Surveys App Overview

Surveys

1. What it is

Surveys lets you author, distribute, and analyse employee surveys — engagement checks, recurring pulses, manager-effectiveness reviews, exit interviews, and custom questionnaires. It includes a separate anonymous feedback channel employees can use any time, outside a formal survey.

• Enablement: Surveys is a licensed app. An admin enables it in Admin → Apps Marketplace, and it requires a licence.
• What it is not: Surveys shares its question engine with the Forms app (same field types and builder), but a survey adds audience targeting, anonymity enforcement, scheduling, AI-powered analysis, and a response-rate dashboard that a plain form does not have.

2. Standing it up

1. Enable the app in Admin → Apps Marketplace → Surveys.
2. Go to Surveys → Settings and review the defaults. The two decisions that matter most on day one are whether to keep the Anonymous Feedback Channel turned on (it is on by default) and who is allowed to create surveys. By default only app admins can create surveys — widen it under Who can create and manage surveys? if managers or specific groups should also author their own.
3. Grant survey-administrator access to the HR team members who will manage results and the feedback inbox. They need the Surveys app admin role, assigned through Admin → Users → Roles.
4. Create your first survey: go to Surveys → Manage Surveys → Create Survey. You have five starting points:
   • Describe it — AI drafts the whole survey (sections, questions, and response types from a short prompt).
   • Browse Library — curated cross-customer templates filterable by industry or use case.
   • Start from Template — built-in templates: Employee Engagement Survey, Quick Pulse Check, Manager Effectiveness, New Hire Feedback, and Exit Interview.
   • Use Existing Form — pick any published form from the Forms app; questions are copied automatically.
   • Duplicate Previous Survey — re-run a past survey with the same questions.
5. Set the audience, schedule, and privacy options, then choose Activate. The survey must have at least one question before it can be activated.
6. Confirm it is live: employees in the audience see it under Surveys → Take Survey, on their dashboard widget, and in their Inbox when you send invitations.

Silent-pairing note: A survey targeted at specific departments, locations, or groups does nothing until at least one active employee belongs to the selection. If the audience resolves to zero people, activation succeeds but nobody receives the survey.

3. How it fits together

Survey types — Four types organise surveys by purpose: Engagement, Pulse, Custom, and Manager Feedback. The type is a label for filtering and reporting; it does not restrict what questions you can ask.

Anonymity vs. confidentiality — These are separate switches on every survey and the most common source of confusion.

• Anonymous Responses (on by default for new surveys) strips respondent identity from results, exports, and the heatmap. Participation is still tracked so the system knows who to remind, but responses cannot be linked back to individuals. Timestamps on anonymous exports are coarsened to date-only so they cannot be cross-referenced against login or badge logs. Once a survey has collected at least one response, anonymity can no longer be turned off — this is enforced at the data layer, not just the form.
• Confidential results limits who can see results at all — only the survey owner, anyone they explicitly share results with, and survey administrators. When confidential is on, managers get no automatic team view and employees never see results, regardless of the other visibility switches. Confidentiality is independent of anonymity: a survey can be both anonymous and confidential, or neither.

Audience targeting — Every survey targets one of four audience scopes: All Employees, Specific Departments, Specific Locations, or Specific Groups (notification recipient groups). Two additional access modes support link-based distribution: Anyone with the Link (no login required — suitable for external respondents or customer feedback) and Anyone with Link (Login Required), which tracks who responded but lets anyone with the URL take the survey after signing in. For link-based surveys you can generate a QR code from the Manage Surveys page.

Recurring pulses — A survey can be set to repeat on a Weekly, Bi-weekly, or Monthly cadence. When the current occurrence closes, the system automatically creates the next one with the same questions and audience. All occurrences are linked into a pulse series, and the Trend view shows how responses change across runs.

Collaboration and access grants — Survey owners can share a survey with other users or groups at four access levels: Viewer (read the definition), Editor (edit questions and settings), Results (view full results and export), and Co-owner (everything the owner can do except delete the survey). Admins and survey app admins always have full access regardless of grants. A user who has been shared a survey sees it on their Manage Surveys tab even if the tenant-wide “who can create” policy would not let them create new surveys.

Relationship with Forms — Every survey is backed by a Forms template. You edit questions by opening the Forms builder (the survey editor links directly to it with Open in Forms app to edit questions). An existing published form can become a survey in one step without rebuilding any questions; the original form stays unchanged.

Draft autosave — While an employee is taking a survey, their in-progress answers are saved as a draft automatically. If they navigate away and come back, the draft is restored. If a survey closes while someone is mid-submission, their answers are salvaged as a draft rather than lost.

Navigation tabs — The app shows different tabs depending on the user’s role:

• Everyone sees Dashboard and Take Survey.
• Users who can create surveys (per the tenant policy) or who have been shared at least one survey see Manage Surveys.
• Admins and survey app admins also see Feedback Inbox (when the anonymous feedback channel is enabled), Results, and Settings.
• Managers who are not admins see Team Results instead of the full Results tab.

Mobile — Employees can browse available surveys, take surveys, save drafts, and submit anonymous feedback from the mobile app. The mobile views are optimised for touch and do not require desktop access.

