Choose the right drivers for your survey

A survey is only as useful as the reports it produces - and in CultureMonkey, drivers are what turn a pile of individual answers into a report you can actually act on. Before you launch, one of the most consequential choices you'll make is which drivers your survey uses and how each question maps to them. Get this right and your results roll up into clear, comparable themes; get it wrong and you're left staring at question-by-question numbers with no story.

This guide explains what drivers are and why they matter, walks through the default engagement drivers CultureMonkey provides, shows how to choose between default and custom drivers for a survey, explains how each question is tied to a driver and why that mapping is the whole point, and closes with how to choose drivers for your specific goal - plus the reporting payoff you get in return.

What drivers are - and why they matter

Employee engagement isn't one feeling. It's the sum of many experiences: the work itself, the people who manage you, whether you're recognized, whether you can grow, whether you feel you belong. Asking a single question can't capture all of that, so CultureMonkey asks several - and then groups them.

A driver is that grouping. It's a named theme of the employee experience, and behind it sits a set of rating questions that all measure the same underlying thing. Instead of reading twenty questions one at a time, you read a handful of drivers, each with a score that summarizes every question beneath it.

Why this matters: the overall engagement score tells you how engaged people are, but it can't tell you what to do. Drivers can. You can't "fix engagement" as an abstraction - but you can improve Recognition if that driver is scoring low. Drivers are the level at which insight becomes action: they're what you filter by, benchmark, track over time, and attach action plans to.

A quick note on factors: some organizations like to think about engagement at an even higher level - grouping several related drivers into broad factors (for example, treating Leadership, Management and Communication as one "Leadership & Direction" family). This is a useful mental model when you present results to executives who want the ten-thousand-foot view. In CultureMonkey, the level you actually build, map and score against is the driver - that's the unit questions attach to and reports roll up into. Treat factors as a way to talk about clusters of drivers, and drivers as the thing you configure. See Understand drivers and factors for how this plays out in reporting.

The default engagement drivers

CultureMonkey ships every account with a set of 15 default engagement drivers, drawn from workplace-engagement research and refined across thousands of surveys. These cover the dimensions that consistently predict how engaged and committed people feel. Each comes pre-defined with a name and a description, and - crucially - the question library is already mapped to them, so you can build a rigorous, driver-based survey without writing a single question yourself.

Here are the default drivers and what each one measures:

You don't have to use all 15 in a single survey. A focused engagement survey might use eight to ten of these; a targeted pulse might use just two or three. Pick the drivers that match what you're trying to learn this cycle, and leave the rest for another survey.

Default drivers or custom drivers?

Every survey uses one of two driver sets, and you choose which on the Basic step of the builder (see Create a survey from scratch):

• Default drivers - the 15 research-backed drivers above, already mapped to the question library. This is the recommended default and the right choice for almost every engagement survey. It keeps your reporting consistent and lets you benchmark against your industry.
• Custom drivers - themes your organization defines itself, managed on the Custom Drivers settings page. Choose these when your organization measures something the standard set doesn't capture - a company-specific value, a bespoke competency framework, or a program you want to track under its own name.

If your account already defines custom drivers, you'll create and manage them under Custom Drivers in settings. There you can add a new driver by name, and remove ones you no longer need - though a custom driver can't be deleted while questions are still mapped to it, so you'll need to reassign or remove those questions first.

How each question is tied to a driver

Here's the mechanism that makes all of this work: every rating question in a survey is mapped to exactly one driver. That mapping is not optional and not cosmetic - it's how an individual answer knows which theme it belongs to, and therefore which driver score it contributes to.

