What are attributes?
Attributes are the specific characteristics or demographic information about your survey respondents. These are really valuable when you are analysing your survey feedback because they allow you to segment your organisation and compare groups against each other.
There are two primary types of attributes:
- Personal attributes – e.g. age, ethnic group, religion
- Employment attributes – e.g. department, tenure, manager
Why is attribute data useful?
Your workplace population isn’t one homogenous group. Each employee has different experiences, and those experiences are often affected by who they are and their demographics.
Someone who’s been with the organisation for ten years will have a different perspective in comparison to someone who joined last month. An employee from a minority ethnic group won’t have the same experience as those from a majority group.
Incorporating attributes into your analysis can help you understand the experiences of different groups of people and shed light on any challenges within the organisation. You’ll be able to identify patterns and trends across various dimensions, and these insights will help you take impactful action.
How do I collect attribute data?
How you collect this data depends on what kind of survey you choose to do.
If you have chosen to do a confidential survey then attribute data will be collected as part of preparing a distribution list. This typically includes data that has been exported from your HR system. However, it is important that this is setup correctly and you can read about that here.
If you have chosen to do an anonymous survey, then you will need to collect attribute data by adding questions for your respondents to answer. You can read recommendations on how to collect age and tenure data here.