Survey Lead Responsibilities

Your responsibilities as a Survey Lead:

As a Survey Lead, you play a key role in ensuring your survey is well‑designed, clearly communicated and used responsibly to support meaningful change. This involves::

  • Setting the purpose and scope. You decide what you need to learn and what decisions the survey should inform.
  • Designing the questions and planning communications, explaining why the survey is happening, what confidentiality looks like, and what happens upon completion of the survey.
  • Analysing the results by looking for patterns, differences across groups, and themes in comments.
  • Keeping everyone in the loop with “You said, we did” campaigns. This step is where trust is won or lost as employees and managers struggle with silence.

Best practice survey design:

A strong employee survey is clear, focused, and designed for action. It’s recommended to start with a small set of themes you’re prepared to address.

  • Avoid vague terms employees may interpret differently. For example, if you ask about communication, specify whether you’re referring to leadership updates, manager one-to-ones, or cross-team coordination.
  • Balance Likert (e.g., a scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree) and multi-choice questions with comment questions to give you both clarity on your themes and context on how to interpret your results.

Turn listening into action:

Once the survey closes, use what you’ve heard to make informed, visible improvements that employees can recognise and trust.

  • Pick priorities that employees recognise, use the data, and be honest about what you can and cannot change.
  • Assign clear action owners with timelines.
  • Support managers with templates, talking points, and examples of good practice.
  • Tell employees what you heard, what you are doing and when you will check progress.

How to run a survey through UoR View?

  1. First, reach out to HR via uor.view@reading.ac.uk with some initial details on the survey you wish to run.
  2. You will then be asked to fill out a survey request checklist containing further information on the survey and some of the messaging that will be sent to employees around the survey.
  3. After an initial call with HR, they will build the survey and share this with you to test. After you have tested the survey, advise HR of any changes needed.
  4. After the survey has been built, it can go-live and all relevant employees will be invited to complete the survey*. They will also receive regular reminders through the system
  5. While the survey is live, you will have access to a response rate dashboard used to track the number of responses across departments. It can be helpful to follow up directly with the departments with lower response rates and explain the benefits of taking part in the survey.
  6. Once the survey has closed, you will be given access to the results dashboard. It may be helpful to have a call with HR to run through how to navigate this and make the best use of it.
  7. You will then analyse the results and formulate actions based on these, keeping employees informed.
  8. Review the outcomes and, if applicable, plan your next listening cycle.

*If you plan to survey both staff and students, as HR does not hold student records, an open link will be made available for you to share with respondents. In this case, no central reminder emails will be sent out through UoR View.

 

Contact us

Email: uor.view@reading.ac.uk