People & HR

How to run an employee engagement survey as Professional Services Founders

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You run a 12-person consultancy and every six months someone on Slack asks whether people feel heard, you say 'good question,' and then it never happens because you're billing 60-hour weeks. When you do run a survey, it's a Google Form cobbled together in 20 minutes, results sit in a Sheet nobody revisits, and three months later your best senior consultant resigns and says 'I've been telling you this for a year.' You don't have an HR team. You have Paylocity or ADP for payroll, Slack for noise, and a gut feeling. The insight you need is sitting in those tools — you just have no system to collect, surface, and act on it.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An automated employee engagement survey that goes out on a set cadence — monthly pulse or quarterly deep-dive — with results collected, summarized, and delivered to you without manual effort

A custom dashboard that tracks sentiment trends over time by team, tenure, and project load so you can spot the unhappy senior consultant before they update their LinkedIn

A follow-up workflow that drafts 1:1 agenda items and next-step tasks off survey responses so insights actually turn into action

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 Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity employee roster data on a schedule to pull the current team list automatically. Gmail is connected as a scheduled-sync provider so survey invitations go out and responses get tracked through your existing inbox. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live to cross-reference team activity signals. Notion is connected as a scheduled-sync provider to store the survey playbook and historical results in your knowledge base.

Prompts to copy

Build me a quarterly employee engagement survey workflow. Pull my team roster from Paylocity, send a 10-question survey via Gmail to everyone, collect responses, and summarize results by theme — morale, workload, leadership, growth — in a dashboard I can review each quarter.

Create a knowledge base entry for our engagement survey playbook: what we ask, why, how we act on results, and a timeline for each cycle. Make it searchable so any future ops hire can run this without asking me.

Every time engagement survey results come in, draft a 1:1 agenda for each direct report that references their specific responses, and create a P1 task for me to complete those 1:1s within two weeks of survey close.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity to Starch — Starch syncs your employee roster on a schedule, so your survey list is always current. No manual CSV exports when someone joins or leaves.

2 Tell Starch to build your survey workflow: describe the cadence (quarterly deep-dive or monthly 5-question pulse), the themes you care about (utilization pressure, client satisfaction, growth opportunities, management), and the audience (full team, billable staff only, or segmented by role).

3 Starch drafts the survey questions. You review and edit in plain language — no survey software UI to navigate. Confirm the question set and the delivery schedule.

4 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch sends survey invitations from your existing Gmail account so responses don't feel like they're coming from an HR software robot — they come from you.

5 Set a response window (7 days is standard for a small team) and a reminder trigger: if someone hasn't responded by day 5, Starch drafts a follow-up nudge through the Email Agent and queues it for your one-click send.

6 When the response window closes, Starch aggregates results and generates a plain-language summary: overall sentiment score, top themes by frequency, verbatim quotes flagged as high-signal, and any responses that suggest someone is at flight risk.

7 The summary lands in your inbox and gets saved to your Notion knowledge base via Starch's scheduled sync — so you have a running archive of every survey cycle, not just the latest one.

8 Starch cross-references the survey results against your Google Calendar utilization data — who's been in back-to-back client meetings for six weeks straight — and surfaces the correlation in the dashboard so you're not reading burnout signals in a vacuum.

9 For each direct report, the Task Manager app creates a P1 task: 'Complete 1:1 with [Name] — review Q2 survey responses by [date].' The task description includes their individual answers and suggested talking points drafted by Starch.

10 After 1:1s, you log what you committed to in Starch. Those commitments become tracked tasks so they don't disappear into the ether. Next survey cycle, Starch includes a 'did we follow through?' question referencing prior commitments.

11 Over time, the Knowledge Management app accumulates your survey playbook — what questions you asked, what changes you made in response, what worked. New ops hires or an office manager can run the whole cycle without a handover call with you.

12 Set a quarterly review: Starch pulls all four survey cycles from the Notion archive and generates a year-over-year sentiment trend report you can include in your annual team retrospective or board update.

