Although the world might feel like a different place since your last survey, the principles and best practices for running a successful listening initiative haven’t changed. As you chart your course for your next employee survey, keep in mind these six fundamentals for successfully re-engaging with your employees:

1) Don’t let the tail wag the dog.

Said another way, don’t survey just because you can without clarifying your overall measurement strategy. Your measurement strategy needs to provide usable insights for your engagement, culture, or performance strategy. Remember the context: What are your organization’s mission-critical imperatives? How are you trying to shape or sustain your culture? How does engagement fit with your other employee experience initiatives? How can a more engaged workforce deliver the results you need?

2) “Shorter, faster, easier, more often” is the way to go.

We have always encouraged organizations to step away from the 100-item survey that takes months to process and leads to analysis paralysis. Technology makes it easier to conduct targeted pulse surveys more frequently and present the findings more quickly to leaders and managers online, enabling your organization to be more agile in responding to your employees’ needs.

3) It’s not about the data; it’s about the dialogue.

Employee feedback needs to inform conversations about improving engagement and performance. Those conversations must include all members of your workforce. If you start gathering information through a continuous listening strategy, make sure you have a way to close the feedback loop and involve employees. Our research suggests that asking for input without acting can lead to lower response rates and disengagement. (People are not “survey weary;” they are “weary of nothing happening.”)

4) Find the cadence that works for you.

Consider this when determining your listening pace: What kind of change management is required to manage and reset expectations of leaders and employees? Historically, what was your organization’s track record for action so far? Will people have enough time to act before you measure again? How will more frequent measurement overlap with your business or talent management cycles? There is no one-size-fits-all; make sure your measurement strategy resonates in the context of your organization.

5) Provide findings down to the lowest level possible—managers and their teams.

Although organization-wide initiatives have their place in your engagement strategy, in our experience change happens most quickly when managers and their teams take ownership of findings and determine what they can do within their control or influence. This means that continuous listening or pulsing strategies need to provide managers with relevant insights about their teams. Forget about random sampling. If you want every member of the workforce to own their part of your engagement or culture strategy (and yes, you do want that), you need to be able to give them their data, not a high-level sentiment sampling.

6) Understand the limitations of people analytics.

This is just one metric that can be combined with others you track in your organization. Kick up your opinion analysis by exploring how retention and performance metrics, exit interview, and promotion data relate to the employee survey. And don’t forget, it’s not just about the numbers. Looking at survey results through the prism of the day-to-day reality of your organization and recent events will deepen your analysis and help you determine actions that will lead to meaningful change for your employees.

Revisiting your listening strategy after a long pause can feel daunting, but sticking to the fundamentals will ensure a successful implementation and rollout of your survey. Just keep your eye on the reasons your organization cares about engagement in the first place as well as what’s going to work best in your culture.