Recommendations for Engagement Surveys with Key Driver Analysis (KDA)

Note: *The Recommendations feature is only available for your Engagement Surveys with Key Driver Analysis (KDA) enabled. 


Congratulations, you’ve successfully launched an Engagement Survey at your organization and generated an insightful KDA from employee responses. Now what?

The Recommendations feature provides follow-up questions that allow you to dive further into your prioritized Drivers, as well as specific actions you can take for your employee engagement initiatives. 

This feature saves you time by taking the guess work out of what to do next with your Engagement Survey data, while giving you confidence that you'll be targeting your organization's key focus areas to improve engagement. 

In this article:


Note: All follow-up questions and actions are designed and recommended by our Science Institute.


Why you should follow-up and deep dive after the Engagement Survey

The Engagement Survey is the perfect starting point to measure your organization’s current engagement level and to pinpoint which areas to focus on. The Engagement Survey has 20 questions (five (5) Engagement Index questions and 15 Driver questions). The Engagement Survey is scientifically designed to have a balance between survey length and topic coverage, optimizing information collected, while limiting survey fatigue.

However, to design the most impactful initiatives, you'll want to dive further into the key focus areas highlighted by the KDA to obtain more details and a better understanding before moving forward.

For example: recall the Health & Wellness Driver question: “This company effectively maintains a safe work environment”. If your Engagement Survey’s KDA recommends this Driver should be prioritized, how do you know which aspects of the “safe work environment” you should focus and act upon? Your employees can refer to being physically, emotionally, psychologically, or socially safe. This is where the deep dive questions come into play. 

Our Science Institute designed these questions so you can easily choose from and schedule your deep dive survey. Once the results of the deep dive survey come in, you can identify if your initiatives should focus on improving the physical safety or the social safety of your employee’s work environment, ensuring the best ROI for your organization’s actions. 

How to use the Recommendations feature

The Recommendations feature is only available for Engagement Surveys with KDA. If you have not launched the Engagement Survey or you have but it did not include the KDA, we recommend you review our articles on the science and benefits of the survey here: Key Driver Analysis Help Docs. You can schedule the Engagement Survey from the Content Library.

Once your Engagement Survey is closed and the KDA has been calculated, the Recommendations tab will be available on your Survey Response page. In this tab, you will see the list of prioritized Drivers and an overview, with the number of questions, templates, and actions recommended.

Clicking on one of the prioritized Drivers, you will see the specific questions, templates, and actions recommended for this particular Driver.

To create your deep dive/follow-up survey, click on “Add to Survey”. This will take you to a page with all the prioritized Drivers and their recommended deep dive questions. Here, you can pick and choose which questions to include in your survey. You will be able to edit those questions in the next step. 

Should you deep dive into multiple Drivers in one survey or in separate surveys? 

The answer to that depends on what works best for your employees and organization. 

  • If your employees respond well to very short and more frequent surveys, and your team operates more effectively with that survey cadence, then you'll likely want to schedule separate deep dive surveys. 
  • If your employees respond well to slightly longer and less frequent surveys, and your team operates more effectively around a few surveys, then you'll want to schedule one deep dive survey. For the latter choice, you can utilize the paging feature when creating your survey, grouping questions together under each prioritized Driver per page. See our article on Survey Paging & Question Grouping.

Once you choose your deep dive questions, you can choose to add them to an existing survey or to create a new survey. From there, you continue through the steps to schedule a survey as usual. 

While your deep dive survey is collecting results and after your deep dive survey is closed, we recommend you check out the Recommended Actions. These are designed by our Science Institute and are a great resource for you and your leadership team to use and/or have conversations around for initiatives. 

Each prioritized Driver has its own Actions, and each Action has a default list of tasks and resources. You can edit the description, tasks, and resources for an Action however you want, and change the status of the Action to In Progress or Completed.


Want to know more about the Insights tab for your Engagement Survey with KDA? Check out this handy article!

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