Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Straight-forward answers to common questions on:

The Survey

Privacy & Anonymity

Next Steps

THE SURVEY

Q: What is the purpose of the survey?

The purpose of the survey is to give employees an opportunity to provide feedback about their employee experience - both the strengths and the areas for improvement.

Q: What does the survey measure?

The survey is a mix of quantitative questions (e.g, on a scale from 1-100...) and qualitative questions (e.g., in your own words, tell us about...) and collects feedback on employee engagement, culture, well-being, performance - as well as an opportunity for employees to identify their top needs in their role. 

Q: How long is the survey?

Our standard Insights survey typically takes less than 5 minutes to complete. While your survey might include some custom questions, the survey itself is almost always less than 30 questions and is designed to be quick and easy.

Q: What device can I use?

Our survey has been designed to be accessible on all devices - desktop, tablet, and mobile - with no one device being better than the others.

Q: Can I stop the survey and come back to it later?

Yes! As long as you come back within the survey window, your browser will bring you back to where you were the last time you responded. It's worth noting that in our reporting process, we will include any responses that have completed 50% or more of the survey. Any responses that have completed less than 50% of the survey will be removed before the report is created.

Q: Is the survey mandatory?

The survey is not mandatory, but it is a great opportunity to provide anonymous and meaningful feedback about your employee experience. While you don't have to respond, efforts to improve organizations are most effective when the strategies come from the people actually experiencing the work.

Q: Are the questions mandatory?

We believe that choice is important - no question on our Insight Survey is mandatory and you are able to skip any question any time. If you don't want to provide an answer, you don't have to, and we will mark that question as unanswered.

Q: What type of demographics are collected?

Our Employee Insights Survey typically collects information on team, tenure, and position by default. Your organization can also add other questions like location, status, and demographic self-identification questions. We will provide more information in the Privacy & Anonymity section, but we will only ever report on groups with five or more responses and we will not combine groups in our reporting across these demographic areas.

Q: Can I respond more than once?

The survey is only meant to be responded to once. If there is an issue and an employee would like to change or remove their answers, they will need to contact us at workwell@ytr.ymca.ca.

PRIVACY & ANONYMITY

Q: Is the survey anonymous?

Yes, the survey is anonymous. Our team at WorkWell ensures this in a number of ways:

• We do not collect names, email, or directly identifying information at any point in the survey. 
• The raw data (i.e., a data export where individual rows of data can be identified) from your survey will never be shared with your organization. Ever. We will only provide your organization with an aggregated report.
• We will never report on groups with less than five survey responses. Any team with less than five survey responses will be included in the organizational total, but we will never provide identifiable data about that team.
• We do not combine groups in our reporting. For example, we might report on all managers at your organization and all employees on the Human Resources team, but we will not report on HR managers.

Your organization may choose to purchase team-level reports that provide insight into a specific department or team. In order to receive a team-level report, our minimum reporting threshold is double to ten responses to enhance and maintain employee anonymity.

We know that this entire process breaks down without anonymity. That's why our team takes this part very seriously.

Q: Will my organization/leader see my responses?

They will not receive any reporting that highlights your responses directly. Our team only reports on data at the group-level. We think it helps to understand your organization will and will not get.

Your organization will receive:

• A report that shows the average score for each questions across groups in your organization. For example, if you are an HR manager who has been at your organization for less than 1 year, your data will be included in the average scores of all HR employees (e.g., the HR team has an average Engagement score of 78), all managers (e.g., all managers have an average Trust score of 74), and all employees with less than 1 year of tenure (e.g., all employees with less than 1 year of tenure have an average Well-Being score of 82).
• All employee comments. These comments will be associated with the team they came from, but no other information. For example, your comment will say that it came from the HR team, but will not say that it came from a manager or that it came from an employee with less than 1 year of tenure. Comments will be removed for teams with less than five responses.

Your organization will not receive:

• Anything tied clearly to one specific individual. No reporting anywhere will ever say "This employee had a score of X and made this comment".
• Data across multiple groups. In other words, we will never report on "HR managers who have been at your organization for less than 1 year".
• Any data from teams with less than 5 responses.

Q: I'm part of a small team/group, how can my anonymity be protected?

We will never report on teams with less than 5 responses. If your team has less than five employees, we will have worked with your organization beforehand to try and combine your team with another similar team so the group is large enough to report on. However, to protect anonymity further, this threshold is based on the number of responses, not the number of members in your team. So even if you work in an HR team of eight people, but only four people respond to the survey, your organization will not receive HR-level results.

This process is exactly the same for all groups - including position, tenure, and demographics. If a group receives less than five responses, their responses will be included in the organizational total and not reported on at the group level, or combined with similar groups to meet that five responses threshold.

And perhaps most importantly, we do not combine group trends. For example, assuming there are five or more responses, we might report on scores of all managers in the organization and all employees in the Human Resources team. However, we do not report specifically on managers on the Human Resources team. Protecting this anonymity is integral to this process and we have made your organization aware of these policies and why they are important.

Q: How do you protect our data?

All of our data practices meet federal Tri-Council Policy standards - a joint policy of Canada’s three federal research agencies for the ethical conduct of collecting data about people. If those standards ever change, our practices do too. All of our data is stored in Canada with end-to-end encryption and our survey tool Alchemer is GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 compliant, which are fancy words for "very secure".

Q: Who is handling our data?

We think it helps to put a face and a name to this process. This is our team of PhDs that will be carefully handling your data and creating your reports. They are the only people who ever have access to your raw data.

NEXT STEPS

Q: What happens after the survey closes?

After the survey closes, our team of PhDs will immediately put on our favourite music, roll up our sleeves, and get down to work creating your organization's report. We will export your feedback, aggregate it into group-level trends, and get the report ready for you.

Q: When does our organization receive our report?

Our team guarantees that your organization will have your report in 10 business days from the time that the survey closes.

Q: What happens after we have our report?

Once the report is complete and in the hands of your leaders, our team at WorkWell will walk your leadership team through the results, help identify the clearest opportunity areas, and help facilitate action planning based on the results.

Q: Will we do this again?

Our recommendation is that organizations collect employee experience data at least once a year. We believe it is important to continue to measure how your organization's employee experience is evolving over time and the voice of your employees never lessens in importance.