As the field of people analytics expands to incorporate data gathered through relational analytics, organizational network analysis, and other streams, the employee survey remains a critical tool to support a comprehensive people analytics practice. Passive monitoring of email traffic, social media connections, proximity data, and other sources of data can indicate where there are strong and weak connections within organizations, but like demographic data or organizational hierarchy, these are descriptive statistics that do not measure the employee experience or how individuals perceive their workplace.

Responses to employee survey questions provide qualitative data representing the opinions and perceptions of employees throughout the organization. Without this data, HR can at best describe the workforce; it cannot get at how employees feel about the company or their work, or the why of employee sentiment regarding the company, leadership, management, or culture. Most importantly, it is difficult to infer what leaders can do to improve the business when they are limited to quantitative descriptive statistics. Strategic surveys that include questions related to culture, engagement, and the employee experience allow organizations to conduct crucial conversations at scale.

This guide will outline how to use employee survey questions to support a people analytics practice.