Here you will find all the answers

Moodtalk is a tool for surveys. You define a topic and the matching questions, and the survey goes out to everyone who has been added. Moodtalk can be used at any level of an organization, for a single team, for a division or for the whole company.

Instead of filling in a questionnaire, each person has a short conversation: the system asks the question, reads the answer and follows up when an example or a reason is missing. Answers are typed or spoken, in around 80 languages.

The difference lies in what happens afterwards. Moodtalk analyses the answers, groups them into topics and presents them so that it is clear at a glance what matters in the team. What was said is visible, who said it is not. The discussion guide as well as the principles and measures build on this.

Moodtalk is used for everything that counts in an organization:

• Collaboration and mood within the team
• Employee surveys across the whole organization
• Process topics that get stuck in everyday work
• Change projects and their support
• Assessments on a single topic

Moodtalk suits every organization that wants to know from its employees how things are going and wants the answers in a structured form. Whether a single team, a division or the whole company, whether office, shift work or distributed locations, whether five people or several thousand: the process stays the same.

Two requirements are enough:

• An email address for every person who is meant to answer.
• The intention to work with the result.

Everything else, from the questions to the analysis, comes from Moodtalk.

Both are possible, and you decide which way suits you.

• Replace: Some of our customers have replaced their classic employee survey with Moodtalk entirely.
• Complement: Others keep it and use Moodtalk alongside for the topics the annual cycle does not cover.

If you want to keep the time comparison from your existing survey, you simply move the rating questions into Moodtalk.

The difference lies in the follow-up question. Moodtalk asks directly at the lowest value what the reason is. That way the reasons behind the numbers are available immediately instead of being collected in a second round.

You need two things to get started:

• The email addresses of the people who are meant to answer.
• A current topic that is on your minds.

Moodtalk suggests the questions for it, and you can adjust them.

Good to know: From signing in to a fully prepared first survey takes about ten minutes. You can interrupt at any time and continue later, your progress is kept.

1. Open moodtalk.com and click «Login» in the top right corner.
2. Enter the work email address under which you have been added to Moodtalk.
3. Depending on how your organization is set up, it continues differently from here:
   • First sign-in: You receive an email that lets you set your password.
   • Already registered: Enter your existing password.
   • Sign-in via company login (SSO): You are signed in through your organization's login. A separate Moodtalk password is not required in this case.

Which sign-in route applies depends on how Moodtalk was set up in your organization.

Good to know: No sign-in is required in order to take part in a survey. Simply click the link in the invitation email. You sign in to set up surveys, look at results or manage the team.

A team is the group that works together regularly and holds discussions together. It is the unit a survey runs for and the unit the results are summarised for.

The scope follows the collaboration, not the org chart. A team can be a ward, a department, a project team or a leadership body. Distributed locations and shift work work just as well.

Good to know: A team is not fixed for good. You can add further teams at any time, add or remove people and change the name. When in doubt, choose the scope in which the group already meets today.

Add every person who works together day to day, and deliberately broadly.

• Apprentices, part-time employees and people on shift work belong in the team. Answers from people who rarely get a say in everyday work are often especially helpful.
• For temporary and external people your organization decides.

As a rule: anyone who works with the team over a longer period and is affected by the collaboration belongs in it.

For each person, email address, language and permission are recorded, no names. Whether it is a company or a private address makes no difference. You can also define whether a person takes part in surveys: someone who should only read along, for example an accompanying person from HR, is added and deactivated for participation.

Good to know: Adding people does not send any email, and you can correct the list at any time.

Onboarding means setting up your team until the first survey is ready. It consists of four steps:

1. Open the access from the welcome email and sign in.
2. Check the team name.
3. Add the members.
4. Set up the first survey.

Together this takes about ten minutes. You can interrupt and continue later.

Good to know: Nothing goes out to the team while you are setting up. The first email to the members arrives when the survey is sent.

You do this together with your contact person at Moodtalk. You provide the org chart and the email addresses, the Customer Success team sets up the structure, creates the teams and assigns the responsible person for each team. This is the usual and the fastest route.

After that you decide how to continue:

• Decentralised: The team leads receive their access and set up their own team themselves.
• Centralised: The surveys are set up and sent from a central point.

Both are possible, also side by side, and switching later is possible too.

Inform the employees shortly before the survey starts about two things:

• An email from Moodtalk: Point out that an email from Moodtalk will be sent and that the link it contains leads straight to the survey.
• The purpose of Moodtalk: Briefly explain why Moodtalk is being used and what the survey is meant to achieve.

