As an administrator of your organisation, you can send engagement surveys in Dialog in the following way:
1. Click on 'Management'
2. Click on 'Surveys'
3. Click on '+ Plan survey'
You can easily schedule a survey in four steps: Planning, Themes & questions, Target audience and Messages.
Planning
For the planning, you indicate the following:
- Name: fill in the name of the survey. This is also the name the employees see when they complete the survey.
- Start date: on the start date, the announcement mail will be sent to the employees around 08:00.
- Note: if you set the survey date for today, and it's later than 08:00, the announcement email will be sent the following morning.
- End date: on the end date, the survey closes and can't be filled out any more.
- Note: this means that if the end date is January 31, the last day the survey can be filled out is January 30.
- Type: there are two types of surveys you can send. A survey with a fixed date and a survey with a Dynamic date.
- Fixed date: all selected questions at 'Themes & questions' are asked at once in the survey. This is the most commonly used type of survey.
- Dynamic date: this is the way to run onboarding and offboarding surveys. If you'd like to know more about this, you can click through to these articles:
- Repeat the survey: if selected, the survey will be automatically repeated periodically. In most cases, you want to leave this option turned off. This can be useful for baseline measurements, as you can have the survey automatically recur every year.
Click 'Next' to go to 'Themes & questions'.
Themes & questions
On this page, you can add the questions from your set that you want to include in the survey. Do you want to expand your set of themes and questions? Read here how to manage your set of questions.
The questions are arranged by theme. Selecting is easy by checking a question.
To the right of the question you have selected, you can also make a question mandatory. When this is set, the employee cannot skip the question without answering it.
Additionally, you can specify whether the questions should be asked in the specified order or in a random order. You can also choose whether an employee sees one question per page while filling it out or an entire theme per page (with all the theme's questions). For smaller surveys (< 40 questions), we recommend using one question per page. For larger surveys (>40 questions), we suggest using one theme per page. In this article you can see what this looks like for an employee. When you choose a custom order, you can drag the questions into the desired order.
Click 'Next' to go to 'Target audience'.
Target Audience
On this page you have two tabs: Target audience and Received. First, you set to whom the survey should be sent. You can send it to specific teams or functions. The most common method is to send surveys to specific teams. When you select this option, you will see the organizational structure.
- When you select the top-level team, all teams are selected.
- You can exclude specific teams (for example, a Board) from the survey by clicking on them. When you do this, the checkbox will be empty.
- At the top, you will always see how many teams you have selected.
- If there is a 'hierarchy icon,' it means that underlying teams have been selected.
Tips for selecting the target audience:
- Consider not selecting a board/management team- To guarantee the anonymity of employees, there are various anonymity rules. Rule 2 states that small teams can sometimes hide the results of larger teams. For example, a board team can hide the results of a subordinate team that is large enough. Our advice is not to include these teams in order to see as many results as possible.
- Check the employees and teams - Before planning the survey, check that the team structure and colleagues per team are correct. Once the survey has started, changes to this information will no longer be included.
Received
Once the survey has been sent to the employees, you can find out when the emails were sent. If a reminder has been sent, the date of the reminder will appear here. This way you can check who has received the survey.
Click 'Next' to go to 'Messages'.
Messages
Use a custom e-mail text: if selected, you can write the subject and text used in the survey announcement email yourself. Note: if you have employees who speak other languages, be sure to also write the text in English. You do this by switching the flag to English.
This text is also used in the reminder mails you send through the online platform.
Send reminder
On this page, you can also set a reminder in advance. Often a reminder is set one week after the survey goes live. You can set here yourself when the reminder is sent. Dialog uses the same text that has been set on the page.
Once you've gone through all the steps, click 'Save.' You'll return to the overview, where the survey is ready to go. You can still make adjustments until the start date.