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This is the eighth blog in our Bite-Sized But Impactful Data series. We collect a lot of powerful data at YMCA WorkWell and we believe that data is only meaningful if it's shared. While our Workplace Well-Being Reports dive deep into our data, this blog series shares bite-sized and data-driven stories throughout the year. We want these stories to be short, quick reads that pique your interest more than answer all of your questions, so if you would ever like to go deeper and learn more about what we are seeing in our data, please contact us. We're always open to talk data with anyone and everyone.
How long should you keep your employee engagement survey open?
Most organizations treat that as a purely operational question. It's logistics-first.
How does your organization approach it? Maybe you lean towards a quick open-and-close pulse to avoid bogging down your communications. Maybe you opt for a longer survey window to hit ambitious response targets or schedule your survey window around busy seasons and reporting deadlines.
But have you ever stopped to consider the implications of that decision?
It might matter more than you think.
Our data suggests that the length of your survey window is not just a logistical decision - it's a data quality decision. It affects who responds - and what kind of results you get.
That has real implications for the integrity of your employee experience data.
So, let's talk data.
The Data Backing it Up
We set out to answer a simple question:
Does who responds - and how they feel - change over the course of a survey campaign?
We knew that if were going to explore that question, we had to do it right - so we examined over 27,000 responses across more than 100 unique survey campaigns conducted through our Employee Insights Survey.
To keep things consistent across campaigns, we focused only on surveys that were open for a standard three-week window and categorized all responses into
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Week 1 responses
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Week 2 responses
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Week 3 responses
If survey length truly didn't matter, we'd expect to see a fairly consistent pattern of demographic responses across those three weeks. In other words, the people responding to your employee experience survey in Week 1 should look a lot like the people responding in Week 3.
What did we find instead? We found clear evidence that "how long should we leave our survey open?" is a more critical question than you might think.
You Hear From Different People Over Time
Our data demonstrates that who responds to your survey can meaningfully change over the course of the survey window.
Across the thousands of responses:
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45% came in Week 1
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30% came in Week 2
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25% came in Week 3.
But those groups were not the same. As the survey remained open, the composition of respondents shifted significantly.
We saw double-digit percentage shifts. The longer a survey was live, the more we heard from:
- Front-Line Employees: They made up 72% of responses in Week 1, 80% by Week 2, and 84% of responses by Week 3. A 12-point shift - suggesting that leaders are more likely to respond in the first week of a survey window.
- Part-Time Employees: They made up 31% of responses in Week 1, 36% by Week 2, and 43% by Week 3 - a 12-point shift.
- Racially Diverse Employees: They made up 33% of responses in Week 1, 37% by Week 2, and 42% by Week 3
Those are real, structural shifts in composition.
Importantly, leaders often set goals to increase the response rates of all three of these groups - and this data would suggest that one of the simplest strategies to achieve that may be the simply leave the survey open longer.
The story here is simple but important: Who you hear from in Week 1 of a survey campaign is not the same group that you hear from in Week 3.
When representation is so important - that matters.
It's Not Just Demographics - It's Experience, Too
These groups don't just look different - they experience their work differently, too.
For example, respondents' average Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) increased by 8 points from Week 1 to Week 3 - driven by both a decrease in Detractors and an increase in Promoters over the course of a three-week survey window.
If you are one of the many organizations with defined eNPS targets in your organizational OKRs, you know how important those 8 points can be.
We also saw:
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A decline in Employee Burnout from one in four employees reporting burnout "Often" or "Extremely Often" in Week 1 to one in five by Week 3.
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At least a 2-point improvement in 12 of the 20 metrics on our standard Insights Survey - including trust, recognition, appreciation, well-being, and job satisfaction.
The data showed that employees responding in Week 3 reported a healthier employee experience than employees responding in Week 1.
These are not dramatic, overnight transformations in organizational health - but when you're looking across tens of thousands of responses, they are certainly meaningful and they can have a real effect on the scores that end up in your report.
This is important because the workforce didn't change in three weeks, but the respondent mix certainly did - and so does the experience profile of those respondents.
That means that the length of your survey window can have a meaningful impact on key metrics like eNPS, burnout, and employee sentiment - not because the organization became healthier, but because a different segment of employees responded.
What This Means For Leaders
Obviously, the next big question is "What does this mean for me?"
The answer, as it often is - is "it depends". Especially on the size of your organization.
If you lead a smaller, centralized organization:
In smaller organizations, these effects are typically more modest.
When employees work closely together or under a small leadership group, it’s easier to drive balanced participation quickly because a strong communication plan can often mitigate response bias within a shorter window. You have a logistical advantage simply because it's easier to encourage responses when you regularly see the people you're collecting feedback from.
A strong plan and rollout is necessary with any employee survey - but as long as those things are in place, you don't need to worry too much about the length of your survey window distorting your results.
If you lead a larger, complex, or multi-location organization:
In larger organizations, these shifts can change the story your data tells.
Our data suggests that if you close your survey too soon, you may underrepresent front-line voices, part-time voices, and racially diverse voices. You may also systematically understate engagement and employee experience.
In other words, survey length becomes not just a logistical decision — but a data quality decision - and one most organizations don't realize they're making.
This is why we recommend at least a three-week survey window for most large and complex organizations.
Anything shorter increases the risk that your data isn't representative of your employee base or your employee experience - and that significantly undercuts the value of the employee survey you're investing so much into.
The Quick Takeaway
The goal of any employee survey should be accuracy. An accurate representation of your workforce and an accurate reflection of their experiences.
The length of a survey window might feel like a simple logistical decision.
It isn't.
If you care about accuracy and making sound leadership decisions - the length of your survey window deserves more strategic attention than it usually gets.
Because how long you listen changes what you hear and who you hear from.
And that shapes what you believe about your organization.
Want to learn more about our Insights Reports and how we can help you capture the most accurate people data?
Check out our Insights Page and always feel free to reach me at dave.whiteside@ytr.ymca.ca if you'd like to learn more. We're always happy to help you turn Insights into Action.
