Engagement Surveys help you measure employee sentiment across your organisation. Create a survey, choose who should receive it, and send it once or on a recurring schedule. Use the results to identify strengths, understand areas for improvement, and follow engagement over time.
Responses are anonymous, and results are only shown once enough employees have responded.
Who can manage Engagement Surveys?
Engagement Surveys must be enabled for your company.
Superadmins and managers added as Engagement collaborators can create and manage surveys. Superadmins can manage this access from Engagement → Collaborators.
Other managers can access Insights, but their detailed results and filters are limited to their reporting hierarchy.
Create a survey
Open Engagement → Surveys in the Admin portal.
Select New survey.
Enter a name and choose an emoji and colour.
Choose a survey size: 5, 10, 15, or 20 questions.
Select the categories you want to include.
Select Create survey.
Aboard generates an initial set of agreement-scale questions from the selected categories. You can review and customise these before sending.
Edit the survey details
Open the survey’s actions menu and select Edit details to update its name, description, appearance, or Duration (days).
The duration determines how long each survey round stays open for responses.
Review and customise the questions
Open the survey’s Questions tab to review its content.
You can:
Select Add questions to choose additional questions.
Drag questions into your preferred order within their question type.
Select Replace… on an agreement-scale question to choose another question.
Select Shuffle to let Aboard suggest a replacement.
Select Remove to remove a question.
Free-text questions cannot be replaced using Replace… or Shuffle, but they can be added or removed.
Question types
Agreement scale
Employees choose from four answers:
Strongly disagree
Disagree
Agree
Strongly agree
These questions are required and contribute to engagement scores.
Free text
Employees can provide written feedback. These questions are optional and do not contribute to engagement scores.
Choose the participants
Open the survey’s Participants tab.
Use the people filters to define your audience.
Review the list of matching employees.
Select Add participant to include an employee manually, if needed.
Only active employee profiles are included. Each time a new round is sent, Aboard resolves the audience using the current filters and manually added participants.
Important: Questions and recipients are locked in for a round when it is sent. Later changes to the survey do not change a round that has already gone out.
Send or schedule a survey
Send immediately
Open the survey’s actions menu, select Send now, and confirm.
Employees receive an email invitation with a link to answer the survey in Aboard. The survey also appears under Forms → To do in their Employee portal.
Schedule a survey
Select Schedule survey.
Choose the send date.
Under Recurring schedule, choose None for a one-time send or select a recurring frequency.
For recurring surveys, choose when the schedule should end:
Never
On date
After number of rounds
Choose whether to enable Randomize questions each round.
Confirm the schedule.
Available frequencies are weekly, every two weeks, monthly, every two months, quarterly, every six months, and yearly.
When question randomisation is enabled, Aboard generates a fresh selection of agreement-scale questions for the next round using the survey’s selected categories and size. Added free-text questions remain in place.
Pause a schedule
You can pause scheduled sends for a defined period or indefinitely. Leave Paused until empty to pause until further notice.
No scheduled rounds go out during the pause.
Completing a survey
Employees open the survey from their invitation or the Employee portal’s Forms area.
To complete it, they answer all required agreement-scale questions, optionally answer the free-text questions, and select Submit.
After submission, they see a confirmation message and cannot submit another response to the same round. Closed rounds no longer accept responses.
Automatic reminders
Aboard reminds active participants who have not yet submitted:
Around halfway through rounds lasting at least seven days.
The day before closing for rounds lasting at least three days.
Shorter rounds do not receive these automatic reminders.
Review the results
Open a sent round from the Engagement sidebar or the survey’s previous-rounds menu.
The round overview shows:
Participation rate
Number of submitted responses
Overall score
Status
Sent date and close date
Once the response threshold is reached, you can also review the average and answer distribution for each agreement-scale question. The round’s overall score uses a 0–100 scale.
Free-text answers only become visible after the round closes, and only if the response threshold has been reached.
Follow engagement over time
Open Engagement → Insights for overall and category scores, monthly trends, and comparisons.
Insights use a 0–10 scale. Available filters include survey, department, workplace, manager, gender, and tenure, depending on your access and the available data. Small groups are hidden to protect anonymity.
Anonymity and privacy
Engagement Survey responses are anonymous.
Results are normally hidden until at least five employees have responded to a round.
Filtered groups must also meet a minimum response threshold.
Written answers are stored separately from employee identities and rating submissions.
When writing free-text feedback, avoid including personal details if you do not want the content itself to identify you.
Frequently asked questions
Why can’t I see any results?
The round or selected group may not have enough responses yet. Written answers also remain hidden until the round closes.
Why won’t my survey send?
Check that the survey has recipients and that every question has wording available in the survey language. Aboard cannot send a round if either requirement is missing.
Can I delete a survey after sending it?
No. Surveys can only be deleted before any rounds have been sent.