How do I design my Viva Glint survey?

• 30 minutes

See how to use our survey design principles to design a strong feedback strategy.

A simple, people-centric set of survey items allows managers to quickly identify key insights and act on feedback. Collecting feedback on the topics that matter most to an organization and their people allows leaders and managers to drive relevant conversations and focused action.

The quickest way to design and launch a survey is to use one of the Viva People Science validated survey templates. These templates include the items most relevant to assessing the employee experience across organizations. Standard survey items are available in multiple languages, saving time if they are used across your survey population.

Leverage Viva Glint feedback programs and templates

This overview provides an introduction to each survey template that Glint offers.

Let’s look at the standard designs for these types of surveys.

Engagement surveys

Glint’s standard Engagement survey design contains:

• Glint’s 2-item Engagement index: eSat and Recommend
• Key drivers statistically proven to be the most impactful drivers of employee engagement

Employee Lifecycle surveys – Onboarding

Glint’s standard Onboarding survey design contains:

• Outcome items evaluating an employee’s overall onboarding experience and feelings of engagement
• Key drivers of a positive onboarding experience
• Open-ended items to learn an employee’s reasons for joining your organization and any barriers they are facing

Employee Lifecycle surveys – Exit

Glint’s standard Exit survey design contains:

• Outcome items evaluating an employee’s likelihood to recommend the organization for someone else to work at or consider working for the organization again
• Items to understand the reasons and circumstances around a person’s departure
• Open-ended items to learn what influenced the employee to leave your organization

Customizing surveys to meet organizational needs

Organizational needs and priorities may dictate that different items be included in your survey other than those in the Glint standard template. To do this, choose other validated items from the Glint Question Library or by creating custom items.

Principles and tips for survey design

Principles for choosing survey items:

• Align survey items to strategic objectives
• Measure only 'need to know', not 'nice to know'
• Keep wording general; look to qualitative feedback to understand root cause
• Use a conversational tone
• Turn on comments for all items to get richer information
• Use single-item measures that are predictive and validated, rather than lengthy themes with multiple questions that take up valuable survey real estate
• Include items actionable at the manager and team level to foster empowerment
• Minimize the use of items targeted to specific employee groups

Principles for survey length

• Keep surveys short and focused to instill a frequent and agile feedback culture. This makes it less cumbersome for providing feedback and ensures that post-survey insights lead to focused action, instead of “analysis paralysis.”
• Use these guidelines for determining the number of items on a survey:
  • Monthly Surveys: 8 or fewer items
  • Quarterly Surveys: 22 or fewer items
  • Annual Surveys: 30 or fewer items

On average, it takes employees approximately 3-5 minutes to respond to a 20-25 item survey.

Principles for item order

• Glint templates are ordered so participants can understand their movement from one survey frame to another. Recommended ordering:
  1. Engagement outcomes: Responding to intended outcomes first ensures responses aren’t influenced by other topics covered in the survey
  2. General items about the organization overall: These include the respondent's perception of an organization and senior leadership
  3. Specific items about local management, the direct supervisor, and the team
  4. The individual job experiences
  5. Open-ended comments or questions

Minimize deviations from standard wording

• Modifyng the wording of standard Glint items can change an item’s meaning, its ability to be benchmarked or mapped to a comparator. It may also require additional translations. Basic rules for editing:
  • Edit only when the minor change resonates better with your employees. Add clarifying text in parentheses to help specify an otherwise broad term (i.e., defining what “leaders” means).

Examples:

Glint standard text	Edited text	Acceptable or Unacceptable
“...satisfied with the recognition I receive.”	“...satisfied with the recognition I receive for my work.”	Acceptable
“I would recommend my manager to others.”	“I would recommend my supervisor to others.”	Acceptable
“My manager makes me feel valued.”	“My manager values my role on their team.”	Unacceptable - changes the meaning of the sentence and cannot be used in reporting.

Provide opportunities for open-ended feedback.

• Glint survey templates give respondents opportunities to provide comments after scaled-response items. In general, open-ended items help determine what’s working well and what can be improved.
• Open-ended items do not have benchmarks, so it is possible (and recommended) to customize the text more specifically to gather feedback on current topics of interest. Craft the item text to align with your survey objectives.

Overcome common design challenges

Organizations often receive feedback on surveys and program design from stakeholders. Anticipate key challenges by:

• Managing survey length

  • Optimize stakeholder input for agility. In many organizations, engagement surveys require stakeholder input and buy-in. However, we find that when the net is cast too wide on providing feedback specifically on survey design, organizations may end up with an overly lengthy survey and the survey design process becomes unwieldy. Instead, we recommend educating stakeholders on key design principles and coaching them on the benefits of short, focused surveys.
  • Look forward. Focusing too much on trending from historical surveys can lead to keeping questions that no longer serve a purpose. If this is your first Glint survey, start with a clean slate and take advantage of our validated survey templates. This is also a powerful signal to the organization on how the new approach is different from the old, encouraging them to take a fresh mindset toward the survey program.
  • Use single-item measures rather than indices or multiple items that measure the same driver, whenever possible.
    • Glint’s research shows that a carefully selected single item on a given topic provides more information than a broader index of items can. Single-item indices streamline the survey and improves the experience for both respondents and for leaders analyzing results and driving action.
    • Single-item measures produce high quality insights, reduce demand on leaders to process too much information, and drive focused conversations informed by relevant and real-time data.
    • Indices make the reporting experience cumbersome. If a driver is aggregated across several related items, steer toward a single item or just as few items instead. Items should be actionable and rolling them up into a group limits utility and actionability at the manager and team level. Focusing on short, attainable snippets is key.
    • Indices prevent agility of frequent surveying, especially when it comes to trending. If an item is removed or changed in a category, the intended comparison of the category score in subsequent surveys is broken.

• Move beyond historical items. Don’t become trapped in “It’s always been done this way.”

  • Tease out which historic items are must-haves versus nice-to-have: 'Must-haves' include items that have been top Focus Areas for improvement or items that are used for reporting for key stakeholders. Look to see if a comparable Glint item is available so that our benchmarks can be used.
  • Exception: For trend data or entrenched stakeholders, it may be sensible to include a one-time item for the first survey only.

• Consider the value of custom requests. During the initial design phase, a topic that isn’t perfectly represented in the Glint Question Library may arise as something your organization wants to measure. Custom items can add great value to a design. Use these tips if adding custom items:

  • Clarify the desired format and response scale. If your organization thinks an item should be presented on a different scale (i.e., 1-7 vs 1-5), ask:
  • Can the Glint platform support the desired format or scale (i.e., scaled Likert items, multi-select items, multiple choice items, comment questions, etc.)?
  • Could the organization learn equally or better from a Glint standard item?
  • Might better information come from an open-ended comment question?

• Leverage the standard items in the Viva Glint Question Library where possible. Glint items have met rigorous testing and validation standards so stakeholders can trust them. They’re written in a one-voice, conversational tone, and the more consistency in the survey-taking experience, the better

  • Glint items come with associated benchmarks which is a benefit over custom-written items
  • Glint items are already translated into many languages. If the survey is multi-language, this will save the organization time and money.
  • Glint items are mapped to suggested actions and learning content, helping organizations move directly from insights to action.