People & HR

How to run an employee engagement survey as DTC Brand Founders

People & HRFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're a DTC brand with 12–40 people and you've never run a formal employee engagement survey. You send a Google Form once a year, get 60% completion, export the results to a spreadsheet, and then do nothing with it because you're too busy launching the Q4 collection. Your team lead in the 3PL warehouse has no idea what the brand team is frustrated about, and your customer support contractors don't feel included at all. You're losing good people to competitors who have actual HR infrastructure, and you're finding out about it on their last day. Nobody has time to chase responses, analyze free-text answers, or build a follow-up plan — and you definitely don't have an HR team to own it.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An automated engagement survey that sends on your schedule, chases non-responders, and surfaces results by team — warehouse ops, brand, customer support, agency contractors — without you touching a spreadsheet

A Starch app that reads free-text responses and groups themes (compensation, workload, growth, culture) so you know what actually matters to your team before someone walks

A follow-up action tracker that converts survey findings into assigned tasks with owners and due dates, so the survey produces real changes, not a PDF nobody reads

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 Email Agent Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Wire Starch to Gmail (Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule) to send survey emails and track replies. Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live — to post completion reminders in your team channels. Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog to store survey history, past action items, and documentation. The Task Manager app tracks follow-up commitments with owners and deadlines so nothing gets dropped after the results come in.

Prompts to copy

Build me an employee engagement survey app that sends a 10-question pulse survey to my team every quarter via email. Track completion by person and department (warehouse, brand, support, contractors). Surface aggregate scores for each question category — compensation, workload, career growth, and culture — and flag any category where the average score drops below 3.5 out of 5. Show me a summary dashboard with completion rate and trend vs last quarter.

Scan all open-text survey responses and group them into themes. Write me a 1-paragraph summary of the top 3 concerns and top 2 things people said are going well. Flag any response that mentions resignation, burnout, or pay as high priority for me to read directly.

Create follow-up tasks from this survey cycle's action items. Assign each task to the relevant team lead with a due date 30 days out, and set a reminder to nag them if it's not marked done. Log everything in Knowledge Management so I have a record of what we committed to after each survey.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Describe your survey to Starch in plain language: tell it the 10 questions you want to ask, the categories they fall into (workload, compensation, culture, growth), and your team structure — warehouse team, brand/marketing, customer support, and any contractors you want to include.

2 Starch builds the survey app and the delivery automation. It uses Gmail (scheduled sync) to send the survey link to each respondent and tracks who has and hasn't replied.

3 Set the reminder cadence: tell Starch 'if someone hasn't responded in 5 days, send them one follow-up from me — not a generic noreply, a short personal-sounding note.' Email Agent drafts and sends those nudges automatically.

4 As responses come in, Starch scores each question and computes team-level averages. Your dashboard shows completion rate, score by category, and a red flag if any category average drops below the threshold you set.

5 For free-text responses, Starch groups answers into themes and writes a plain-English summary: 'Six people mentioned unclear career paths. Three mentioned the warehouse schedule. Two mentioned pay.' You get the themes without reading 35 individual responses.

6 Any response flagged for urgency (mentions of resignation, pay, burnout) surfaces in a separate view so you can follow up personally — Email Agent can draft that outreach for you.

7 After you've reviewed results, tell Starch: 'Create action items from these findings.' It turns the themes into tasks — 'Define a career ladder for the warehouse team by May 15' — and assigns each to the right team lead inside Task Manager.

8 Task Manager tracks each commitment with a due date. If a task goes overdue, Starch posts a reminder to the assigned person in Slack (queried live from Starch's integration catalog) and flags it for you.

9 Everything — survey results, themes, action items, and completion status — gets saved to Notion via Starch's integration catalog so you have a running record. When you do the next quarterly survey, Starch pulls last quarter's action items and shows you what got done and what didn't before the new results land.

10 At the end of each survey cycle, tell Starch: 'Write a one-page summary of this quarter's engagement results and what we're doing about them.' You paste it into your next all-hands or board update. Presentation Agent (currently in development) will eventually turn this into a polished slide — request beta access if you want to get notified.

11 After two or three cycles, Starch shows you trend lines: which categories are improving, which are getting worse, and whether completion rates are going up — a signal that people believe the survey actually leads to change.

