Engagement Survey Strategies

Strategies for scheduling and sending engagement surveys within Pomello.

In general, within Pomello there are three primary things that determine how often you should send the engagement survey:

1. Use Case - Your intended use of Pomello will likely be the largest determining factor in your survey cadence.You’ll obviously want to look at this in conjunction with the following:
2. Receptiveness to surveys within your organization - You’ll want to keep in mind levels of trust as well as other competing surveys in determining how frequently you’ll send engagement surveys.
3. Competing initiatives & leadership prioritization

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In this quick overview, We’ll be looking at the first two primary use cases. While we’re receptive to the third, and happy to offer guidance, you’ll be the best equipped to understand the nuances of this. 

1. Consistent insight into sentiment in your organization over time - This will be the most common, and arguably the most useful implementation of an engagement survey. When looking at engagement over time you want to keep in mind that this is a more volatile metric than culture. It should be related back to culture, measured more consistently, and examined more frequently, although with less intensity. This will allow you to see if culture shifts within your organization are trending in the right direction. It may also shed insight on times of particularly low, or particularly high morale. 
2. Analysis in response to an event - If there has been a sudden upset, or change, an engagement survey is a good way to understand the impact that this is having on company morale across the organization. Keep this in mind if you know that there is an expected event.
3. Open field questions in response to - Finally, you can use open field questions in conjunction with the standard engagement questions to give your employees a voice. This may provide more actionable insights with respect to causality, but keep in mind as this data is anecdotal and somewhat vulnerable to selection bias, you’ll want to make sure you are looking at it in stride.   

While employing any of the strategies on the preceding pages, it is important to think about a few factors.

1. How many other surveys are your employees receiving? If they receive several surveys throughout the year, you may want to consider going for a low cadence where you focus on open field engagement questions a and look strongly at the analytics within the context of culture strength over time on an annual or semiannual basis. 
2. If you feel that your employees are more receptive to more regular engagement surveys you may want to look at a quarterly, monthly, or even weekly cadence. Weekly cadences should be used with caution as their frequency may cause individuals to become disengaged from the survey itself, leading to incomplete data.
3. Have your employees received another survey recently? If so, you may want to consider staggering your surveys such that they are not receiving the engagement survey near the same time as another survey. 
4. Do you have a high level of trust or a low level of trust within your organization? This will have a direct impact on how regularly employees will be willing to fill out the survey. Keep this in mind and communicate clearly with respect to the surveys intent. Also consider a lower cadence. Finally with engagement it is imperative to communicate the fact that the survey is fully anonymous. 

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