Choosing a Survey Type

Types of employee feedback

There are generally three categories:

• Full scans: an overview of organisational performance, resilience and engagement
• Deep dives: investigate individual areas of working life
• Topical: react to emerging issues, like remote working

Full scan surveys

A scan – or ‘census’ survey – is run annually, typically at the same time of a year or quarter.

Each scan uses our Organisational Fitness framework to understand the survey results, by breaking your feedback into 16 key organisational areas (or what we call ‘indicators’). 

There are a few reasons you might want to send this survey more than once a year. If you’ve recently gone through a change within your business – like team restructuring, or experiencing a fast growth period – it’s a good idea to see if there’s been any impact on your people, and how they feel about the changes. 

Deep dives/pulse surveys

Unlike census surveys, pulse surveys are often shorter, sent more frequently, and help you understand the impact of changes.  In our platform, we call these ‘deep dive surveys’ – as they allow you to take a closer look at 16 key aspects of employee experience: 

Each survey has 4 key dimensions, with 3 closed text and one open text question. 

You can run a deep dive or ‘pulse’ across the whole organisation, or choose a survey for specific parts of your organisation such as a department, team or location.

Lifecycle surveys

These surveys let you understand key moments in the employee lifecycle. This includes events like being onboarded to the organisation, or when they’ve decided to leave. 

These surveys will be sent as-and-when required – at any of these key moments. They help to inform your management of the employee lifecycle – so you understand any gaps in your onboarding process, or get insights into why people decide to move on. 

Topical surveys

Our ‘topical’ surveys focus on the challenges organisations are facing right now – from remote working, to employee wellbeing. These surveys might be sent to help shape your strategy, or response to, a particular challenge – and in some cases, sent again to check the effectiveness of your change initiatives. 

Here are two popular topical surveys we currently offer:

• Returning to the Workplace: measure feelings about the workplace 
• Wellbeing: measure feelings about mental, emotional, physical and social wellbeing