See this running on Starch

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

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q1 2026 Engagement Survey — 34-Person DTC Brand

Sample numbers from a real run

Total team size	34
Survey responses received	29
Completion rate	85
Average score — Culture	4.1
Average score — Workload	3.2
Average score — Career Growth	2.9
Average score — Compensation	3.6
Flagged high-priority responses	3
Action items created from results	7
Action items assigned with owners	7

In Q1 2026, the brand ran its first structured engagement survey through Starch across all 34 team members — warehouse staff, the four-person brand team, customer support reps, and two agency contractors who work embedded with the company. 29 of 34 responded (85%), compared to the 60% they got from last year's Google Form. The workload score came in at 3.2 out of 5 — below the 3.5 flag threshold — driven almost entirely by the warehouse team, which is understaffed heading into spring restock season. Career growth scored 2.9, with six open-text responses grouped by Starch under the theme 'no clear path forward.' Three responses were flagged as high-priority; the founder read those directly and followed up personally within 48 hours using Email Agent to draft the outreach. Starch turned the results into seven action items: define a warehouse headcount plan by April 30, draft a career ladder for ops and brand roles by May 15, and schedule skip-level 1:1s for the two support leads before end of quarter. All seven were assigned in Task Manager with owners and due dates. The summary was pasted directly into the Q1 board update — no reformatting needed.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Survey completion rate by team segment (warehouse vs. brand vs. support vs. contractors)

Average engagement score by category (workload, culture, growth, compensation) vs. prior quarter

Percentage of action items from the prior survey that were completed before the next survey launched

Voluntary turnover rate in the 90 days following each survey cycle

Number of high-priority responses flagged and followed up within 48 hours

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Forms + Sheets

Free and familiar, but you manually chase responses, export data, do your own analysis, and the results almost always die in a spreadsheet rather than producing committed action items.

Lattice or Culture Amp

Purpose-built for engagement surveys and genuinely good at benchmarking, but priced for companies with a full HR team to run them — typically $6–11 per employee per month with annual contracts most DTC brands at sub-50 headcount won't recoup.

Typeform + Zapier + Airtable

Flexible but you're stitching together three paid tools with a fragile automation in the middle, and the analysis layer is still manual — you're back to reading rows in Airtable and building the themes yourself.

SurveyMonkey

Good for one-off surveys but no native workflow automation, no theme analysis on free text, and results don't connect to any task or follow-up system — the survey and the actions it should produce stay completely separate.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — task manager, email agent, 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

Can Starch actually send the survey emails, or do I need a separate email tool for that?

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and can send emails directly from your account — no separate survey delivery tool needed. Respondents get an email from you, not a noreply address from a survey platform. If you use Outlook instead of Gmail, that works too; Starch connects to Outlook the same way.

What happens if I have contractors or agency partners I want to include — people who aren't in my HR system?

You just tell Starch who to include. The survey list is based on email addresses, not HR system records. If your warehouse team lead, your embedded agency designer, and your 1099 customer support rep all need to get the survey, you add them to the list manually or paste in a group. No formal HR integration required.

Does Starch store survey responses? I want to be able to trend across quarters.

Yes — results get saved to Notion (connected from Starch's integration catalog) so you have a running archive. Before each new survey, Starch can pull the prior cycle's results and show you what moved and what didn't. That said, Starch is not a long-horizon data warehouse — it's a live data surface. If you need responses archived for compliance or legal hold, you should export them to your own system of record.

Is this SOC 2 certified? My warehouse team lead is asking about employee data security.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing before you route sensitive HR data through it. For a pulse survey on workload and culture, most DTC-sized teams are comfortable with the tradeoff. If you're at a stage where compliance certification is a hard requirement, that's an honest reason to wait or run a more limited pilot first.

Can Starch anonymize responses so people actually answer honestly?

You can tell Starch to display aggregate results only and not surface individual responses in the main dashboard — so the warehouse team sees 'workload avg: 3.2' rather than who gave a 2. Free-text responses that get flagged as high-priority will be visible to you as the founder, and you should disclose that to your team upfront. True cryptographic anonymity isn't built in, so if your team has strong trust concerns, that's something to communicate clearly when you launch the survey.

We're 14 people right now. Is this overkill?

At 14 people, the survey itself takes 20 minutes to build in Starch and maybe 5 minutes to review results. The part that saves you real time is the follow-up: automatically turning themes into tasks with owners, sending reminder emails without you chasing, and having a written record of what you committed to. The ROI isn't in the survey tooling — it's in not losing a $70k/year brand manager because you didn't know they were burning out.