Integrations with other apps — Surveys connects to other parts of the platform in several ways:

• The Performance app can automatically send a survey after a performance review is approved (post-review survey).
• The Service Desk app can trigger a satisfaction survey when a help request is resolved or closed.
• The Onboarding Hub can include surveys as steps in an onboarding plan, with configurable day offsets and due dates.
• Surveys feeds sentiment and theme data into Mango Signal for organisation-wide analytics.

4. Running it

Sending invitations and reminders

1. Open Manage Surveys, select a survey, and choose Send Invitations. Each targeted employee receives an email and an Inbox notification with the survey name, estimated completion time, and deadline.
2. To nudge non-respondents, choose Send Reminders — only employees who have not yet responded receive the reminder.
3. Three days before the close date, the system automatically sends a pre-close reminder to non-respondents. The survey owner receives a notification when the response count meets the minimum response threshold.

Reviewing results

1. Go to Results, select a survey. The dashboard shows per-question summaries and response rates. You can filter results by department, location, manager, tenure, employee type, performance tier, or date range. When AI Analysis is enabled, the system generates sentiment scores (overall and by distribution), themes (3–7 per survey), and focus areas (top 3).
2. Use the Heatmap to compare scores across five dimensions: department, location, manager, tenure, and employee type. The tenure dimension groups employees into brackets: New Hire (under 1 year), 1–3 Years, 3–5 Years, 5–10 Years, and 10+ Years. Segments with fewer responses than the minimum response threshold display “N/A” to protect anonymity.
3. Open Comments to browse free-text responses. You can highlight individual comments to flag them for follow-up. For anonymous surveys, if applying demographic filters would narrow the responses below the threshold, the comments are blocked entirely.
4. Export downloads responses as CSV. For anonymous surveys the export coarsens timestamps to date-only.
5. Managers see a separate Team Results tab showing only their direct reports’ responses — but only on surveys where the owner turned on Let managers see their team’s results and the survey is not confidential.

Sharing results back with employees

After reviewing, you can publish a “You said, we did” summary. Open the survey’s results page, choose Publish Summary, preview the aggregate, then Deliver Results Summary. Each respondent receives the summary in their Inbox and by email.

Managing anonymous feedback

When the Anonymous Feedback Channel is enabled, employees can submit feedback at any time — it is not tied to any specific survey. Each submission picks a topic (Workload, Safety, Leadership, Culture, Compensation, Communication, or Other) and receives a claim code. The employee can check their feedback’s status later at /feedback-status using that code, without revealing their identity.

1. HR reviews submissions in Surveys → Feedback Inbox, filtered by status (New, In Progress, Closed) and topic.
2. Mark a submission In Progress to acknowledge it, add internal notes, and Close it when resolved.
3. Bulk actions let you close or mark multiple submissions at once.

Non-responders and QR codes

From Manage Surveys you can view the list of employees who have not yet responded (up to 200 shown). You can also generate a QR code for any survey with a shareable link — useful for posting in break rooms or on digital signage.

Closing and archiving

• A survey closes automatically when its close date passes. A daily background job handles this, emails the owner that results are ready, and triggers AI analysis if the response threshold is met.
• You can also close a survey manually from Manage Surveys → Close.
• Closed surveys can be archived to move them off the active list. A draft survey with zero responses can be deleted outright; once responses exist, archive instead.
• You can regenerate a survey’s shareable link at any time; doing so invalidates the previous link and QR code.

5. Settings

All settings are at Surveys → Settings. Only admins and survey app admins can access this page.

Setting	Default	What it changes
Enable Surveys Agent	On	Lets users interact with the Surveys agent through Ask AI to create surveys, check responses, and run analysis.
Enable Anonymous Feedback Channel	On	Shows the anonymous feedback form to employees and the Feedback Inbox tab to admins.
Enable AI Analysis	On	Enables AI-powered sentiment analysis, theme extraction, and focus-area generation on survey responses.
Minimum Response Threshold	5	Number of responses required before results, AI insights, and heatmap cells are shown. Protects anonymity in small segments.
Who can create and manage surveys?	App admins	Controls which users can author, edit, send, and close surveys. Can be widened to everyone or to specific groups. Admins and survey app admins always pass regardless.

Per-survey settings (on the survey edit page)

Setting	Default	What it changes
Anonymous Responses	On	Strips respondent identity from results and exports. Locked once responses are collected.
List in the Surveys app	On	Shows the survey in the Take Survey browse list. Turn off for surveys distributed only through another channel (e.g. an onboarding step or performance-review follow-up) so it is reachable only via its direct link.
Confidential results	Off	Restricts results to the owner, explicit grantees, and survey administrators. Blocks manager team view and employee results summary.
Let managers see their team’s results	Off	Lets managers view their direct reports’ responses only. Ignored when the survey is confidential.
Show a results summary to employees	Off	Lets employees in the audience view an anonymized aggregate summary after responding. Ignored when the survey is confidential.

6. More help

• Surveys FAQ — specific setup questions, limits, and troubleshooting.
• Ask AI — the assistant answers questions about Surveys from these articles.