Intranet surveys: How to get (honest) employee feedback

If you work in management or HR, you’ve probably encountered this before: You finish a presentation and ask employees if they have any questions or feedback. You know they probably do. But no one speaks up. 

Getting employees to provide honest feedback is a challenge, and perhaps even more so, with teams that are scattered across different time zones and working remotely. But employee input is important for a variety of reasons, and you can use your intranet to gather it.

Let’s begin!

What are intranet surveys?

Some modern intranet platforms offer the ability to create intranet surveys. You can configure these so that they display on your intranet homepage when employees log in, or within an intranet channel. 

Surveys may consist of true/false questions, multiple choice questions, and open-ended questions with text fields for feedback. Depending on your intranet platform, you may also be able to add images and rich formatting, to make surveys more engaging. 

How do you use intranet surveys?

If you need some inspiration, here are some ways you can use intranet surveys: 

Keep remote teams engaged 

Sometimes, open-ended questions can be difficult to answer. For example, if you’re checking in with remote team members and asking, “How are you doing?” they might simply reply, “Fine.” A well-crafted survey can engage remote workers, encourage them to share information, and show them that you care about their opinions. 

Some questions you might want to ask in a survey for remote workers include:

• What additional tools or technology do you need for your role? 
  
  
• Would you be interested in attending a virtual team building exercise? 
  
  
• Are you getting enough feedback and guidance from your manager?

Gather feedback about the intranet platform

Yes, you can use intranet surveys to ask employees how they feel about your intranet. Even if you have access to user analytics, you may want to hear from employees in their own words what they like or dislike about your intranet.

You might want to set up a statement-based survey that asks employees to rate statements on a numeric scale, or by choosing an option (such as “not at all” or “neutral”). These statements can help you evaluate your intranet platform and identify needs for additional training:

• Our intranet platform makes it easy to find information.
  
  
• I use our intranet platform to interact with my peers. 
  
  
• Our intranet improves our ability to collaborate.
  
  
• I understand how to follow channels and groups. 
  
  
• Our intranet helps me keep up with company news.

Involve employees in key decisions

Whether you’re planning an event or considering a fundamental change for your business, involving employees in the decision-making process is a good idea. You might use surveys to gather employee input when: 

• Considering a change to your logo, tagline, or other branded assets. 
  
  
• Determining a location for an annual business meeting. 
  
  
• Evaluating whether to change your company’s benefits package.

Achieve consensus among small teams

Remote work sometimes requires teams to make critical decisions without any opportunity to brainstorm in person. That’s when surveys can be useful. For example, if you’re part of a hiring team that’s trying to choose the best candidate from a small pool of applicants, you could use a survey to: 

• Ask everyone to rank applicants in order of preference. 
  
  
• Choose the single best applicant.
  
  
• Include text fields, if you want more context about everyone’s choices.

Start the self-evaluation process

Many businesses use self-evaluation processes instead of formal annual reviews. With open-ended intranet surveys, you can start this process by proposing some questions, such as:

• What do you feel was your greatest accomplishment in the past year? 
  
  
• What are your top three professional goals for the upcoming year? 
  
  
• What can we do to help you achieve your goals? 

Gather personal details 

Are gifts (or gift cards) part of your employee recognition strategy? If so, gathering some details about personal interests can help you provide a perfect gift when it’s time to acknowledge an employee’s work anniversary or accomplishment. Create a survey with questions like:

• What are your favorite hobbies?
  
  
• What’s your favorite restaurant? 
  
  
• Do you like chocolate?

Ask simple yes/no questions

If you’ve ever visited a product support page, you may have seen something like this at the bottom: 

A survey doesn’t need a lot of detail to be helpful. Presenting a yes/no question in-the-moment can help you evaluate your training materials, your intranet portal’s support pages, and the quality of your internal content.

Intranet survey best practices 

To really drive engagement with your surveys, we suggest you:

Tell employees about it 

Don’t surprise employees with a survey. Announce it in advance via email — or through your intranet company news channel — and explain its purpose. Provide specifics such as, “This survey is to evaluate whether we should switch from Trello to Jira.”  

Let people know when the survey will go live, how long it will be open, and when you’ll announce the results. 

Keep it simple

Employees should be able to complete any survey in less than 10 minutes (although it’s OK if annual self-evaluation surveys take a bit longer). You never want employees to feel like a survey is “work” or is taking valuable time away from more important tasks. 

Choose one topic at a time

You might want to collect input on several topics, but space your surveys so that one ends before the next one begins. Once you’ve revealed the results of a survey, you can prepare to announce a new topic. 

FAQs 

I previously created an annual employee survey in Typeform. Is there a way to import that survey into my intranet platform? 

Yes! Happeo integrates with Typeform (and Google Forms), so you can either create a survey with a link to the Typeform survey, or embed your Typeform survey in Happeo. 

Do I need any special technical skills to set up intranet surveys?

Nope! Happeo’s drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create surveys and other types of content. 

How do I manage the information I collect in my surveys? 

Happeo automatically collects your survey responses, which you can then sort in several ways.