the different groups.

What you will need to configure tasks:

Get started by navigating to the TASKS tab and enabling the subject management, question personalization, and fillout tasks. For each task, select configure to configure its settings.

Step 8 - Schedule tasks

After you have configured the tasks, the next step is to schedule when each task starts and ends.

You may use the following schedule as a guideline:

Step 9 - Publish project

The next step is to publish the project, which is essentially activating the tasks so that they can be completed by all the groups.

What you will need to publish the project:

After verifying that the appropriate subjects and members have been added, navigate to the PUBLISH tab to start publishing the project. For more information, see Publish a project.

Step 10 - Create reports

The final step is to create reports which analyze the employee feedback collected from the project. For employee engagement surveys, individual reports will be shared with managers, and aggregate reports will be shared with department heads, division heads and the CEO/President. For steps on how to create reports, see Create a new report

What you will need for individual reports:

Example of published individual manager report:

What you will need for aggregate reports:

Example of published divisional group by report: