Creating a bespoke survey and reporting platform for The Survey Initiative

Employee engagement is key to a successful business; an engaged and motivated workforce is happier, healthier, more productive, and gives you an edge in business, but measuring how employees are feeling, particularly in large companies, is not always easy.

The Survey Initiative (TSI), a long-standing client of AVAMAE, work consultatively with clients to create and deliver surveys that meet the specific needs of the company and to provide them with reports that display employee survey results to all stakeholders in a way that is meaningful to them.  

Previously, The Survey Initiative created individual websites for each of their clients, with hard-wired questions, to collect employee responses to surveys. They then took the raw data and manually turned it into detailed reports that could be sliced and diced as required and disseminated to clients.

When they first came to us, TSI were looking for our help to develop a Survey Reporting Platform, that would allow them to upload the raw data that they had collected and for bespoke, complex and varied reports to be automatically created for their clients. We built them a platform that created multiple sophisticated reports for the client to view in the platform and download as PDFs. 

Sophisticated Report Creation – Typically TSI work with large organisations and their surveys can be completed by thousands or tens of thousands of employees; so it was essential that we delivered a solution that facilitated the creation of multiple types of reports from the same survey data, reports that could be sliced by departments, by region, or to provide board-level data, as well as many other parameters. 

The reports available on the platform include Headline Reports that provide headline responses by selected demographics, Comments Reports that collate employee responses by theme and sentiment and 360 Feedback Reports that contain detailed feedback from multiple responders. The reports include easy to understand diagrams and graphs of responses, and some also display rater comments and provide an action plan for future development. The platform also gives clients the flexibility to create bespoke filters of up to 10 demographics to filter each report type, so that they can view the exact detail they require. 

Additional Development – Following the success of the Survey Reporting Platform, TSI asked us to build them a configurable Employee Response Platform, where employees complete bespoke surveys, and the data collected is automatically sent to the Survey Reporting Platform, thus reducing work for the TSI team and automating more of their processes.  

The Survey Initiative’s clients can now seamlessly perform employee satisfaction surveys, crunch the data and see it presented in useful reports that give employers a deep understanding of their employees. 

Multiple user types – When developing TSI’s software, we had to consider the three specific user groups who would be accessing the platform; the employees who take the survey at the request of the employer, the clients who have requested the staff survey and finally, the admin team at The Survey Initiative who are responsible for configuring and managing surveys on behalf of their clients. 

Employee Engagement – Employees are invited to complete surveys on a platform that is branded to their company. The key thing for employees completing the surveys is that the process is engaging, intuitive and easy to use. 

The platform that we created for TSI allows configuration of surveys with multiple question and response types, with everything from sliding percentage scales and labelled scales, to preference rankings and free text answers, making the employee interaction with the system more interesting and more meaningful.  

Multiple survey types can be delivered to employees, ranging from employee engagement and empowerment surveys, to 360 feedback and pulse surveys, or completely ad-hoc surveys.

Client Automation – Clients login to a personalised area of the Survey Reporting Platform, where they can access all the different types of reports to view and download. Our software development team also created a Workbooks section which lets clients look more closely at the details of one survey and to create comparisons of multiple surveys within the same project, as well as make comparisons with earlier survey results and across teams.  

Action Plans related to workbooks and projects can be created easily by clients. These allow the clients to specify areas for development that have been picked up from survey results, along with the people responsible, dates, actions and resources required. Clients can interact with the action plans, recording start dates and their progress, as well as print and download to PDF. They can access an overview of all Action Plan progress on an Action Plan dashboard and can set email reminders to remind people to complete actions.

Admin Configuration – To get truly insightful survey results, the right questions need to be asked in a way that is carefully and intelligently constructed, which is where TSI’s expertise lies. 

The TSI team are able to set up completely bespoke surveys with complex configuration that carry the client’s branding. This includes configuring multiple sections with multiple question and response types, such as single select, multiple select, range scale and preference ranking.  

Powerful Integrations – One of the most powerful elements of The Survey Initiative reports is enabled by the integration of Azure Text Analytics to analyse all employee comments for sentiment. This integration allows us to get insight from text using Natural Language Processing (NLP). It is used to pull out key words from employee responses, assesses comment sentiment and indicates a sentiment confidence score. This integration also allows the platform to automatically group comments by theme in a Comments Report. It allows us to provide clients with quantitative data from a qualitative survey element.

We gave admins the ability to specify response scales, as well as indicate whether each section is mandatory, set up routed questions, set up weighted average questions and indicate whether each should be displayed on the client report. 

Complex project report configuration also allows admins to specify where they want each response type to appear on reports. They can select questions to hide and those to group together in themes. The order and style of each report section can all be configured. 

We made all this functionality as easy as possible to use with simple drag and drop controls, so admins can effortlessly move sections of the report and drag questions in and out of each section. 

The platform also delivers admins an oversight of platform interaction, showing them which employees have opened emails and overall response rate of surveys, along with the ability to send reminders, which allows the TSI team to manage and enhance response rates. There’s also multi-language functionality embedded, for the translation of surveys into different languages. 

“Despite its complexity, they have a good understanding of what we do. We have a detailed system, and they’ve gotten to know us and our business. Moreover, the account management and responsiveness are excellent. Also, the quality of what they produce is fantastic. They take the time to understand our requirements and develop accordingly.” – Gary Cattermole, The Survey Initiative