An email template is available for this, which you can rewrite in your own words.

Good to know: For employees without email access, the same text also works as a notice on the wall or as a short announcement in a meeting.

It is best to start as early as possible. As soon as a topic comes up and the team members have been added, it is worth starting.

No more lead time is needed: one or two days between informing the team and sending the survey are enough.

Anyone who waits for a quieter month usually postpones the start by a quarter.

This is ensured through the display and through access rights. Three mechanisms work together here:

• Answers without a sender: The results do not show who said what.
• Separated per question: A person's answers are kept separate for each question. Someone who writes something recognisable on one question is therefore not recognisable on all the others.
• Minimum number of answers: Below a minimum number, nothing is shown at all. Your organization sets this number.

The Assistant helps along the way. Before sending, it shows what will be stored and shared, corrections are still possible at that point, and if a name appears in the text it asks whether it should remove it.

The survey itself carries the note to share only what you are comfortable sharing. The content of an answer can point to a person, and that cannot be prevented technically.

The data is held on servers in Switzerland. The platform, the answers, the databases and the backups sit in a Swiss Microsoft Azure data centre. Only summarising and translating run in a European Azure data centre. Transmission and storage are encrypted.

What is stored is a person's email address, language and permission as well as their answers. Nothing is sold or passed on to third parties.

Your organization is the controller, Moodtalk processes the data on its behalf. When the collaboration ends, the data is deleted or returned.

Good to know: The data processing agreement, the privacy policy, the backup and contingency plan and the data centre certificates are available in the Trust Center at moodtalk.com/trust-center.

The Assistant supports you with everything that comes up along the process or in terms of content. It takes on five tasks:

• It suggests the questions you use to set up the survey.
• It runs the survey as a conversation and follows up on short answers.
• It sorts the free-text answers into topics.
• It prepares the discussion guide.
• It suggests principles and measures.

Decisions are not made there: you can change, replace or delete every suggestion.

On top of that there is the chat. It knows the team's previous surveys and brings knowledge about leadership and collaboration with it. So you can turn to it for both: what a result means, where something sits in the platform, or a conversation with a particular focus as a guide.

You can ask it about anything that concerns your team, and about anything you want to do in the platform. The Assistant is a chat and draws on two sources:

• General best practices on leadership and collaboration.
• Everything held about your team in Moodtalk, meaning the answers from the surveys, the topics discussed and the measures recorded.

The longer you use Moodtalk, the more it knows about your team and the more precise its answers become.

Typical questions are «What are the three biggest challenges in this team right now?» or «Suggest measures that help us with the topic of remote work». It answers with an analysis across everything it knows about the team and, if you want, proposes concrete next steps.

A suggestion turns straight into a measure. You can still adjust the wording, assign a topic, set a responsible person and a deadline, and record the measure from within the chat.

Good to know: The wording does not matter, and typos are not a problem.

The AI runs as a private service in the EU and not through a public chat service. Processing is GDPR-compliant, and nothing is passed on to third parties.

Legally, your organization is the controller and Moodtalk processes the data on its behalf.

Good to know: All documents for a review by your data protection office are available in the Trust Center at moodtalk.com/trust-center.

As a rule, use as few questions as possible. Beyond a certain number, motivation and response rate drop, and that loss weighs more than the extra answer.

The recommendation is therefore few questions on one specific topic and more frequent surveys instead.

It also makes the follow-up work easier, because you work through one topic at a time instead of five at once.

The person who starts a survey decides which questions are asked. The «Admin» permission is required for this.

Moodtalk suggests suitable topics and questions. These suggestions keep developing and are extended by new answers.

Questions that have already been used can be reused. The principles of the organization can also be included as questions. That way you can check regularly how well they are being lived in everyday work.

The system follows up automatically and individually. If an answer stays short or unclear, it asks a follow-up question that fits exactly that answer, at most twice per question.

Anyone who answers concretely straight away moves on to the next question. Anyone who does not want to add anything says so and is done.

The more precisely you phrase the question, the less reason there is to follow up.

Good to know: A short note to the team beforehand puts the follow-up questions in context. They are the reason meaningful answers are available at the end.

Yes, Moodtalk sends both automatically. You set the send date with time and the deadline, after that it runs on its own.

• The invitation goes to everyone who has been added, at the time you set. They fill it in without signing in.
• The reminder arrives three days before the deadline and only reaches people who have not answered yet.

