Employee engagement surveys people actually answer
An engagement score tells you the temperature. It never tells you what to fix. Let people say it in their own words, from their phone, in under five minutes.
Unlimited surveys and questions, free. No credit card.
The problem with a 1–5 engagement survey
Every employee engagement platform on the market produces the same artefact: a number that went up or down, and a free-text box that most people leave blank. The number is genuinely useful for tracking. It is useless for deciding what to do on Monday.
The free-text box is where the answer was supposed to live, and it is where engagement surveys quietly fail. People type twelve to twenty words into a box. They say eighty to a hundred and fifty when they talk. The difference is not padding — it is the reason, the example, and the thing they nearly did not mention.
Voice answers, on a phone, in the time people actually have
Candid Reply works as an employee feedback tool the way people already communicate: they read your question, tap once, and answer out loud. No app to install, no meeting, no camera. A six-question survey takes about four and a half minutes, and the screen tells them so before they start.
Every answer is saved the moment it is given. Someone who answers four questions on the bus and never comes back has still told you four things — a partial engagement survey is a partial engagement survey, not a blank row.
Anonymous when it needs to be
Send a generic link and nobody is identified unless they choose to say who they are at the end. Send personal links and you know exactly who replied, which is what you want for manager one-to-ones and stay conversations.
For sensitive topics, anonymous voice is a genuinely different instrument. People will say things out loud, unattributed, that they will not type into a box with their name on the account.
Run it as a pulse, not an annual event
The reason annual engagement surveys go stale is that they cost everyone a morning. A four-minute voice pulse can run monthly without anyone resenting it, and the answers stay comparable because you keep asking the same questions.
Export every answer as CSV, or connect the API and have your own tooling pull the results the moment they land.
Employee engagement questions worth asking
Six open questions is roughly four and a half minutes of someone’s time. Copy these straight in and edit them to sound like you.
- What is the best part of working here right now?
- What is the most frustrating part of your week?
- Is there anything you have wanted to say but have not had the chance to?
- What would make the biggest difference to your day-to-day?
- How well do you feel your manager understands what you do?
- What almost made you look elsewhere this year?
Common questions
- Can employee engagement surveys be anonymous?
- Yes. A generic link collects nothing identifying unless the person volunteers their name and email at the end. Personal links do the opposite — they greet the person by name and attach the response to them — so choose the link type to match the question you are asking.
- How long should an employee engagement survey be?
- Six questions is about four and a half minutes of someone’s time, and that is roughly where completion stays high. Candid Reply shows the respondent the time remaining and counts it down as they go, so the length is never a surprise.
- Do employees need an account or an app?
- No. The link opens in whatever browser they already have, records with one tap, and saves each answer as it goes.
Related solutions
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Unlimited surveys and questions, no credit card. Write six questions and send the link.
Unlimited surveys and questions, free. No credit card.