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Getting Started with Employee Engagement

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Getting Started

This guide walks you through every step necessary to launch your Employee Engagement project.

  1. Preparing for Your Employee Engagement Survey
  2. Building Your Engagement Survey
  3. Configuring Project Participants and Distributing Your Project
  4. Reporting on Your Employee Engagement Project Results
  5. Closing Your Project and Preparing for Next Year’s Project

Below is a list of all the content you should have prior to building your project:

  • The list of questions/items you want included and their associated category/driver
  • The list of employees that will be taking the survey
  • Final drafts of the email messages (invites and reminders)
  • A general idea of the information you want to report in your dashboard

Templates to Get You Started

Throughout these Getting Started pages, we will provide example files to guide your first Employee Engagement project. However, there’s another resource available to you to make this go even faster. Every Employee Experience customer gets access to template projects, which include survey questions, messages, and dashboards developed by our subject-matter experts.

For our Employee Engagement users, we recommend the EX 25 Annual Baseline. This solution measures drivers of employee engagement and enables managers at every level to action and drive improvements. With research-based and validated engagement survey items and pre-configured dashboards from Qualtrics, this solution is ideal for annual or biannual employee engagement programs.

the ex25 solution in the catalog

The EX 25 project can be found when you create an EX project and look at the Guided projects section.

Qtip: For Lifecycle templates, see Templates for Employee Experience. Note that while similar, Lifecycle projects are not the same as Employee Engagement projects.

Guided Project Creation

Need help building an Engagement project from scratch? Check out the in-product guidance to help you get started. By answering a few short questions, Qualtrics will build a beginning Engagement survey for you based on the updated Qualtrics EX25 methodology. You can then further customize this survey for your organization’s specific needs.

Qtip: You’ll need the “Access Guided Engagement” user permission enabled to use this feature. Additionally the “Engagement Standard Short,” “Engagement Standard Medium,” and “Engagement Standard Long” extension permissions should be enabled.
  1. From the Qualtrics projects Catalog, select Engagement.creating a new engagement project using guidance
  2. Select Start with recommendations.
  3. Choose the type of Engagement project you’d like to use as a baseline.choosing the baseline engagement template
    Qtip: These options are controlled by the “Engagement Standard Short,” “Engagement Standard Medium,” and “Engagement Standard Long” extension permissions. If one or more of the above templates are unavailable to you, then contact your Brand Administrator and ask them to enable the associated permission for you.
  4. Click Next.
  5. Fill out the questions to customize your survey. The survey preview on the right-hand side of the screen will adjust based on your answers.filling out the form to customize the engagement survey
    Qtip: You can click Show answers to hide or display the responses to preview questions. You can hide or display the entire survey preview by clicking the arrow at the top of the preview.displaying the survey preview
  6. Click Next to continue through the different steps of the setup. The guided setup contains the following customization sections:
    • Introduction: Customize your organization name and internal terminology.
    • KPIs: Choose the KPIs you’d like to focus on.
    • Drivers: Select the drivers that impact your KPIs.
    • Open Ended: Add open ended questions to your survey.
  7. On the final page of the setup, review the survey. If you need to make adjustments, you can click the “Back” button to return to previous steps in the setup.reviewing the survey before generating it
    Qtip: To rename your project before creating it, click the menu next to the project name and click Rename project. Alternatively, you can double-click the project name to edit it.renaming the project
  8. Click Create to generate the project.
  9. You can then edit your project like any other Engagement project. See the next steps in the Getting Started Guide for additional help.editing the generated survey
Qtip: Your project will contain certified questions that can be customized if needed.

Overview Tab

Qtip: This section describes functionality that we intend to release starting March 4, 2026. Qualtrics may, in its sole discretion and without liability, change the timing of any product feature rollout, change the functionality for any in preview or in development product feature, or choose not to release a product feature or functionality for any reason or for no reason.

The Overview tab of your Engagement project will walk you through the major steps of setting up your project. You’ll be brought here automatically if creating a project through the guided flow. Projects created from scratch will start in the “Survey” tab, but you can navigate back to the “Overview” tab at any time if you need assistance with any step of the setup.

Please complete these steps in order from top to bottom. Completed steps will have a green check mark. You can click Modify next to any completed step to edit your setup. Any uncompleted steps will say Start, which you can click to begin that step in the setup process. If a step is grayed-out, then you must complete a previous step first.

Below is an overview of each step, with links to more in-depth resources about each step in the process.

The "Overview" tab in an Engagement project

  1. Follow the steps under Survey launch to build and distribute your Engagement survey.
    • Create survey questions: Add and remove questions. If you used the guided flow to create a project, you’ll have questions already in your project that you can customize. You can customize all aspects of the survey taking experience in this step. See Building Your Engagement Survey for an overview.
    • Add participants and org hierarchy: Upload participants to your project and build an org hierarchy. See Preparing a Participant File for help formatting your upload file, and Adding Participants for more information about the different upload methods available to you. After your participants are uploaded, you can generate your org hierarchy.
      Qtip: The guided import flow will walk you through the steps to create a file, upload participants, and build an org hierarchy. If your project does not contain any participants, then you will automatically start the guided flow when beginning this step. We strongly recommend using this flow instead of manually adding participants if you are new to Engagement projects.
    • Distribute survey: Active your project and send your survey to your employees. At this stage in your project, you’ll be sending a survey invite email.
  2. The steps under Dashboard launch help you analyze your Engagement results and share those with key stakeholders:
    • Build a dashboard: Create a dashboard to visualize your data. This step will launch the guided flow to build a baseline dashboard, which you can then customize.
    • Distribute dashboard: After your survey is complete and your dashboard is finalized, you can send an invite to stakeholders to view the dashboard.

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