There are two ways a question gets its driver:

• Library and template questions come pre-mapped. When you pull a question from the library with Add question from our library, it already carries its driver. These questions were written and validated against specific drivers, so their mapping is consistent every time you use them - which is exactly why library-based surveys are so comparable across cycles.
• Custom questions are mapped by you. When you write your own rating question with Add custom question, you assign it to a driver as part of writing it. This is a required step: an unmapped rating question has nowhere to roll up to.

app.culturemonkey.io/surveys/new

Why the mapping matters so much

The driver you assign to a question decides where that answer shows up in every report. Map a question about your manager to Management and its scores flow into the Management driver; map it - by mistake - to Communication, and you'll quietly distort both drivers. Because reports, benchmarks, heatmaps, trends and action plans all operate at the driver level, a wrong mapping doesn't just mislabel one question; it corrupts the theme.

1. 1Write the question around a single theme. A good rating question measures one thing. "My manager gives me useful feedback" is clearly Management; a double-barreled question ("My manager and my pay are fair") can't map cleanly to any driver.
2. 2Assign the matching driver. Pick the driver that the question actually measures, not the one you wish scored well.
3. 3Prefer the library where you can. Library questions arrive pre-mapped and validated, sparing you the judgment call and keeping results comparable.
4. 4Review your mapping before launch. Skim your question list and confirm each one sits under the right driver. Mappings lock when the survey goes live, so this is your last clean chance to fix them.

Choosing the right drivers for your goal

The best driver set depends on what you're trying to learn. A few common goals and where to point your drivers:

Two principles guide the choice. First, measure what you're prepared to act on. There's no value in scoring a driver you have no intention or ability to improve - it just lengthens the survey. Second, stay consistent across cycles. If you want to track a driver over time, keep it (and ideally its questions) stable from survey to survey, so a change in the score reflects a change in reality, not a change in what you asked.

The reporting payoff

Once responses come in, the driver structure you set up is what makes the reports readable. Rating answers are averaged up to a driver score for each theme, and from there almost everything in Analyse is organized by driver:

• Driver scores and heatmaps show every theme's score at a glance, so you immediately see strengths and focus areas (read a heatmap of driver scores).
• Drill-downs by segment let you compare a driver across teams, locations or managers - finding where a theme is strong or weak.
• Trends over time track each driver across cycles, so you can prove whether your actions are working.
• Benchmarks compare your default-driver scores against your industry.
• Action plans attach directly to a driver, closing the loop from "this theme scored low" to "here's what we're doing about it."

None of that is possible without clean driver mapping. The five minutes you spend choosing drivers and checking each question's mapping before launch is what buys you months of clear, comparable, actionable reporting afterward.

Frequently asked questions

How many drivers should a survey use?

As many as your goal needs and no more. A full annual engagement survey commonly spans eight to twelve drivers for good diagnostic coverage; a short pulse might use just two or three. Choose the drivers you'll actually act on, and give the ones that matter a few questions each so their scores are stable.

Can I mix default and custom drivers in one survey?

No. Each survey is either a default-driver survey or a custom-driver survey, and CultureMonkey won't let you combine the two sets in the same survey. Decide which set you're using on the Basic step before you add questions.

What happens to a rating question with no driver?

Every rating question must be mapped to a driver - an unmapped question has nowhere to roll up. Library and template questions come pre-mapped; when you write a custom question, assigning its driver is part of creating it.

Can I change a question's driver after the survey launches?

No. Questions and their mappings lock once the survey leaves Draft, so every respondent answers the same, consistently-mapped survey. Review your mappings during preview - that's your last chance to correct them.

Do custom drivers work with industry benchmarks?

No. Industry benchmarks exist for CultureMonkey's standard drivers. Custom drivers are great for tracking themes unique to your organization, but they won't have an external benchmark to compare against - so reserve them for the things the default set genuinely can't capture.

Do free-text questions map to drivers?

The driver structure is built around rating questions, which produce the numeric driver scores. Free-text comments feed the qualitative side - sentiment and topics - and can be viewed alongside drivers in feedback analytics, but they don't change a driver's score.

Where to go next

• Get the vocabulary first: Key concepts every new user should know
• Go deeper on the theme: Understand drivers and factors
• Build the survey around them: Create a survey from scratch