As we continue through the COVID-19 crisis, team alignment might not look like a top priority. Here’s our theory, though: it will be critical for rebuilding healthy business.

In theory, team alignment is straightforward and goes something like this: the CEO or another C-suite member lays out goals and a vision for reaching them, the goals are written down, managers say “Sure!” and help workers understand what they’re working toward. Alignment!

In reality, team alignment goes much deeper than verbal agreement or the absence of dissent—and there’s a lot at stake for both an organization’s health and a CEO’s tenure when members of one department or across departments are out of alignment.

Employee engagement surveys are essential tools that allow employers to take the pulse of their workforce. Now, imagine you had a health tracker that checks your heartbeat, and it was strapped to your kneecap. Turns out the kneecap is a terrible place to check your pulse, as there’s not a major vein or artery passing over the knee.

When you’re collecting survey data, time is of the essence. Participants can give you high-quality data for only about five minutes. After that, they tend to lose focus and interest—and the data quality plummets. To maximize research effectiveness, you need to collect the most data possible from each participant in the shortest amount of time. Paring down a lengthy list of questions can be challenging, but the effort pays off in a better-quality data set.

But when you’re limited to explicit-only questions and responses, you’re unlikely to gather sufficient data in five minutes. It might appear to happen sometimes, but in such cases your participants are probably rushing through the survey.

Traditionally, the number of participants is the primary measurement of significance when you’re conducting a research study. But while volume of participation is key, it misses another dimension—the quality of that participation. Was the respondent overwhelmed by your questions, uncertain about their answers, or worse—bored and distracted?

The offer of an incentive, such as a gift card, for completing the survey is a common method for boosting participation numbers—but it adds another layer of confusion around the resulting data. Were responders rushing through the questions for the sole purpose of gaining a prize at the end? Are their answers reliable?

While there’s no way to completely resolve those questions, pursuing real digital engagement can help to capture more robust behavior data in a survey, offering a new level of insights for your research project. Here are three steps you can take toward better digital engagement with your surveys.

We live in the age of big data. It’s a fast-moving, ever-growing ocean of information that can easily overwhelm those who are leading research projects. How do you gain access to the highest quality of data? And once you have it, what will you do with it?

Researchers are well aware that data itself carries no value. Insights spring from the questions you bring to the table. For a survey designer, defining the optimal questions to ask has become the first step toward innovative research.

And today, many researchers realize that participants’ social and cognitive biases greatly impact results—because explicit responses do not represent the whole picture.

Human beings are complicated creatures. You know that, but does your workplace design survey know it?

As a company focused on creating truly useful surveys, Survature obviously thinks surveys are a critical tool for workplace design professionals. We also know typical surveys can fall short because they don’t take human psychology into account. They can’t help you parse out the differences between what workers say they need, for instance, and what they’re really thinking. The resulting data can leave you directionless or, worse, point you in the wrong direction.

Here are three common reasons why workers’ explicit answers and implicit needs differ—and why you may not get what you need for a successful, data-driven design.

How do people really work? When you’re designing an office environment, understanding this can seem like a holy grail of insights—powerful and elusive. (Learn five reasons so many workplace design surveys don’t help you reach that understanding.)

At Survature, we’ve researched this question of how people work, and we’ve come to think of it not as a holy grail, but as a structured project.

By designing the right workplace survey questions, you can build an understanding, layer by layer, of how your client’s employees work.

Architects, interior designers, how often do you survey your client’s workforce to get the data you need—and then you end up relying on prior experience or resorting to educated guesses to create the best office environment for them?

Haven’t taken our survey yet? You can still take it here! Read on for part two of a deeper dive into the results and make sure to check out the overview here and part one here.

In the first two articles, we discussed that the dominance of digital screens in our work and private lives is already “here and now” as opposed to being for the “future workplace”. We also explained that most screen-enhanced workspaces can be considered unique because the function of those spaces is truly in the eyes of the beholder – or in this case – worker.

In this article, we want to share the strategy we take when designing workplace design surveys. Specifically, why we ask the questions that we do and the insights we’re able to capture by taking an indirect questioning approach.

Together with our research partner Work Design Magazine, we launched a survey to learn more about what screens tell us about how people really work. Between May 14^th – 31^st of this year, 368 of you participated in our research. Here is part one of the results!