Building Your Survey

Build Your Survey

Begin by giving your survey a name and selecting a ready-to-go survey templates for the type of survey you want to run, or select custom survey to create your own. Click save and continue to move on to creating your survey questions.

It is important for only one user to be in the survey builder when creating/editing. Having multiple users in the same survey simultaneously can lead to issues with changes not being saved correctly.

Create Your Questions

If you are using a ready-to-go survey template, the categories and questions will be pre-populated. You can modify question text by clicking the text and typing over it and edit category text by clicking the pencil icon after the category name. You may need to change text to match your organizational language or add category descriptions to help survey participants respond to survey questions. For example, you may want to change "manager" to "supervisor" or update the category description for senior leadership. Formatting of text can’t be updated (italics, color, size, etc.).

People Element provides ready-to-go questions within the ready-to-go survey templates and the question library for you to use in your surveys. To maintain the integrity of the platform reporting (e.g. benchmark reporting), do not edit a question to the point that it changes the meaning of the question, and/or overwrite these questions with a custom question. Instead add your own custom question(s) as needed.

If you want to add questions to your survey, you can add questions from the question library by dragging and dropping a question into your survey or create your own custom questions.

Question Library

The question library is located on the left side of the page when in your survey. You can add full categories of questions, or individual questions. To add a category of questions from the library (e.g. “Well-Being”), drag and drop that category into your survey. You can also click on a category to view the questions within it. To add a subset of questions from the category, click one or more questions you would like to add and drag them into your survey. When done this way, the questions will be added to the current category you are viewing in your survey. You can also use the search bar to locate the categories and questions you want (e.g. search by keyword, such as “manager”), and drag and drop it into your survey.

Custom Questions

You can create and add your own questions to any survey. Creating custom questions (add question) allows you to add questions specific to your organization; however, they will not have action recommendations or benchmarking available. To add a custom question, click "+add question" located above the questions in the category you wish to add the question to. Type your question in the blank space provided, and choose your question type (Single Select, Open Ended, Yes/No, Matrix, Dropdown). You can then edit, add, or delete the answer choices as needed. When finished, click OK.

Question Options

On the right side of each question you will see some action icons.

The first icon is the settings wheel. Clicking on settings will bring up the question editor where you can modify the question text, edit the scale, link your question to a demographic, exclude the question from reporting, and set the question to require a response.

Edit your scale: Use the orange trash cans to remove answer options or add options using "+add answer choices". If you want to change from the default agreement scale to a custom scale and use across all single select survey questions, create your custom scale and apply to all questions. Learn how to create a custom scale here.

Link to a demographic: For dropdown questions where responses are not shown in reporting, you may want to link those responses to a demographic you can use to filter your other survey data. For example, if you are asking participants to select their work location, you can link that question to a work location demographic. This will allow the responses given by participants to be automatically created as a demographic you can use in reporting.

Exclude from reporting: By checking the exclude from dashboard box, this removes the question responses from being used in any reporting calculations and excludes the data from showing in any report. The results are available only in a raw data export as needed.

Filter question: The second icon is the filter question option. This allows you to set parameters around what participants get to see the question in their survey.

If you want specific groups/populations within your organization to see a question on the survey and excluded from others view, you can apply question filtering based on your participant demographics. For example, if you have questions specific to onboarding, you can filter so that only people who have been employed with the company for less than 1 year will see this question on their survey.

By default, all questions are shown to all participants.

The third icon category, allows you to move questions from one category to another. Click the icon and select the category you want to move the question to.

The last icon allows you to delete a question from your survey. Responses already collected for the question are still available for reporting, but will be removed from the survey so that no future data is collected.

Additional Survey Design Features

You can add categories to your surveys by clicking the orange plus sign. Type in your category name and click add. To add a category description, click on the pencil icon to type or edit the description. If you don't add a description, it will be blank when in the survey.

To reorder your categories, click more options (three vertical dots) then reordering categories. Drag and drop categories into the order you would like them to appear in the survey and click save.

If you want all questions within a category to be required, you can check "require all questions" for any category where all questions should be required.

When finished building your survey, click save and continue. Changes will be lost if this is not done. Clicking save and continue will take you to the survey settings page. Review this article for information on the survey settings page.