Question about collecting feedback via form or request update

vakhanka

Hi I have a bit of an issue that I am struggling to solve myself.

I have a worksheet with that gets updates via data shuttle with a list of employees nominated for a performance award. I want to collect feedback from their respective unit managers on specific criteria. The feedback is a numeric rating that answers specific questions. For example, "On a scale of 1-5 how would you rate {{employee name}}'s ability to resolve a customer complaint?" or "On a scale of 1-5 how would you rate {{employee's name}} ability to navigate a work conflict?" I need to ask each manager 4-5 questions for each of their employees.

The dilemma that I face is that if I use the "request update" feature, the fields have to be column names, and column names are not long enough to be these questions. If instead, I set up an automation to email a form, there is no way to prepopulate the form with the employee's name, so it just creates a new row instead of populating the existing one.

Is there a workaround that I am just not seeing?

jessica.smith

@vakhanka Do you have access to Dynamic View? You might be able to create a workaround using a dynamic view report filtered to only show a manager their employees. Clicking the employee would open the details panel where they would fill out the survey. You can set custom labels for each field so you could replace the column name with the actual question. Not sure if this is a perfect solution, but could at least get you closer to the form you're looking for.

vakhanka

@jessica.smith Thank you for your idea. I do have Dynamic View. It's an interesting thought. I would have to build out specific contact lists with "their employees" for each manager though, wouldn't I? I am in a big company, so this would definitely be a big undertaking.

jessica.smith

@vakhanka That would probably be the best way long term if you went with this approach so that you don't need to manually add the manager before requesting the updates each time.

I did something similar at my company so that I could always link an employee to their manager and be able to show managers any employee data they wanted, like hours reported or assigned tasks.

In short, I created an Employee Database linking each employee to their manager and then on any sheet I needed to make the association, I added a hidden Manager column and used an index/match column formula with a cross-sheet reference to the database to input the manager for each row. Then I just use reports to show manager's their employee data by setting a filter to Manager is Current User.