How to configure your survey before you launch.
Lattice recommends determining the following before setup to get the most out of engagement surveys. For an Engagement survey deep-dive, see Ultimate Guide to Employee Engagement Survey.
Determine when to launch
Timing is everything when it comes to launching an Engagement survey. As a survey admin, it is essential to determine the survey launch date and duration to ensure you're giving enough time to get valuable insights from your team.
Here are some questions to ask yourself before creating the survey:
- Will your company do annual or quarterly surveys?
- Which day of the week will your survey launch?
- How long will your survey stay open?
Learn more in When to Launch and How Long to Run Employee Engagement Surveys.
Set up employee data
To get the most out of a company engagement survey, all employee data must be current.
The default user attributes that are used in survey analytics are:
- Manager
- Department
- Start date (used to calculate tenure)
- Birthdate (used to calculate age)
- Gender (male, female, or non-binary)
In addition to the default attributes that Lattice offers, you can create custom user attributes to capture information that Lattice does not already store.
Note: Although ethnicity and sexual orientation are default attributes, Engagement cannot be filtered by them. Create these attributes as custom attributes to filter survey results.
If some departments are too small to meet the anonymity threshold and results will not be visible, you can create custom survey groups. Custom survey groups combine different groups, such as departments, together. Groups need to be set up before your survey launch.
Design your survey
Participants
When creating a survey, you must decide who will participate. Including all employees as participants will include all active, invited, and created state users. Invited and created will be prompted to complete the survey when they activate their Lattice account. Invited users will receive a launch notification, but Created users will not receive the launch notification.
Questions
Next, you must decide what questions will be asked. We recommend looping in stakeholders early in this process.
Lattice surveys offer a question bank validated with external experts, trusted thought partners in our Resources for Humans community, and a selection of customers. 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 create and add custom questions to the survey. Remember 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. It is essential 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 topics you can't change or improve, you may have some disappointed employees if 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.
- Keep the survey shorter rather than longer. If you send out a yearly or twice-a-year survey, keep the survey length below 50 questions to reduce fatigue. For more frequent surveys, they should be even shorter.
Communication
Ensure you have a communications plan for why you are running the survey and a plan of action for the results.
Draft an email communication that addresses the following:
- Why you're running the engagement survey
- Survey anonymity
- When responses need to be in by
- How the data is being analyzed
- When will the results be shared
- What action will be taken from the results
For an example, check out Lattice's Sample Survey Launch Email.