Before You Launch Your Survey

To get the most out of your engagement survey and make the process as smooth as possible, a few things should be done before launching a survey.

For an Engagement Survey deep-dive, check out Lattice's Ultimate Guide to Employee Engagement Survey.

This article contains the following topics:

• Determine when to launch
• Set up your employee data
• Design your survey
• Communications

To get the most out of a company engagement survey, all employee data must be up to date. 

The default user attributes that used in survey analytics are: 

In addition to the default attributes that Lattice offers, you can also create custom user attributes to capture information that Lattice does not already store. For example, if you know that you'll want to analyze your survey data by office or level, you can create some custom user attributes for that information.

If some of your departments are small enough that they do not meet the anonymity threshold and therefore results will not be visible you can create Custom Survey Groups. Custom Survey Groups allow you to combine different groups, such as small departments, together. Note that these groups need to be set up prior to your survey launch.

Note: Selecting to include All employees as participants of a survey will include all Active, Invited, and Created state users. This means that you can launch a survey, and any users who are either Invited or Created will be prompted to fill out the survey when they activate their Lattice account. Invited users will receive a launch notification, but Created users will not receive the launch notification.

One of the most critical parts of the engagement survey process is deciding which questions you will ask. 

We recommend that you start this process and loop in stakeholders early. Lattice Surveys offers a question bank developed in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley Social Sciences Department. These questions would work well in any organization looking to run a general engagement survey. 

Lattice default questions can be benchmarked against other Lattice customers.

You can also add your own custom questions to the survey if you wish. Keep in mind that the questions you write should fit the Likert scale response format (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree) or be open-ended. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when creating your questions:

• Use direct, simple questions that are neutral and unambiguous. And remember, it's important to frame questions positively, for example, "I am happy to come to work every day."
• When choosing which questions to ask, ask only about topics you're prepared to act on. If you're asking about things you can't actually change or improve, you may end up with some very disappointed employees should the results show strong opinions on those questions.
• For rating questions, it's also important to write the questions so that responding with "strongly agree" is a positive response to match our analytics format.

Ensure that you have a communications plan for why you are running the survey and the plan of action for the survey results.

Draft an email communication that addresses: