The questions focus on how they first learned about LimeSurvey, how they work with the software, as well as the services developed by them for users. Today we will discuss with Tammo ter Hark, our partner from the Dutch company Tools for Research (Kleine Stappen), who actively helps users on our forum, providing also professional LimeSurvey and consulting services to clients who wish to use the software professionally. Tammo ter Hark Q: When and for what project did you use LimeSurvey the first time?A: We encountered LimeSurvey for the first time in 2009 while doing a project for an insurance company. That was both a success and a failure: we saw the possibilities of LimeSurvey at first sight and we jumped right in. We made one mistake: we developed a sophisticated theme (by standards of 2009) specifically for one survey, but forgot to ask the customer what browser they were using. That turned out to be Internet Explorer 6, which was in 2009 already very outdated.We successfully finished the project (eventually) by placing LimeSurvey (and XAMPP) on a USB stick, which was used on dedicated PCs in the offices of the customer (on PCs with modern browsers installed). So, in the end we could collect the data, learning at the same time a lot during our first LimeSurvey-related project. Of course, many others have followed.Q: When did you start your business?A: We started in 2009, after I left TNO (Dutch Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) and teamed up with Jan Ehrhardt to start "Tools for Research". Happily working since then in making the life of research professionals easier.Q: Tell us about your company and your team.A: The two of us still own "Tools for Research". In the meantime, we have built a great team around us - made of a talented graphic/UX designer, several psychologists, and survey colleagues - who is already ready to help when times get rough. Next to working with LimeSurvey, we have specialized in working with Drupal and WordPress. We work with organisations located all over the world, having many customers from the Netherlands and USA.Q: Are you or your colleagues active in the LimeSurvey community (forum or Discord chat)?A: I attend periodically the IRC meetings and read the forum almost daily, Jan being the guy that you would see on GitHub.Q: Which services do you offer as LimeSurvey authorized partner?A: We want to focus on building surveys with beautiful and very responsive themes, as well as on reporting through R and Rmarkdown.Q: Do you offer themes, questionnaires, or plugins in the LimeStore?A: In 2016 we developed our own theme (TFR Responsive), then for the 2.06 version of LimeSurvey. That was sold through the great store of Marcel Minke. There was (and still is) a free version on our website.We started working on a similar theme for LimeSurvey 3.x, which is now in development and freely available on GitHub. We are waiting for the LimeStore to open to have our theme(s) available there.Q: Are there any plans for new plugins or services you are going to offer?A: We would really like to team up with other developers to make reporting easier. Currently, the tools are not adequate for the needs of the organisations we work for. We use the open source software R for that, looking at the moment for ways to make the whole process easier, since R has a steep learning curve. We would love to work on combined screens and document reporting via Shiny and RMarkdown.Q: What would you recommend to a person who uses LimeSurvey for the first time?A: Start with small steps, do not try eat this elephant in one meal. Find a coach and learn by doing. Remember that many users will possibly use mobile phones (depending on your use case) and that several question types will look differently on mobile phones and large screens. Make sure you test your survey on multiple devices (browsers, PCs, tablets, and so on).Q: Do you have a special tip for advanced LimeSurvey users?A: Not really, but we would like to meet them to discuss how they tackle certain challenges.Q: Tell us about your most interesting or challenging LimeSurvey project.A: We needed to make sure that a group of young people with certain mental disabilities would answer a periodical survey (every two weeks). We developed a way of inviting them via SMS and making sure they could fill in the survey in 2 minutes. And send them a nice "thank you" message (also by SMS) as soon as they had finished the survey. This proved to work well, response rate was higher than expected, and the respondents felt "heard".Q: What are you truly passionate about?A: Making things easier.If you would like to find out more about Tammo & his team, please check their website. You can also address them questions on the forum.In case you would like to find out more about our network of partners, visit the following website�.

