It can sometimes be difficult to write a survey that provides enough results to draw conclusions, without requiring too much time and energy from respondents or from the people who will analyze all these results.
To help you craft surveys that are in line with your needs and as balanced as possible, we've listed some tips and best practices here. 💡
In this article:
💎 Qualitative choices
Know your context
Having a good knowledge of the survey population, as well as its past and present context, allows you to ask your questions at the right time and to the right people.
💡 Want to deepen your understanding of the field before jumping into specific topics? Take advantage of our survey templates Engagement Audit and Employee Commitment to gain clarity on the essentials.
Use Supermood's expertise
Our questions were designed by work psychologists. Feel free to draw from the Supermood question bank and use our thematic and contextual templates.
By doing so, you will be contributing to the creation of benchmarks, which will benefit you and help you better understand your scores.
Address one topic at a time
Ideally, stick to one topic per survey. If you decide you want to cover more than one topic in the same survey, consider using section pages to transition between them.
⚖️ Quantitative balance
Limit the number of questions
If you survey your teams every month, we recommend a maximum of 10 questions. More accessible surveys will be better appreciated by employees and will have a higher participation rate. They will also be easier to process when analyzing the results.
Having too many questions in a survey also means that you risk lacking precision when defining your action plan - you will have to answer too many issues at once.
Ask only one or two open questions per survey... but include at least one!
Asking one open-ended question per survey gives the respondent a window of opportunity to express themselves - this is important to keep the dialogue open and ensure countinuous feedback.
In addition, you will gain analytical finesse by adding a qualitative dimension to the quantitative scores.
That said, an open-ended question requires more time and effort from respondents. It is also much more complex to interpret at the time of analysis. This is why we advise you not to overuse it.
Logical layout
Arrange the questions in a logical and unbiased order
Like a speech, a questionnaire must be intelligible to the respondent, it must make sense.
Depending on the nature of the questions, the order can affect the answers. As a general rule, ask your questions from the most generic to the most specific to avoid influencing the answers.
If your open question is related to a closed question, be sure to put them one after the other so that the comments remain correlated to the score. You can also simply enable comments on a closed question.
Save the complex / open questions for last
We know that open-ended questions take more time and consideration. The following questions will necessarily receive less attention and content from respondents. By placing your open-ended question at the end of the survey, you can secure your team's attention until the end.
🎯 The importance of eNPS
Create a recurring eNPS campaign - your continuous engagement barometer!
eNPS is a great tool for measuring employee engagement.
You can create a specific campaign for this one question, on a monthly or bi-monthly basis, addressed to your entire team, or choose to include the question directly in one of your surveys.
Would you like specific advice on how to adapt your survey to your current context? Feel free to contact your Account Manager – they will be able to support you with their expertise. 🔥