Engagement surveys give you a continuous, anonymous read on how your people feel about work, and the reasons behind it. You set a recurring schedule, Humaans sends short anonymous surveys to your chosen audience, and results appear as scores, trends, and themed comments you can break down by department, team, location, and custom fields.
This guide covers some concepts that are useful to understand for setting up a successful engagement survey.
Video overview of engagement surveys
Engagement programme
The engagement programme is where you configure the schedule, the questions, who receives them, and how results are reported. You have one programme, which starts as a draft and runs once you start it. To build one, visit How to build an engagement survey.
Continuous mode and deep-dives
A programme runs in one of two modes:
Continuous mode: Sends short surveys on a frequent cycle. Each person sees a rotating selection of topics, so individual surveys stay brief while coverage builds over time.
Deep-dives: Sends one comprehensive survey covering all questions on a longer cycle. You can also add pulse surveys in between to track scores between deep-dives.
Engagement score and eNPS
Two headline measures summarise your results:
Engagement score: The overall percentage of favourable sentiment across engagement questions, split into supporters, neutral, and detractors.
eNPS: Employee Net Promoter Score, from −100 to +100, is based on how likely people are to recommend the organisation as a place to work. The eNPS groups responses to the recommendation question by score. Promoters answer nine or 10, passives answer seven or eight, and detractors answer zero to six.
Engagement questions
These are the questions your engagement score is calculated from. They show how engaged employees are right now, captured through sentiments like pride, advocacy, and intent to stay.
Topics
Topics are the themes behind engagement, such as manager support, growth, recognition, and workload. A low score in a certain topic points you to the area that needs attention.
Survey schedule
Surveys open on the next scheduled send day. If you start the programme on a day that matches the schedule, the first survey goes out that day.
Anonymity threshold
To preserve anonymity, you choose a minimum number of responses needed before results become visible. This means a breakdown for any group only appears once enough people in that group have responded, which protects individuals in small teams. The threshold default is 5 and the minimum is 3.
To learn more, visit How anonymity works in engagement surveys.
Segments
Segments are how the results of a survey are broken down and include space, department, team, manager, location, tenure, contract type, nationalities, gender, and custom fields.
Aggregation period
Set how far back the survey includes responses from when calculating scores. The options are None, three months, six months, and 12 months. The default is six months.
For example, with an aggregation period of three months, if an employee doesn’t respond to a current survey, their answer from three months ago will be included in the results.
Comparison baseline
The past point your current results are measured against to produce trends and deltas. This is set using the Compare control when viewing a survey’s reporting. Choose from the previous run, a number of months ago, or a specific run.
Changing the baseline changes the deltas shown, but not the underlying scores.
Delta
The change in a score against your comparison baseline, shown in points with an arrow when viewing a survey’s reporting. An upward delta means the score improved since the baseline, whereas a downward delta means it declined.
