Employee Survey Tips: How Often Should you Survey?

I spent seven years leading methodology and data science for employee engagement surveys at Peakon and Workday. Over that time, I’ve worked with everyone from tiny tech startups to massive retail brands, mining operations, football clubs, and even government entities. Now that I’m no longer directly involved in survey creation, I can share my honest thoughts on the most effective ways to run employee surveys.

See the complete set of tips & tricks for running employee engagement surveys.

One of the most common questions HR leaders ask is how often they should send out employee engagement surveys. For many organizations, quarterly or bimonthly surveys strike a solid balance: frequent enough to stay informed of issues, but not so frequent that you exhaust employees. In fast-paced environments, like tech startups with constantly shifting priorities, you might check in more often to keep a pulse on employee sentiment.

Below are a few key points to consider:

1. Spread Out Your Questions
   There's a very simple rule of thumb: employees will typically answer around 100 questions over the course of a year. It’s up to you whether to bundle them into a single annual survey or break them up throughout the year, but you'll find it difficult to go too far beyond this guideline. Conducting multiple smaller surveys can help address issues faster and keep discussions fresh.
2. Recognize Real Survey Fatigue
   Survey fatigue is real, but it’s usually tied to a lack of visible follow-up. If employees never see changes as a result of their feedback, they’ll become disengaged. The best way to combat fatigue is to show you’re listening and taking action.
3. Don’t Let Action Plans Hold You Back
   You do need to act on feedback, but don’t wait until every improvement initiative is complete before sending the next survey. Fresh insights are always more valuable. Sometimes you’ll have to juggle resolving older issues while gathering new data. You might even find that an issue that used to be important has dropped off the radar and that you should refocus your effeorts.

Ultimately, your survey frequency depends on your organization’s culture, speed, and capacity for action. We can give some guidelines, but the best approach is to experiment, track your response rates and engagement, and adjust as needed.

Sunbeam

Sunbeam is a feedback analytics platform designed to make working with open-ended, text-based feedback as straightforward as working with scores. Too many organizations overlook the rich insights hidden in qualitative responses, and Sunbeam aims to fix that. By combining deep industry expertise with cutting-edge AI, Sunbeam makes it simple to analyze and act on text feedback, ultimately helping HR teams unlock the full potential of employee engagement data.