The more you listen to your employees, the sooner you can identify drops in engagement and potential turnover risks. This empowers you to make smarter, data-driven people decisions.
There’s a catch, though. If your feedback platform and your HRIS (Human Resources Information System) aren’t connected, gathering regular feedback creates extra manual work for your People team. Every cycle, you have to export an employee list, tidy it up, upload it, and then manually reconnect department, location and job title for each person. Do it once and it takes an afternoon. Do it every month for a global organisation and it becomes a whole new job – and it just gets harder as you grow. This fragmentation is how HR loses track of employee sentiment, and with it, the foundation for better decisions.
More than 260,000 organisations already use SurveyMonkey to listen to their people, and supporting employee experience teams in understanding their workforce better is currently a top priority for us.
That’s why our Product team has developed two new HRIS integrations with leading platforms, Workday and BambooHR. Both are included at no extra cost in your current plans – Workday with SurveyMonkey Enterprise, and BambooHR with Team Premier and Enterprise plans – so you can get started straight away.
How the new HRIS integrations work
Whether you’re using Workday or BambooHR, connecting your HRIS to SurveyMonkey takes just a few clicks. Once set up, your employee data syncs with SurveyMonkey every 24 hours, so you’ll always have an up-to-date list when it’s time to send a survey; no more manual list management. Your survey results are then linked to that data, letting you interpret employee feedback in the right context.
Connecting your HRIS transforms three key aspects of a survey, from the initial draft to the final report for leadership:
- You reach the right people without the prep. Build your audience directly from up-to-date Workday or BambooHR data, such as department, location or employment status, instead of wrestling with a spreadsheet. Your employee data syncs every 24 hours from your HRIS, so you’re always working from the latest organisational chart. Once the connection is set up, sending the next survey is as simple as clicking send – no list rebuilding required.
- You see feedback in context. Responses arrive already linked to employee details like department, location and job title, so you can filter and compare results without the hassle of combining different data sources manually.
- Your response rate increases thanks to a better survey experience. When SurveyMonkey already has details like department and location, you don’t need to ask those questions. This means shorter, more relevant surveys for employees, helping you avoid one of the main causes of abandoned responses: survey fatigue.
Where this pays off
These features are valuable on their own, but they really shine when applied to the work HR teams are already doing.
Onboarding gets better. New-hire feedback is only useful if you can view it through the lens of what shapes the first 90 days. With the integration, you can easily include new starters in your survey audience, along with key details like location, department and whether they’re remote or on-site. This lets you analyse their feedback in the right context. Instead of asking questions like "Are you joining as a remote or on-site employee?", you’ll uncover useful insights, such as remote engineering hires finding setup tricky, while onsite sales hires are thriving.
Continuous listening programmes become a breeze. Recurring engagement and pulse programmes are where manual admin is most painful, as every cycle means building the list all over again. Now, your audience automatically updates itself against the latest organisational chart, so there’s no need to prepare anything between rounds.
Reading the room during change gets easier. Reorganisations, leadership changes, return-to-office policies and post-acquisition integrations all have varying impacts across an organisation. Because responses include department, team and location, you can compare how different groups are reacting to change and spot dips in sentiment before they lead to attrition. This gives you the chance to act before an entire division’s concerns only come out in exit interviews.
Try connecting your HRIS today
The Workday integration is included in SurveyMonkey Enterprise. The BambooHR integration is available with Team Premier and SurveyMonkey Enterprise. If you’re on an eligible plan, you can connect your HRIS from the Settings tab in just a few clicks.
This is just the start
We’ve built these integrations for HR and employee experience teams, and we’ll keep investing in them, bringing you more automation, greater control and an even closer connection between your people data and listening programmes. Much of this development is already underway, and we have more innovations to come for People teams, so stay tuned!
Ready to connect employee feedback to the data behind it? Discover how the Workday and BambooHR integrations work, and find out which plan best suits your team.
