How do I inform my employees about an upcoming survey?

Here are two examples of pre-survey emails which you could send your employees

Ideally, your employees should know the following before the survey is sent out:

Why it is happening?
What is being surveyed? (Topic)
Why is it being asked?
How they can participate and what the next steps (high level) will be.


Often, the employee also questions whether or not the survey is anonymous.


Example 1:

Dear ...,

Our employees are very important to us. You will only inspire our customers if you are satisfied with your working conditions.

That's why you now have the opportunity to tell us in our Employee Satisfaction survey: What is the company doing well? What could we do better?

Your participation is, of course, completely voluntary and confidential. In order to guarantee this anonymity, we have commissioned an external service provider, called Honestly, to carry out the survey. This means that neither your colleagues nor your the management can trace your answers back to you.

Why make the effort? The more feedback we get from you, the better we can understand which issues need to be addressed.

Participation is easy and is possible via a mobile app, web link, or (at larger sites) with a dedicated tablet. You can read how easy it is on the back of this letter.

Looking forward to seeing how we are doing,

The HR Department


Example 2:

Why an employee feedback tool?
Communication and exchange are essential factors of a well-functioning company in which you as employees can enjoy working. Due to the current situation of working remotely, where direct daily contact is often missing, and the further growth of *********** with which dialogue is becoming increasingly difficult, we want to create opportunities for exchange and feedback. Blind actionism does not help anyone. We want your feedback in order to become better and to be able to change things so that they continue to run well or become even better in the future.

What is the difference between the pulse survey and the individual surveys?
The Employee Satisfaction Survey is a fixed set of questions that address topics such as Satisfaction, Personal Growth, Relationship with Colleagues, Relationship with Management, Recognition & Feedback, Culture, Advocacy, and Well-Being. We will survey you at fixed intervals (for more information, see "How often will we ask you?").
Custom surveys will also be created irregularly on individual topics that might come up or when we need to deepen our understanding of feedback received in the Employee Satisfaction survey (more on this in the question "What happens with the results of the surveys?").

How often will we ask you?
In order to fill the individual topic areas of the Employee Satisfaction survey with your answers as quickly as possible and thus obtain an overall view of the company, we plan to carry out the survey as follows: We will initially start weekly for 8 weeks with 6 questions in the survey. We want to get a full set of data as quickly as possible so we can work with the management team to improve. Subsequently, the survey will then only be sent out monthly but will then contain a total of 12 questions with an additional text question. The monthly response should take no longer than 4-6 minutes and can also be carried out on a mobile via the app.


Participation in the survey: via a link in an email or using the Honestly Engage app.
There are two ways you can participate in the surveys: Either click on the link in the email you receive in your company account or use the mobile app. With the Honestly Engage app, you can participate in employee surveys anytime and on the go.

All details about settings in the app can be found here: https://help.honestly.com/de/knowledge/

How is anonymity ensured with Honestly?
Maintaining the anonymity of participating employees is essential to enable open feedback. Participation in all surveys is, of course, completely voluntary. As is often the case, however, nothing is moved without a vote.
To ensure anonymity, we have commissioned the external service provider, Honestly, to carry out the survey. Restrictions in the filter method and function, ensure that anonymity is guaranteed even if many/detailed filters are activated.
The level of anonymity is ensured by the evaluation software, especially by the filters, and is not done manually. Only once 5 evaluations have been received per question will any feedback become visible to account users. You can find more information here: https://help.honestly.com/de/knowledge/
For the use of Honestly, we have made a works agreement with the works council on the implementation of employee surveys.

How can employees be filtered once data has been gathered?
We can filter by department, by business area as well as by time model (Vz / Tz / gB (minijob)).
The following departments are stored: Editorial, Agency, Tender Service, Publishing Service, Business Development, Administration (includes Dept. IT, Organization and HR with Training), Management (includes all AL).
The following business units are stored: Publishing, Procurement, PR Agency, Congresses, Administration (includes all cross-functions such as IT, Accounting, HR, Training, etc.).
Groups that contain less than five feedbacks are merged into a common group "others". This group then bundles all feedbacks from groups which have less than five feedbacks, as well as feedbacks with empty group values.
However, to increase anonymity, the "others" group must also reach the anonymity threshold of five. If it does not yet do so, the smallest group that is still displayed will be included in the "others" group.

How will we communicate the results of the surveys to our employees?
We want to communicate the results to you in a transparent manner. We will use a Slack channel and the intranet to publish the results. In addition, there will be two separate access points to Honestly. You can use these to log in at any time and view the results using filters (see question "What areas can be filtered by in the analysis?").

What happens to the results of the surveys?
The results will become a central part of our weekly meeting. We will look at the values together, discuss them and consider what we should change or which topic we should specifically address. This can also mean that we might ask more specific questions about a particular topic in order to have more detailed input for upcoming decisions, or that we conduct another short custom survey to present various options and find out whether we are on the right track.