Engagement Custom Questions and Factors

Introduction

The employee engagement module includes a collection of built-in questions. The answers to those questions contribute to the company's satisfaction and engagement factor scores. In addition to these built-in questions, it is possible to define several custom or company-specific questions to include in your engagement pulse surveys.  As with the Engagement Factor and eNPS questions, it is possible to control the cadence of such custom questions on pulse surveys.

Creating a New Custom Question

You can easily create one or more custom questions.  For rating-scale-type questions, the question text is a statement that you expect survey takers to rate on a scale of strongly disagree to strongly agree, mapped to a 1.5 rating scale.  For Comment Box-type questions, the question text can be used as a prompt for additional feedback that a survey taker can expand upon as an open-ended response. The Question Preview lets you view how your question will appear to survey takers.

Assigning a Custom Question to a Custom Factor

When creating or editing a custom question, you can assign it to a custom factor. This groups the question under that factor in your engagement dashboard and, if the factor is set up to contribute to Overall Satisfaction, allows the question to influence your organization's Overall Satisfaction score. Additional details about factor assignment can be found below:

• A custom question can be assigned to only one custom factor at a time.
• Only rating-scale custom questions contribute to the Overall Satisfaction score. Comment-type questions do not affect scoring even if assigned to a contributing factor.
• Custom questions that are not assigned to any custom factor appear under the "Unassigned" label in the Questions dashboard. (Please note the availability of PerformYard's custom factor functionality is dependent on pricing tier. Organizations who do not have access will continue to see "Custom" as the factor name for their custom questions.)
• You can reassign a custom question to a different factor or remove its factor assignment at any time. Questions can still be edited, enabled/disabled, or deleted regardless of their assignment.

Previewing the Question

You can quickly preview the question in the context of the survey application to ensure it reads as you would like it to when phrased as a rating scale question (or other type of question.)

Turning a Custom Question on or off

It is possible to turn individual custom questions on or off.  The PerformYard surveys will only select enabled custom questions, so disabling a question offers the ability to remove that question as an option for an upcoming survey.  You might leverage this capability to allow specific questions in the first half of the year and later disable them and enable a different set of questions for the year's second half.

Including Custom Questions on Surveys

As with the other types of questions available, you can control how often the custom questions should be included on surveys, and you can also control if all custom questions should be included or if a subset of custom questions should be selected randomly.

Custom Question Survey Cadence

As with Factor and eNPS questions, it is possible to control how often Custom Questions should be included in surveys. By default, custom questions are not included, but you can choose to have them on every survey or to control the frequency to be less often, for example, every other survey. 

Pulse surveys have a fixed number of questions, and the number of questions is based on the survey frequency.  More frequent surveys include fewer questions, while less frequent surveys include more questions.  In the case of custom questions, they are selected randomly from the list of enabled custom questions alongside the built-in questions.  As a result, there is no guarantee that any particular custom question or number of custom questions will be included in any given survey. The Include all custom questions option allows you to force them to be included. 

Including All Custom Questions

The option to "Include all custom questions" bypasses the random selection approach and forces the survey to include all your currently enabled custom questions. Selecting this option means that, at the end of your survey, all of your active custom questions will be asked. Many companies have a few questions they "always want to ask," and this option allows for that scenario.  Remember that this option can potentially result in a large survey if there are many custom questions.

Viewing Results for Custom Questions

The Employee Engagement dashboard's Questions page provides the ability to view the results of specific questions, including custom questions.