The question remains: why is a website is so incredibly important to companies. After all, they could simply stick to a web presence on social media platforms by maintaining a Facebook or Instagram page. According to Facebook statistics on Statista, social media platforms had more than 2 billion monthly active users in the last quarter. Statista also reports that Instagram had more than 1 billion monthly active users in the last month alone. These are some pretty impressive numbers.  So, why do organisations still struggle with designing and building websites? It turns out, there are, in fact, a number of reasons. The Benefits of a Professional Business Website Unlike a social media business page, your website is your main communication channel with your prospective and actual customers, leaving it fully up to you how you use it to communicate. Platforms will specify certain guidelines and rules of conduct, as well as predefined features that allow you to communicate in restricted ways. Your website belongs to you.  You carry responsibility, hence, you decide how it is used. Customer communication possibilities are endless, ranging from chats, forums, ticket systems, marketing campaigns, emails, surveys, phone contact, content in the shape of whitepapers and case studies and much more. In today's digitised world, the majority of online shoppers conduct searches and draw comparisons before purchasing products or booking services. In addition, the higher the investment in a product or service, the more extensive this research phase tends to be. It is, therefore, extremely important that you provide a website that remains greatly optimised for search engines to ensure that your pages will rank high on the search engine results page when someone is looking for your products and services. When it comes to search engine optimisation, you have many more possibilities and exposure when ranked with your own website as opposed to business pages on platforms. Your own website gives you full control over design, functions and content while lowering your dependence in terms of vulnerabilities and instabilities on other platforms. Full customisation and personalisation with regard to branding and website structure are great ways to emphasize your professionalism and company mission. Any website functions imaginable are possible with the appropriate code and can be implemented with your own preference and initiative. This gives you great power and flexibility to be creative with your site and, if necessary, redesign whenever you want. Two of the most crucial factors for winning new customers and retaining existing customers are trust and credibility. To ensure you are conveying a trustworthy and credible image outward, you require a professional, transparent and coherent website, as it is usually the first point of contact a prospective customer makes with your business and brand. You will then become a part of people’s brand awareness.  And if you can subsequently impress with a great product or service experience to visitors who become customers, you will have a shot at becoming the top-of-mind awareness brand. A Website is a Never Done Once your website has been set up and is live, it is important to be aware that it will never be fully completed. There is always work to do.  There are always changes to be implemented regarding the optimisation for search engine indexing, as well as for facilitating usability and improving user experience. Ways of boosting your search engine rank can be studied and applied by going through endless literature and content on search engine optimisation (SEO). However, making your website easier to navigate and access is a trickier endeavour. To truly understand how your visitors feel about the experience on your website, you will need to ask them first-hand. Our best suggestion? Run a website feedback survey on a frequent basis and get results about your website over time to identify weak points and determine the effectiveness of your implemented changes. We also have a great template you may use which we will walk you through in this article. Setting up a Website Feedback Survey There are several aspects of a website that need to be taken into consideration when considering its impact on visitors and customers, such as comprehensibility, aesthetics and navigation ease. We have incorporated all these vital aspects into our website feedback survey template to help ensure that you receive the well-rounded feedback necessary to improve your website. "How often do you visit our website?": This question aims at getting more data on the frequency of a person's website visits to determine the degree of familiarity with your page. The more frequently someone visits your website, usually the better these people know what it has to offer due to more and oftentimes longer page sessions.   "How well do you rate the following aspects of our website?": This array question provides respondent feedback on the quality of many website essentials such as design, search function, navigation, content and more. This will give you an idea of which parts or functions are rated poorly and require some attention.   "How easy was it for you to find what you were looking for on the website?": This question in combination with its follow-up question ("In the end, did you find what you were looking for?") help you learn what visitors think of the website navigation. The easier and more intuitive your website navigation, the easier it is for people to find what they are looking for.   "How easy was it for you to understand the information on our website?": Content comprehensibility is the central concept measured with this question. If you cannot properly convey your message to website visitors, they will not convert to customers and simply disappear, probably without ever returning. Scoring high on all these questions will boost your website visitor experience and increase your sales, possibly even induce high-quality word-of-mouth potential. If you are offering a product or service that truly adds value to peoples' lives, it’s that simple - an amazing website experience will lead to substantial and long-lasting business growth. LimeSurvey offers a Website Feedback Survey Template which includes the aforementioned questions. Since it is a template, it is fully editable and serves as a general survey framework. If you want to give us feedback, comments or suggestions regarding our website feedback survey template, feel free to send us an email.