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 Pulse — 11-person consultancy, strategy practice

Sample numbers from a real run

Responses collected (of 11 sent)	10
Average sentiment score (1–10)	7
Flagged high-signal responses (workload theme)	3
Days from survey close to 1:1s completed	9
Open tasks created from survey follow-up	5

You run the survey on March 3rd. Starch pulls 11 names from Paylocity (one person is on leave — Starch flags them as excluded). Ten respond within the 7-day window; one gets a nudge on day 5 drafted by the Email Agent and responds the same afternoon. Results come in: average sentiment is 7.0 out of 10, down from 7.8 in Q4 2025. Three verbatim responses surface under the 'workload' theme — all from your two most senior consultants and one mid-level hire who joined eight months ago. Starch cross-references Google Calendar: those three averaged 6.1 billable client meetings per week in February versus a team average of 4.3. The dashboard makes the correlation visible in 30 seconds. You didn't need to pivot a spreadsheet to see it. Starch creates five P1 tasks in the Task Manager: three 1:1s flagged urgent, one task to revisit staffing ratios for the Q2 project pipeline, one task to update your project assignment process in the Notion playbook. You complete all three 1:1s by March 12th — nine days after survey close. The senior consultant who would have updated her LinkedIn in June instead gets a 20% reduction in concurrent client load starting April 1st.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Survey response rate per cycle (target: >85% for a team this size — low response rate is itself a signal)

Average sentiment score trend quarter-over-quarter, segmented by tenure band (0–1 year, 1–3 years, 3+ years)

Days from survey close to 1:1 completion — your personal accountability metric

Percentage of prior-cycle commitments tracked to resolution before the next survey

Voluntary turnover rate correlated against prior-quarter engagement scores

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Culture Amp or Lattice

Purpose-built engagement platforms with benchmarking data, but priced for 50+ person companies, require an HR admin to run, and don't connect to your Paylocity roster or Google Calendar utilization data — so you're still manually correlating burnout signals.

Google Forms + Sheets

Free and fast to set up once, but results stay in a spreadsheet nobody revisits, there's no automated follow-up, no trend tracking across cycles, and the insight-to-action gap is entirely on you.

Typeform + Zapier + Notion

Closer to a real system, but requires you to wire and maintain three separate tools, and the automation breaks every time Typeform or Notion updates their API — which means your ops person (probably you) is debugging it at 10pm.

Asking at the quarterly all-hands

Genuinely what most 12-person firms do — honest answer is it captures group sentiment but misses individual signals, and people won't say the hard thing in a room with their colleagues.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — task manager, knowledge management, email agent 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 only have 11 people. Isn't this overkill?

Eleven people means one departure is a 9% reduction in capacity and probably your most experienced person, since junior staff take longer to quit. The cost of running a quarterly survey once it's set up is about 20 minutes of your time per cycle. The cost of not having it showed up in your last exit interview.

Will my team know Starch is analyzing their responses?

That's your call to make, and Starch doesn't make it for you. The survey invitations come from your Gmail account, not from a third-party HR platform. You should tell your team what you're doing with responses — that's a management decision, not a software question. What Starch does is aggregate and summarize; individual responses are visible to you, so you should be transparent about that with your team.

Can I keep responses anonymous?

You can design the survey so respondents aren't asked to identify themselves, but because invitations go out via Gmail and Starch tracks who responded to send reminders, true anonymity requires some deliberate configuration. The more honest answer: at 11 people, your team probably knows you can figure out who said what anyway. Consider whether anonymity or psychological safety is the real goal — sometimes those require different solutions.

Is my employee data safe? Do you have SOC 2?

Starch is not yet SOC 2 Type II certified — that's the honest answer. Paylocity and Gmail data is synced into Starch's database on a schedule. If your clients require SOC 2 attestation for any vendor that touches employee data, that's worth knowing upfront. Starch is working toward certification; it's not available today.

What if my team uses Slack more than email? Can the survey go out over Slack?

Yes. Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live — and tell Starch to deliver survey invitations via Slack DM instead of or in addition to Gmail. You'd describe that in plain language: 'Send the survey link via Slack DM to each team member and follow up in Slack if they haven't responded by day 5.'

Can Starch build the survey questions for me or do I have to write them myself?

Describe what you want to learn — 'I want to understand whether people feel overloaded, whether they feel like they're growing, and whether they trust leadership decisions' — and Starch drafts the questions. You review and edit. You're not starting from a blank page, but you're also not locked into a pre-set question bank designed for a 500-person company.