People & HR

How to run an employee engagement survey as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

People & HRFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're chief of staff at a 150-person company and someone just told you it's time for the annual engagement survey. That means: drafting questions, picking a tool, getting the CEO to approve it, figuring out how to distribute it across a workforce that's split between Slack and email, chasing response rates, downloading a CSV, cleaning it, building a deck for the leadership team, and then following up on the three action items everyone agreed to and no one tracked. You've done this in SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Culture Amp before. The survey part isn't the problem. Stitching the results into something leadership can actually use — and then not losing the follow-through — that's where it falls apart.

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People & HRFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A Slack- and email-distributed engagement survey with automated response-rate tracking, so you stop manually nudging managers to remind their teams

A living results dashboard that pulls response data into a clean view for leadership, broken down by department, tenure band, or any cut that matters — no CSV wrangling required

An action-item tracker tied to the survey findings, so when the leadership team agrees 'we need to fix async communication,' that commitment doesn't disappear into a Notion page nobody opens again

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Task Manager Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Slack data on a schedule (channels and users) to track who's been reached and monitor response patterns by team. Gmail is synced on a schedule for email-distributed survey sends and follow-up reminders. Notion is synced on a schedule to pull in any existing survey documentation or prior results. Survey distribution to tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform can be automated through Starch's browser automation — no API needed for those platforms. For HR headcount context, connect Paylocity or ADP; Starch syncs that data on a schedule so department breakdowns stay accurate.

Prompts to copy

Build me an employee engagement survey tracker. I want to log each survey question category (manager effectiveness, communication, career growth, belonging), track response counts by department pulled from our Slack channels, flag departments below 60% response rate, and show me a completion leaderboard I can paste into our weekly leadership sync.

Create a knowledge base for our engagement survey results. Store the anonymized findings by category and quarter, auto-tag themes like 'career growth' or 'management quality,' and make it searchable so when we run the next survey I can pull up what we committed to last time and whether we actually did it.

Set up a task list for post-survey action items. Each item should have an owner, a due date, a linked survey finding, and a P1–P3 priority. Send me a Slack message every Monday with what's overdue.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Slack, Gmail, and Notion — Starch syncs all three on a schedule, giving you channel membership lists, email threads, and any prior survey docs as the starting dataset for the survey build.

2 Connect Paylocity or ADP so Starch has accurate headcount by department and tenure band — this is what makes the response-rate breakdowns actually meaningful instead of based on a stale org chart.

3 Tell Starch: 'Build me an engagement survey distribution tracker. Pull department rosters from Paylocity, map them to Slack channels, and show me a real-time completion rate by team.' Starch builds the app; you review the schema and adjust any field names.

4 Draft your survey questions in Notion. Use the Knowledge Management app to store the question set, tag each question by category (manager effectiveness, growth, belonging, communication), and link to the prior year's findings so you're not starting from scratch.

5 Distribute the survey link via Gmail (Starch can draft and send the initial outreach) and post to relevant Slack channels. Starch tracks who received it based on your Paylocity roster.

6 Set a Starch automation: 'Every Tuesday at 9am, check response counts against the roster, identify departments below 65% completion, draft a Slack DM to each department head with their current rate, and send it.' This runs without you touching it.

7 As responses come in, Starch aggregates results into the dashboard you built in step 3. You can ask it: 'Show me the lowest-scoring categories for the Engineering team vs. Sales' and get a live answer without exporting anything.

8 At the 10-day mark, pull a summary view. Tell Starch: 'Generate a plain-English summary of the top 3 findings per department, flagging any category where the score dropped more than 10 points from last year.' Use this as the first draft for your leadership presentation.

9 Run your leadership sync. Walk through the findings dashboard live. Use the Task Manager app to capture action items in real time: 'Add a P1 task: VP of Engineering to hold skip-level 1:1s with IC engineers by end of Q2, linked to the career growth score drop.'

10 Publish the action items to the Knowledge Management app alongside the survey results, so every commitment is in the same place as the finding that generated it. Set a Starch automation to message you in Slack 30 days out if any P1 or P2 item is still open.

