You want a simple but effective employee survey tool for Slack. Welcome to Conrad. We did not find the right tool, so we built it ourselves.
Table of Contents
- Track Employee Feedback in Slack
- Use Employee Surveys to Boost Engagement
- Increase Your Team’s Morale and Productivity
- Understand Trends and Find Actionable Insights
- Build a Great, Remote Culture with Data
Want to improve your distributed team’s productivity? Join the waitlist for Conrad today. Teams of 1-29 members can use it for free forever.
Slack is a great communication and collaboration tool. One of its best attributes is that it has tons of apps that improve or extend its functionality. In the world of remote work, it is important to use an employee survey tool to improve your team’s engagement, morale, and productivity.
But which tool do you use and how do you find the right solution? One that has all of the features you need, at an affordable price, without being difficult to use.
Well, that’s where Conrad comes in. We could not find the right tool, so we built it ourselves. Let’s take a look at how Conrad works, including how your employees can respond to surveys directly in Slack which boosts your response rates.
Track Employee Feedback in Slack
Your team uses Slack every day to communicate in private conversations, small groups, and channels. It’s an effective tool to make sure the right people are collaborating and have visibility into work projects.
But Slack is really a platform that can be extended by useful apps. Conrad is an employee survey tool built right into Slack. Our Slackbot can automatically send private surveys to your team members, meaning they fill out surveys in a few minutes in an interface they are already familiar with. Yes, that means it works on all devices, including smartphones too.
We make it easy to track employee feedback from within Slack. There are two main benefits of using this approach. First, your team does not have to learn how to use a new piece of software so your response rates are very high. And second, your results are automatically calculated for you on the backend.
Let’s say you want to ask a question like “How satisfied are you at work?” or “Do you feel supported by your manager and colleagues?”. You want responses to be tracked on a 5-point scale with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest. If you send this out in a Conrad survey, we calculate the results for you instantly -- making comparing this week to last week or last month a breeze.
You can get started in minutes, instead of trying to figure out which survey tool to use, then figuring out how to send the survey to your staff, then repeatedly bugging them to actually fill out the survey, then tabulating the results. That sounds tedious. And we don’t like tedious.
Use Employee Surveys to Boost Engagement
Companies usually fall into a few different buckets when it comes to employee feedback. Most companies do not collect employee feedback, at all. Some companies collect it ad hoc in conversations. Other companies send out random questionnaires but the questions change over time, so it’s hard to draw meaningful comparisons.
Our preferred method is to send the same, structured employee survey every week. This allows managers to spot trends and get a good sense if a person or team is facing a challenge.
Why does this matter? Because employees feel heard and it makes them actively want to participate in the company culture.
The way to boost employee engagement is not to throw random parties or host “virtual happy hours”. The best way to boost employee engagement is to ask them what is working, what is not working, and incorporate their feedback.
In the same way you dedicate time and money to better understanding your customers, you should invest in better understanding your employees.
Increase Your Team’s Morale and Productivity
Every team wants to increase productivity, but how — exactly — would you do that? Where do you start? And how do I know that things are trending in the right direction?
First, you need to set a baseline. This is done by surveying your team today to understand what is working and what is not working. (This is a continuation of the point above.)
Once you have your baseline, then you need to decide on a few key areas to improve while you continue to track the data by surveying your teams.
For example, if you wanted to increase the number of users who finish onboarding, you would probably start by (a) looking at your onboarding flow today and (b) thinking of a way of reducing friction.
The same is true with employees. Are people in too many meetings? Is your engineering team faced with bottlenecks? Do you have too many managers, or too few? Are project deadlines unrealistic? Could your compensation plans be simplified?
There is no one magic solution here. Each company is different. But there is a playbook that you can follow to continually improve morale and productivity. They go hand in hand.
Understand Trends and Find Actionable Insights
One key benefit of using an employee engagement platform is the data collection. Conrad automatically collects all of your responses and organizes your data.
In a few minutes, our analytics dashboard can show you the raw data and trends. Importantly, we can also highlight areas of relevance to you today. If a team is usually performing well but is running into obstacles, we can surface that to you. If an employee usually responds quickly to surveys and gives high scores, but recently has stopped responding, we can highlight that as well.
Disengagement is bad because it permeates through the org. It is also problematic if multiple people across the company surface the same issue over and over.
Instead of thinking about each of these parts individually, it could be time to ask employees for their feedback and use data to make better decisions across the board.
We have seen great results from teams that implement small changes quickly and provide the opportunities for employees to be heard.
Build a Great, Remote Culture with Data
Business leaders want great cultures. Business leaders want employee engagement. Business leaders want high productivity and morale. These are good things. So what is the problem?
Most business leaders have no idea how to create a great culture. We have seen it time and time again. To most people, culture is this “subjective” or “ephemerial” word. But that is not how it works in real life. Culture is something that you can measure and improve – in the same way you track user engagement.
Employees want to be respected and empowered. Employees want to be well paid and have meaningful work. How do you know if your company is doing that? Well, the best way is to ask them!
Ask employees what is going well and what is not going well. Ask them what they accomplished this week. Ask them what made them feel frustrated. Ask them which team members they enjoy working with. Ask them their preferences on how to be managed and communicated with.
In the same way that you build great products by talking to users and following the data, you build great teams by talking to employees and following the data.
Conrad helps you build a great, remote culture with data. Every week, you are collecting structured data on what is working and what is not working. Gathering this data allows you to make a series of small but meaningful changes to your company to improve team alignment. At the end of the day, both business leaders and employees win when the whole team is well motivated and engaged.
We highly recommend asking questions around employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), employee engagement, and employee morale on a repeated basis so you can track the trends over time. Conrad makes this data collection a breeze.
Employees fill out a quick survey in Slack. Leaders get access to recommendations and data to improve operations. It’s a win-win.