Employee Survey Across Multiple Departments and Locations

Your workforce is made up of several departments, you have different locations, and you want to analyse the results of your employee survey by department and/or location? You do not need to create a separate survey for each department or location. There are several ways to cover this in just one survey. Below, we show you how.

In brief:

• Your data and your employees’ data are processed in encrypted form in German, ISO-certified data centres
• Every survey can be run 100% anonymously
• Inviting participants is easy: use a link, for example on your intranet
• Survey invitations can also be sent through LamaPoll
• You can adapt the design to your own requirements
• The survey is responsive and looks good on all devices

Create your employee survey for free now!

All you need is an email address and a password

1. Getting Started: Creating Your Employee Questionnaire in LamaPoll

Surveys are quick and easy to create with LamaPoll. The process is similar to PowerPoint: you add slides (pages) and then create elements on each one (questions, text blocks, images and so on). You also have features such as mandatory questions (respondents cannot continue without answering), show/hide rules (questions or pages only appear if…), jumps (if… then jump to page X) and more.

You will find the most important features here:

• Getting started with survey creation
• Adding, moving, duplicating and deleting questions
• Question types
• Conditional visibility and branching (jumps)
• Survey design
• Anonymity factors: how do I run an anonymous survey?

Start your employee survey for free now!

All you need is an email address and a password

2. Inviting Your Employees: “Open” or “Closed” Survey?

How you invite your employees affects how the survey is run, which we explain later. So here is a short overview first:

A survey of several departments and/or locations can be set up in different ways. Here we present 4 options and assume an anonymous survey. Which option is best for you depends, among other things, on how you invite people. The key distinction is between “open” and “closed” surveys:

With an “open” survey there is one survey link, which you must pass to employees through a channel of your choice (email, intranet, etc.). You can simply retrieve this link under “Publish” → “Overview” → “Invite via link”. All participants then use the same link. Technically, it is not possible to trace who took part (or how often). Matching participating employees to departments has to be done within the results; you will find out how in section 3.

With a “closed” survey, each employee receives an individual link that can only be used once. The easiest way is through LamaPoll: you upload the participants to the address book and use placeholders in the invitation email so that each person gets their own link with their own code. In the address book, these links can be assigned to individual departments. More on this in section 3.

Alternatively, you download the required number of links in the software, under “Publish” → “Overview” → “Generate access keys”, and send them with your own email program, using a mail merge function, for example. Please note that the downloaded links must be distributed at random, for example by a trusted person such as your works council or data protection officer. To guarantee anonymity, you as the survey creator must not know who receives which individual access link. As a general rule, only a “closed” survey can effectively prevent an employee from taking part more than once.

Both methods have advantages and disadvantages, as well as different requirements. Here is a short decision aid: a survey that gives you a recommendation once you have answered it. It assumes an anonymous survey in which responses cannot be linked to individual employees by name.

3. Creating and Running the Survey: 4 Options

It is up to you: do you want to, and can you, write to all employees individually at all? Is there a high risk of multiple participation? Should employees be asked to classify themselves, and can they, or would it be better if you did the classification?

3.1 Option 1, Open or Closed: Ask for Departments/Locations in the Questionnaire and Filter by Them Later

Simple, but not error-proof: you start the questionnaire with the question about department/location and later filter or compare the results by that question. This approach works regardless of how you invite your employees.

For example: “Which department do you work in?” The department names follow as answer options. This works with a single-choice or multiple-choice question (the latter if a person belongs to several units), ideally combined with the “mandatory question” setting, so that nobody can continue the questionnaire without answering this opening question.

• Advantages: easy to set up, independent of how you invite, an open survey visibly signals anonymity (nobody knows who took part)
• Disadvantages: the biggest risk is that participants mis-click or deliberately give false answers. Since nobody knows who took part, nobody knows whether there was multiple participation, or whether people from outside the company took part.

3.2 Option 2, Closed Surveys: Store Departments/Locations as Attributes in the Address Book and Filter by Them Later

Requirement for this approach: you invite your employees with the LamaPoll address book as part of a “closed” survey, using individual links. For this you need all your employees’ email addresses and want to, and are able to, import them into the address book and thus into the software.