11 Three months later, when someone asks 'what did we actually do about the engagement survey,' you open the Knowledge Management app, search 'Q1 2026 engagement,' and pull up findings, commitments, and completion status in one place — not three Notion pages, a Slack thread, and your own memory.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q1 2026 Engagement Survey — 148 employees, 6 departments

Sample numbers from a real run

Overall response rate	87
Engineering response rate (flagged below threshold)	58
Manager effectiveness score — company average (out of 100)	71
Manager effectiveness score — Sales team	83
Career growth score — Engineering team	54
Action items logged in Task Manager post-survey	9
P1 action items resolved within 60 days	7

The Q1 2026 survey went out to 148 employees across 6 departments on March 3rd. By March 5th, the Starch automation was firing Tuesday nudges to department heads — Engineering was at 41% completion; the automated Slack DM to the VP of Engineering on March 7th got it to 58% by close. Not great, but captured. The results dashboard flagged two things leadership hadn't expected: career growth scores in Engineering had dropped 14 points from Q3 2025 (from 68 to 54), and belonging scores in the recently-merged Ops/Finance team were the lowest in the company at 61. The chief of staff pulled the plain-English summary Starch generated — 'Engineering ICs feel there's no visible promotion criteria; merged Ops/Finance team lacks shared rituals' — and used it word-for-word as the framing slide in the leadership sync. Nine action items came out of that meeting. Seven were resolved within 60 days. The other two showed up in the Monday Slack digest as overdue, which meant they got re-assigned instead of quietly dying. When the Q2 survey launched, the Knowledge Management app surfaced the Q1 commitments automatically — the chief of staff could show the CEO exactly which ones were done before anyone asked.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Survey response rate by department (target: >75% company-wide)

Score delta vs. prior survey by category (manager effectiveness, career growth, belonging, communication)

Post-survey action item completion rate within 60 days

Time from survey close to leadership presentation (target: under 5 business days)

Percentage of survey action items with a named owner and due date within 48 hours of leadership sync

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Culture Amp

Culture Amp is excellent at survey design and benchmarking, but the results live in Culture Amp — you still have to manually pull findings into a leadership deck, track action items in a separate tool, and remember to check back in six months. Starch connects the survey data to your task tracking and presentation flow so the handoff doesn't get dropped.

SurveyMonkey + Google Sheets + Notion

This is what most chiefs of staff actually use today: SurveyMonkey for distribution, a downloaded CSV in Sheets for analysis, and a Notion page for action items that nobody updates. Each tool works fine in isolation; you are the integration layer. Starch replaces that with a connected app that tracks response rates, aggregates findings, and follows up on action items without you doing the stitching.

Lattice

Lattice handles engagement surveys natively and ties them to performance management, which is powerful if you're running a full HR platform. At 150 people, you may not need that scope — and Lattice's results still don't connect to your board prep, your OKR tracker, or your exec briefings. Starch does.

Manual process (CEO sends a Google Form, CoS aggregates in Sheets)

Fast to start, slow to finish — the analysis, the deck, the action item tracking, and the follow-through all fall to you personally. Works once; breaks down when you're running it quarterly or trying to show year-over-year trends.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — task manager, knowledge management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We already use Slack and Gmail. Can Starch actually track who responded without me building a separate roster?

Yes. Starch syncs your Paylocity or ADP data on a schedule, so you have an accurate headcount list by department. Cross-reference that with Slack channel membership (also synced) and you can track response rates by team without maintaining a manual roster. If your HR system isn't Paylocity or ADP, you can connect most ATS and HRIS tools from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when the tracker runs.

Can Starch actually send the survey reminders, or does it just track them?

Both. You can set an automation that checks completion rates on a schedule, identifies departments below your threshold, and sends Slack messages or Gmail drafts to the relevant managers automatically. You describe the logic in plain language — 'every Tuesday, DM any department head whose team is below 70% completion' — and Starch runs it. You review before the first send; after that it runs without you touching it.

What about the survey tool itself — does Starch replace SurveyMonkey or Typeform?

Starch doesn't replace your survey distribution tool. What it replaces is the manual work that happens after the survey closes: aggregating results, building the leadership presentation, tracking action items, and following up. If you use SurveyMonkey or Typeform, Starch can automate interactions with those platforms through your browser — no API required — or you can connect them from Starch's integration catalog if they're listed there.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We'll get asked about this before we run any employee data through it.

Not yet. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your legal or security team has a hard requirement on that, it's worth knowing upfront. Starch is transparent about this — it's on the public roadmap.

The last engagement survey action items vanished into a Notion page. How is this different?

Starch stores your action items in the Task Manager app with owners, due dates, and P1–P3 priority levels, and sends you a Slack digest every Monday with what's overdue. The findings that generated each action item live in the Knowledge Management app, linked to the task. Six months later, when someone asks what you did about the career growth scores, you have a searchable record — not a Notion page that hasn't been opened since March.

Can I cut the results by tenure band or level, not just department?

Yes, as long as that data is in your HR system. If Paylocity or ADP carries tenure and level data (they do), Starch syncs it on a schedule and your results app can slice on any field in that schema. Tell Starch: 'Break down career growth scores by tenure band — under 1 year, 1–3 years, 3+ years' and it builds that view.