Employee satisfaction and engagement surveys

Employees speak openly when they are sure their answers will not come back to them. With YouReply Survey you can build engagement, pulse, onboarding and exit surveys and use anonymous response mode. This page also explains plainly what you need to watch for to keep responses truly anonymous.

Employee templates

The Employee category contains four templates. Each is a starting point you adapt to your organization.

  • Employee Engagement Survey

    For periodically measuring how engaged employees are with their work and the organization.

  • Employee Pulse Survey

    For quick pulse checks repeated at short intervals.

  • New Hire Onboarding Survey

    For understanding how new employees experience their first weeks and settle in.

  • Exit Interview Survey

    For systematically collecting the reasons employees give for leaving.

What does anonymous response mode protect?

With Anonymous responses turned on under Response Behavior in Settings, no IP address or location is stored with the response; the IP address, country and time zone columns in the exported file stay empty.

This setting alone does not guarantee anonymity. In the situations below, responses can become linkable to a person. If you announce the survey to employees as anonymous, avoid them, and wherever possible choose not to collect identifying data at all.

What can break anonymity

  • Meta info question: even in anonymous surveys it writes browser details, platform, language and screen size into the response, plus referrer and time zone if you select them.
  • Hidden Field: if you add a URL parameter such as an employee number or email to the link, every response is matched to that person. Such fields can be marked as This field identifies the participant; never use them in an anonymous survey.
  • Questions that ask for identity: questions requesting name, email, phone or staff number tie the response directly to a person.
  • Small groups: when department, title, tenure, age and gender are asked together, it may be possible to guess who responded in a team of a few people. Ask demographic questions in broad ranges and do not interpret the results of very small groups on their own.
  • Open-ended answers: text in which people describe themselves, their team or a specific incident can also reveal who they are.
  • Access to raw data: keep the number of people who can see the Responses tab and the exported files as small as possible.

Running an employee survey with care

  1. 1

    Explain the purpose and anonymity

    Use consent text to show a Participation Consent screen at the start; state the purpose of the survey, what data is collected, whether it is anonymous and how the results will be used. As the employer, you are the controller of this data.

  2. 2

    Do not collect identifying data

    Turn on anonymous responses and do not add meta info, hidden fields or identity questions. Limit demographic questions to the ones you truly need.

  3. 3

    Preview and test the path

    Check the survey flow with Preview and Path test before collecting data; nothing is saved in preview mode.

  4. 4

    Share the link on internal channels

    Announce the Share Link through internal email, your intranet or messaging channels, and set when the survey closes with End Date.

  5. 5

    Limit access

    In your organization account, give the Admin, Editor and Viewer roles only to the people who need them, and take the same care when sharing exported files.

  6. 6

    Review results in a separate product

    Export responses as Excel or CSV and work on score distributions in YouReply Analyze and open-ended comments in YouReply Qualitative.

Frequently asked questions

Is an anonymous survey really anonymous?

With anonymous responses on, IP address and location are not stored. A meta info question, hidden fields, identity questions or demographic questions asked together in small groups can still make responses identifiable. If you add none of these, no information identifying the person is recorded with the response.

Can managers see who answered what?

If you set the survey up as anonymous and added no identifying fields, responses are not stored matched to a person; the Responses tab and the exported file show answers, status and durations. Remember that in small teams people may be guessed from what they wrote.

Can I repeat a pulse survey every month?

Yes. You can create a new survey from the Employee Pulse template for each period, or keep one survey open and separate periods using the start and completion times in the exported file. If you change question wording and publish again, the survey version column shows which response was given to which form.

Can I offer the survey in Turkish and English at the same time?

No, each survey has one language. For teams working in different languages, you create two separate surveys, one in Turkish and one in English.

Related guides and documents

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