People & HR

How to run an employee engagement survey as Small HR Teams

People & HRFor Small HR Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're a two-person HR team supporting 150 employees, and 'employee engagement survey' means you spend three weeks cobbling together a Google Form, manually exporting responses into a spreadsheet, pivot-tabling participation rates by department, emailing managers their team results, and tracking follow-up action items in a Notion page nobody checks. Meanwhile Paylocity has your headcount, Slack has the pulse of who's actually unhappy, and Gmail has every manager's excuse for why their team didn't complete the survey. None of it talks to each other. The survey runs once a year because running it more often would break you.

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People & HRFor Small HR Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A custom survey distribution and response-tracking app that monitors participation rates by department in real time, without a single manual export

Automated manager briefings sent to each people manager the moment their team's results are ready — no copy-paste, no mail merge

An action-item tracker that captures survey themes by department and pings managers on Slack when a follow-up task goes overdue

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 data on a schedule (employees, org units, reporting lines) so participation rates and manager assignments are always current. Gmail is connected from Starch's integration catalog so the agent queries your drafts folder and sends manager briefings live. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog for automated follow-up nudges. Survey responses from Google Forms or Typeform are pulled live via Starch's integration catalog. No scheduled snapshots of survey data — results are queried live each time the dashboard loads.

Prompts to copy

Build me an employee engagement survey tracker. Pull our active headcount from Paylocity so I can see participation rate by department as responses come in. Show me a dashboard with completion %, average eNPS score, and a red flag column for any department below 50% response by day 5.

For each manager with at least 5 direct reports, draft a personalized email summarizing their team's survey results — response rate, top-scoring themes, lowest-scoring themes, and one suggested conversation starter. Pull the manager's name and team list from Paylocity. Send drafts to my Gmail review queue before anything goes out.

Create a follow-up action tracker. For each department, let me log the top two themes we heard and the action we committed to. Set a 30-day reminder in Slack for the manager if the action hasn't been marked done. Keep a running record I can paste into our next board deck.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity in Starch — Starch syncs your employee roster, org units, and manager-report relationships on a schedule so your participation tracker always reflects current headcount, not last quarter's export.

2 Connect Gmail from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can draft and queue manager-results emails without you writing a single one manually.

3 Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog so Starch can post follow-up nudges to managers in the channel of your choice when action items go stale.

4 Connect your survey tool — Google Forms or Typeform — from Starch's integration catalog so response data feeds live into your participation dashboard as employees submit.

5 Tell Starch: 'Build me an engagement survey participation dashboard showing response rate by department, updated in real time, with a flag for any department below 50% on day 5.' Starch builds the app; you tweak the thresholds.

6 On survey launch day, open the dashboard and watch participation by department. No exports. When a department stalls, Starch lets you fire a reminder directly from the dashboard.

7 At the close of the survey window, tell Starch: 'For every manager with 5+ direct reports, draft a results email with their team's response rate, top three themes, and bottom three themes. Pull manager names and team lists from Paylocity. Queue everything as Gmail drafts for my review.' Review and send in one pass.

8 After results are out, open the action-item tracker app. Log the two focus themes per department and the committed action. Starch stores this in the app and starts the 30-day Slack reminder clock for each manager.

9 Use the Knowledge Management app to write up a plain-language survey summary — what we heard company-wide, what we're doing about it — and publish it to your team wiki so employees can read the response without emailing HR.

10 At the 30-day mark, Starch automatically posts a Slack message to each manager: 'Your Q2 engagement action item is due. Mark it done here or reply with an update.' You see the status in your tracker without chasing anyone.

11 Before your next board or leadership meeting, tell Starch: 'Build a slide summarizing engagement survey results: overall eNPS, department breakdown, top three themes, and our action commitments.' It pulls from the data already in the tracker and drafts the summary for you to drop into your deck.

