How we make our BuzzFeed employees feel heard using Qualtrics, Google Sheets & Apps Script

According to Qualtrics, only 30% of employees in the US think that their feedback influences change at their company. At BuzzFeed, the score is much higher, but still not where we want it to be. This is no good, part because it’s a key driver of employee engagement for us, and in part because feedback is influential here. So what do we do?

For our 3rd year of a People-Analytics-run engagement survey, I spent a year asking how we could raise the bar on signaling to our employees that their time and effort is valued. I knew that:

• A) I wanted to put my Google Apps Script chops to work
• B) I didn’t want to overdo it (we’ve put hours into natural language processing and sentiment analysis when, TBH, we could have just sorted comments by wordcount for our needs)
• C) I wanted to appeal to the needs of our executives, who are big fans of reading on mobile devices OR on honest-to-goodness paper while they fly on planes. So…

Step 1: Build a handy data schema in Sheets

After 1 or 2 results came in, I used an anonymized export of raw data and tagged up the column with a unique ID, Sheets address, question name, label, question type, etc. This comes in a lot of handy because it teaches the computers to understand your dataset. Later on in Apps Script I can pull magic tricks like these:

function getFreeLong(ss,d) {
  var…