This post originally appeared on the BizRun Blog. 

One of the great things about G Suite is that it provides so many tools for running your business. And one of the most underutilized of those tools is Google Forms. We use Forms in our own HR to create surveys that help us assess and communicate more effectively with our people.

Here’s an example of what we mean: We built a survey to assess employee engagement. Now we’re sharing it with you in the form of a template. It’s free to use and fully customizable. Awesome, right?

Why survey employee engagement?

Below are some reasons to survey the level of engagement in your organization.

1. You want to see where the company stands. Are people pumped about giving their best? Are the great ideas flowing freely? Are folks empowered to make real contributions?
2. You’re about to launch a campaign to boost engagement. If you plan to implement new initiatives to improve employee engagement, first you’ll want to assess your baseline, so you have something to compare results with.
3. Measure the success of your last engagement campaign. If your company just completed an engagement-boosting campaign, find out how well it worked.
4. You need a gut check with a particular department. Maybe Customer Support hasn’t been as perky lately, or perhaps things seem tense in Marketing. You can send separate surveys to the departments within your company, and see if there are appreciable differences.
5. It’s been a while since you’ve checked in with your people. Because engagement is one of the best ways to increase productivity, you’ll want to check in periodically and see how things are going.

Here’s how to do it

1. Get a copy of our Engagement Survey Template, built with Google Forms

Follow this link to find the Engagement Survey Template.

2. Rename it

Drive will save a copy of the survey to your “My Drive.” It will be called “Copy of Employee Engagement Survey Template.” Rename it to something like “Innotech Employee Engagement Survey.” Move it to the appropriate location in your company’s Google Drive, so that it has the appropriate level of permissions. We keep our company surveys in a folder only HR can access.

3. Decide on your survey strategy

One survey for the whole company? Or do you want to survey different departments separately? The results will be anonymous, so if you want to group the results, you’ll need to survey each of those groups separately. If one survey will suffice, proceed to step four. If you want to survey by department, make a copy for each and name it accordingly. For example, “Engagement Survey: Customer Service” and “Engagement Survey: Marketing.”

4. Customize the look (optional)

Open your survey from Drive by double-clicking on it. Google Forms gives you several ways to customize the look of the survey.

Pick a color: You can simply choose a color from the palette.

Use a stock image: Google provides several stock images you can use for the header if you like. After clicking the palette, as in the step above, select the bottom right circle with the image icon inside it. In the next window that opens, choose a stock image.

Use company branding: To use your own image, choose “Upload photos” at bottom right in the image window, and upload the image you want to use. You’ll be given an opportunity to crop it to fit.

5. Alter the questions

At a minimum, you’ll need to edit the survey to provide the survey due date in Section One and the Strategic Goals in Section Two. Simply click on the question you want to edit and type in your changes. You can make any changes you like, such as altering the rating scale, adding new questions, removing questions that don’t apply, or rewording questions to better fit your organization. You can even add videos.

6. Preview your survey

Click the Preview icon at the top of the survey. You can walk through the entire survey as if you were a respondent. If you find a mistake, click the pencil icon and edit. Repeat as necessary.

7. Turn on email notifications (optional)

If you’d like to receive an email any time someone responds, go to Responses, click the settings icon, and select “Get email notifications for new responses.”

8. Distribute your survey

When you’re ready to send out your survey, click the big “Send” button at the top of the page. The Send form has several fields you’ll need to fill out.

Automatically collect respondent’s username: We recommend you do not check this option. For your people to feel free to speak openly, the survey needs to remain anonymous.

Send via: You can choose whether to distribute via an email composed in this window, get a link to distribute elsewhere, or get HTML to embed wherever you like. You can also share the survey via Google+, Facebook, or Twitter.

If you’re sending out the message via email, you’ll need to enter a recipient, subject, and your message. It’s convenient to use an email alias if you have one set up, such as employees@innotech.com or marketingdepartment@innotech.com. In your message be sure to let people know when you expect the survey to completed.

Close the survey

Give people at least a couple of days to complete the survey. You may want to send a reminder email before closing it. Once you’ve received all the responses you want, you should close the survey. To do this, go to the Responses tab and toggle the Accepting responses button.

Then it’ll look like this:

View the engagement survey results

Now the fun part! You’re ready to look at the responses to your Employee Engagement Survey. On the Responses tab, you have two ways to view the results: as a summary or individual responses. We recommend you start in the Summary view. The Individual view is a great way to dig down into results when you need to understand something more deeply.

In the Summary view, Google provides charts for each question, showing both the counts for each value as well as percentages.

Pretty slick, right?

Can I export these survey results?

Naturally, Google thought of that too. You have a few options for exporting the survey results.

1. The survey results are already saved to a Google Sheets spreadsheet you can view simply by clicking the Sheets icon on the Responses tab.
2. Or you can download a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file. From the Responses tab, click the settings icon and select “Download responses (.csv)”.
3. You can also print the responses.

Let us know how it goes

We’d love to hear from you. How did your Engagement Survey campaign go? What did you learn about your company? What next steps are you taking? Email us at support@bizrun.com and share your thoughts.