Survey Design Best Practices

Survey design and execution is best when it is collaborative and evidence-based, grounded in I/O psychology best practices. 

In practice, it looks like this:

1. Align on goals and measurement framework

Start with a short discovery session to understand your organization's priorities and key decisions the survey needs to inform. Be sure to involve a cross-functional group of stakeholders so that they have input and see themselves in the survey design. Based on the feedback, define a set of measurement themes and map each theme to clear constructs and outcomes (e.g., culture, career growth, manager effectiveness).

2. Build the survey

OrgAcuity has a large library of validated survey items and scales that customers can select from, and we also provide the ability to create custom items and scales when something unique is needed (e.g., a culture index tied to your specific values; a manager effectiveness index tied to specific manager capabilities you want to build). If you have legacy items or indices you want to retain for trending, we can incorporate them as well.

These are guiding questions to consider when evaluating which survey items to include:

• What decision will this data help us make?
• Where are we guessing instead of knowing?
• What’s getting in the way of great work?
• What are we actually prepared to fix?
• What might surprise us?

3. Optimize for response rate and data quality

For customers that purchase our advisory services, our team recommends the right blend of survey item types, and we apply best practices around survey length, wording clarity, and respondent experience. We also partner with you on communications and launch strategy (timing, reminders, manager enablement) to support strong participation and reliable results.

Here are some survey design best practices to consider:

• Include a combination of rating items, open-ended comments, and connection questions to support actionable insights.
• All questions should be positively worded. By design, OrgAcuity does not support reverse scoring (i.e., questions should be created so that higher ratings always indicate a more favorable response than lower ratings).
• Don’t ask a question you’re not prepared to act on.
• Fewer, sharper questions beat longer, safer surveys.
• Include questions with a clear referent (e.g., “my manager”, “Senior Leadership Team”) and items without a referent (these are best for a network-based lens that relates to broader, cross-functional experiences).

4. Integrated network-based questions

OrgAcuity is the only employee listening vendor that offers integrated organizational network-based questions to help you identify key change agents across your company (mentors, subject matter experts, culture carriers, support anchors, and more). This helps you understand the sentiments and experiences of your most connected and influential people and enables leaders to activate the right change agents during action planning (e.g., when forming a focus group to learn more, or building a change coalition).