In the address book, you can assign attributes of any kind to each recipient in a column of its own, including the department or location. The best approach here is to prepare an Excel spreadsheet with the attributes already assigned and import it in CSV format via Import address book.

Once employees have been matched to their department/location in the address book, you can filter by it in the analysis area with the result filters (see section 6, Analysis).

Advantages: Assignment is exact, nobody mis-clicks, nobody can enter false information. Because the keys are individual, nobody can take part more than once.

Disadvantages: The perceived anonymity suffers badly. Problem 1: if you do not ask for the location but present the results by location, employees wonder where that obviously hidden information comes from. Problem 2: if the link is individual, participants wonder why that is.

Get started now. Your employee survey, free of charge!

All you need is an email address and a password

3.3 Option 3, Open Survey: Assign Passwords to Departments/Locations and Filter by Them Later

With this approach, you choose the general survey link and send it yourself using your own email program.

For each department/location, you set a password in the tool at the relevant place, under “Publish” → “Settings” → “Security” → “Password protection”, and communicate it to the respective employees together with the general survey link. Employees can then only take part in the survey with the password assigned to them. In this case, as the survey creator, you need a list of which department/location received which password.

In the analysis, you can filter by passwords with the result filters.

Advantage: with an open survey, anonymity is visible and beyond dispute.

Disadvantage: Multiple participation is not effectively prevented.

3.4 Option 4, Open and Closed Surveys: Attach Departments/Locations to the Survey Link as Attributes and Filter by Them Later

If you want to send the survey link yourself, as in section 3.3, you can combine the link with attributes instead of a password. To do this, you change the survey link using a prescribed structure. You attach the department and/or location to the link, so to speak, in the form of a short code:

An example:

Standard survey link: https://survey.lamapoll.de/feedback-anonym

Survey link with attribute “ABC”: https://survey.lamapoll.de/feedback-anonym/?ABC=1

Here you will find the detailed guide to attributes.

Advantage: Less effort for the participant, who does not have to enter a password or answer a corresponding question. You can also combine individual links with attributes.

Disadvantage: Much like the law of conservation of mass, effort is never lost, only shifted, in this case to the survey creator.

Create an employee survey for free now!

All you need is an email address and a password

4. International Locations in an Employee Survey

Do you have employees at international locations where another language is spoken, and want or need to survey them in their own language? A survey with several language versions suits this, and you can set it up under the “Questionnaire” → “Translate” menu item.

Please see our guide to multilingual surveys.

5. Templates and Examples for Employee Surveys

Feel free to use individual questions from our sample template, created by the German Economic Institute (IW) in Cologne and the RKW Kompetenzzentrum. You can transfer the template to your own account via the “Use” link:

You can adapt the survey design to your needs: the “Design” and “Colours” areas offer plenty of options. For example, use your company logo to create recognition and strengthen your employees’ trust in the survey: upload your logo at the top left of the first questionnaire page. It will automatically appear on every other page.

More templates on our website

6. Analysing the Employee Survey

The LamaPoll analysis area generally offers 2 result downloads:

• the overall report, which gives you a separate analysis of each question
• the raw data, a CSV file that lists every participant ID with all of that participant’s responses. It also contains all free-text answers to “open” questions.

With result filters you can filter by specific questions, for example by individual departments, and display only those records.

You can also spot relevant differences between groups with the compare function, in ONE clear table. You can put the participant groups together however you like. For example, compare female managers at location A with male production staff.

7. Notes and Tips for Your Survey

• A non-anonymous employee survey is also possible with LamaPoll in principle. In that case, however, you as the survey creator are obliged to inform your participants.
• Add a legal notice and privacy policy to your survey, for example by linking them in the footer or header. That way the information is visible on every survey page.
• Use “open questions” (comments or input fields) to ask specifically for suggestions, wishes or reasons from your employees. But explicitly ask them not to leave any personal data in the input or comment field!

Get started with your employee survey now!

All you need for our free trial is an email address and a password

8. More Types and Variants of Employee Surveys

• Employee survey: the standard case
• Employee survey with and without PC access
• Pulse Check
• Physical Risk Assessment (GBU)
• 360-Degree Feedback