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

Q2 2026 Engagement Survey — 150 employees, 8 departments

Sample numbers from a real run

Overall response rate (day 7)	112
Employees flagged in low-participation departments (Engineering, Finance)	24
Manager results emails drafted and reviewed	11
Action items tracked across departments	16
Slack nudges sent at 30-day follow-up	9

You launched the Q2 survey on a Monday. By Wednesday morning, Starch's participation dashboard showed overall completion at 61% — solid, except Engineering at 38% and Finance at 29%. You fired a targeted reminder to both departments directly from the dashboard. By Friday close, you hit 74% company-wide (112 of 150). On Saturday morning you told Starch to draft manager briefings for all 11 managers with 5+ direct reports: each email included that manager's team response rate, their top three scoring themes (belonging, clarity of role, manager communication) and their two lowest (compensation, career growth). You reviewed all 11 drafts in Gmail in about 20 minutes and sent them. Over the next two weeks you logged 16 department-level action items in the tracker. At the 30-day mark, Starch posted Slack reminders to 9 managers whose items weren't marked complete. Seven replied the same day. You went into the leadership all-hands with a one-page summary built from the tracker — no Sunday-night slide assembly required.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Survey response rate by department (target: >70% company-wide within 7 days)

Time from survey close to manager results delivered (target: under 48 hours)

Action item completion rate at 30-day follow-up (% of committed items marked done)

Manager briefing turnaround time (how long drafts sit in review before sending)

eNPS score trend quarter-over-quarter by department

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Lattice or Culture Amp

Purpose-built engagement platforms with strong benchmarking data, but cost $8–12 per employee per month, require a separate admin login your managers won't open, and don't connect to Paylocity so participation tracking is still manual.

Google Forms + Sheets + mail merge

Free and flexible, but every survey cycle is 4–6 hours of manual export, pivot table, and copy-paste work — exactly what Starch automates away.

SurveyMonkey Workforce

Good survey UX and anonymous response handling, but results live in SurveyMonkey's dashboard; getting them into manager emails, a Slack reminder system, and a board-ready summary still requires you to do the glue work.

15Five or Leapsome

Solid continuous-feedback tools if you want weekly check-ins baked in, but overkill if you're running quarterly or annual surveys and need the data to flow into the same place as your payroll headcount and Slack follow-ups.

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 use Rippling or BambooHR, not Paylocity or ADP. Can Starch still pull our headcount for participation tracking?

Yes. Rippling and BambooHR are available through Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries your employee data live when the participation dashboard runs. You won't get the scheduled-sync depth you get with Paylocity or ADP (where Starch stores a refreshed copy of your roster), but for headcount counts and org structure, live query is fine for most survey use cases.

Can Starch keep survey responses anonymous the way Culture Amp does?

Starch doesn't have a native survey engine with built-in anonymization. The pattern that works: run the survey in Google Forms or Typeform (which both support anonymous responses natively), then connect the results sheet to Starch for tracking and analysis. Starch sees aggregated results by department, not individual responses — you control what gets pulled.

Will Starch send manager emails automatically or do I have to review each one?

Drafts go to your Gmail review queue first. Nothing sends without you clicking send. You can tell Starch to send automatically if you want, but for manager communications most HR teams want a 10-second eyeball before anything goes out — the default is draft-and-queue.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? Our CPO will ask.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing if your company has a strict vendor security review process. It's on the roadmap. If you need SOC 2 Type II for approval, that's an honest reason to wait or check back.

We run engagement surveys twice a year. Is it worth setting this up if we only use it twice?

The setup takes an afternoon, not a week. Once the participation dashboard and manager-briefing automation exist, your second survey cycle is maybe 30 minutes of work instead of 6 hours. And the action-item tracker runs year-round — it's useful between survey cycles too, for tracking anything you promised employees you'd fix.

Can I use the same setup to run pulse surveys — shorter, more frequent check-ins?

Yes, and it's actually a better use case for Starch than annual surveys. A 5-question pulse survey every 6 weeks means you're doing the participation tracking, manager summaries, and follow-up nudges 8+ times a year. Automating that cycle is where the time savings really compound for a 2-person team.