All these aspects have a major impact on overall employee satisfaction, one of the most important performance levers of any organisation, as we will outline later. How relevant different "impact categories" such as financial, developmental, emotional, or others are for each individual varies depending on an employee's personality or goals. Nevertheless, knowing how and where to invest resources in order to keep employee satisfaction high is vitally essential, not only to boost organisational performance, but by implication to avoid employee turnover and retain top talent. Due to fast-paced work environments, obstacles, and resistance to change, jobs are ultimately minimised, and this may lead to substantial and frequent staff fluctuation. Thus, organisational structures and dynamics are heavily disturbed and costs and resources are invested inefficiently as well. As a result, organisations prefer to hire the right people in the first place and invest in them to ensure survival and growth. Happier employees make for more productive organisations Retaining high quality employees is, in fact, the core task of every organisation that is working towards the goal of long-term business success since employees are the foundation of added value in organisations. Employees will, in most cases, only leave a job if they are unhappy with their situation in an organisation. Therefore, leadership needs to ensure employee satisfaction to foster engagement and identification with an organisation. If there is substantial employee dissatisfaction with the work conditions, the consequence will be either employee resignation or feelings of inner submission, each of which will result in productivity and performance deterioration. Why is this? Negative emotions, if not recognized and addressed, may overshadow the ability to focus on professional tasks and lead to general incapacity. A high employee satisfaction rate consistently equates to employees accomplishing more and improvement in performance.  I.e., happy employees = increased organizational productivity and performance.   How to determine employee satisfaction In order to build employee satisfaction, organisations need to identify any potential negative emotions that might be floating about in order to act upon these and improve work conditions, as well as avoid employee turnover.  This can be achieved one-on-one with a coaching approach. However, it will cost much more time to hold individual meetings throughout the organisation and doesn’t ensure anonymity for employees. The latter may lead to dishonesty in responses on attitudes to avoid negative consequences.   A more quantitative and anonymous approach is an employee satisfaction survey. It’s easily and quickly set up and distributed among organisational members, also easily flexibly evaluated.   Furthermore, the same survey can be conducted on a frequent basis to receive comparative values over time and determine the impact of certain actions aimed at increasing employee satisfaction.   Asking the right questions in employee satisfaction surveys There are three overarching and intertwined factors that could potentially impact employee dissatisfaction which need to be covered in an employee survey.   Job: Aspects such as low perceived meaning, tasks being too challenging, unpleasant work conditions, insufficient development and promotion possibilities, and high stress due to workload can easily lead to staff dissatisfaction with their jobs and role within the organisation. For example: 82.39% of employees say a lack of progression would influence the decision to leave their jobs. (CareerAddict.com) Employees said the three most contributing factors to quitting their jobs were a lack of career advancement opportunities, low pay, and the absence of a salary pay raise. (CareerAddict.com) Of those who had already quit their jobs, 35% would consider returning if they were offered a better salary or a higher position. (CareerAddict.com) Environment: Circumstances related to employees’ teams, departments or general environment such as low collegial appreciation and respect, slim contribution opportunities and poor communication can make people feel uncomfortable and can have a negative effect on job performance and interaction with coworkers. 83% of people feel their relationships with coworkers are excellent, very good or good. (Cigna) 33% of executives say, "Improving our employees’ loyalty and faith in the company is a top priority." (The Predictive Index) 67% of employees are as productive as they can be in their office environment. (Olivet University) Management: Supervisors who do not lead in a performance-driven and emotionally intelligent way can put immense pressure and stress on employees and create a negative work environment.  They may also make employees feel undervalued and intimidated. 9% of employees said their company/manager is awesome at acting on feedback, 24% said pretty good, 44% said okay, and 23% said horrible. (Achievers) 41% of employed Americans want a work environment where employees are encouraged to have a work-life balance. (Cigna) 56% of workers said their employer or manager generally determines their work schedules. (TSheets) If viewed correctly and addressed appropriately, any staff dissatisfaction that may arise can be used as an opportunity to demonstrate an organisation’s willingness to put the effort in and change, as well as improve existing conditions and processes, rather than to consider them a threat or a weakness. This strengthens the bond between organisations and their employees to ensure long-term staff retention and loyalty. LimeSurvey offers an employee satisfaction survey template which will be available for "LimeSurvey Cloud" (Basic, Expert, Enterprise) and as "ComfortUpdate" for the community edition (3 Months, 6 Months, 12 Months) subscriptions and covers all the above mentioned variables/items to measure employee satisfaction effectively. If you have questions or suggestions, simply contact our support and we will answer you as soon as possible.