In addition you can trigger the reminder manually at any time, again only to those still outstanding. The system knows who is outstanding; the number is shown, not the names.

Good to know: You set up a recurring survey once and schedule it in a rhythm, for example every two weeks.

The interval follows the occasion and not the calendar. A new round is worthwhile in three cases:

• The situation has changed and a current overview is missing.
• New topics have come up.
• A rhythm fits the project and the way you work, for example always before a particular meeting or after a project phase ends.

The interval is measured by two things: how strongly the environment and the topic change, and how quickly you can work through the topics and set changes in motion.

As long as measures from one round are still running, a new survey brings little.

You see the status at the survey itself, continuously. As soon as the survey has been sent, it shows how many of the people added have answered, for example seven out of twelve, and how many responses are still outstanding.

From there you trigger the reminder to exactly those outstanding people. The results fill up in parallel.

The status is shown as a number and not as a list of names. It is not visible who answered or who said what. If you mention that when following up, the team knows what the reminder is based on.

Among our customers the response rate averages around 70 percent. The announcement has the strongest effect.

Say one or two days beforehand that an email from Moodtalk will arrive on day X at time Y. Two points are worth mentioning:

• The voice function: Answers can also be spoken, Swiss German included.
• No login needed: One click on the link in the email is enough.

The rest is decided after the survey. If the results are discussed and something comes out of them, more people fill in the next one. At organization level it also helps to make visible where earlier surveys led to something.

More than 80 languages are available for answering. When adding people you assign each person their language, and that controls which language they receive the questions in.

So you do not have to split up multilingual teams. Everyone receives the same survey in their own language, and the answers come together in one analysis. The analysis itself appears in German, English, French or Italian, and the original wording stays visible alongside it.

Answers are typed or spoken, and Swiss German works. What is spoken is transcribed, and the person sees the text before sending and can edit it.

Good to know: Mentioning the voice function in the announcement lowers the barrier and leads to more detailed answers.

When setting it up, a dedicated step lets you choose which teams the survey goes to. The teams you are authorised for are shown, and you can exclude individual ones. A survey across the whole organization requires a person with access to all divisions.

In the same sequence you define who sees the results, only the central point or the team leads as well. A common pattern is the cascade:

1. The management team sees the results first.
2. Then the division leads.
3. The teams last.

The announcement to the teams comes either from the central point or through the line managers. What matters is that it is clear beforehand which of the two routes applies.

Every answer has three dots next to it, and through them you send a message to the person who wrote the comment, without revealing who they are. They receive an email and decide for themselves whether to seek a conversation.

This lets you respond to a single critical piece of feedback without breaking the commitment you made to the team.

A response is worthwhile in every case, because anyone who writes a critical comment wants to know that it arrived. If the topic needs more than one message, it belongs in the discussion. Bring it in there as a perception within the team and not as a quotation.

Your organization sets this number, and there are two separate values:

• For the rating questions there is a value of its own.
• For the free-text answers there is a value of its own, usually higher. A written sentence reveals more about the person writing it than a point on a scale.

Answers are counted, not members. A team of twelve people where three have answered stands at three.

You can find out which values apply in your case from the person who looks after Moodtalk for you.

The history builds automatically as soon as the same rating question is asked again. It is then shown without you having to set anything up, and this works the same at both levels.

With text answers the history shows differently: in whether a topic recurs and how the tone changes.

Good to know: Both become meaningful from three or four rounds onwards.

The combined view builds automatically as soon as the teams were part of the same survey. At organization level the results appear across all participating teams together, and you can narrow them down to individual divisions. If a division contains several teams, their answers are combined there.

The division view shows more than the individual team results combined. It shows which topics recur across the teams, and that is not recognisable from a single team. At HHM, workload was the most frequent topic across 16 teams, followed by project organisation and information flow.

Looking into the individual teams remains necessary nonetheless. The division average smooths out differences that are visible in the individual teams.

You select the topics in the results. At the top of every analysis there is the option to select it for the discussion.

Everything you mark this way becomes a discussion, and the discussion questions for it are supplied automatically.

After that you can adjust and prepare everything. For the conversation itself you start presentation mode in the top right: you go through the topics together, record notes, measures and principles directly, close the discussion at the end and download the minutes.

Communicate the results first, the measures then emerge in the conversation.

The discussion guide is built exactly that way: for each topic first the analysis, then the discussion questions. The team usually sees the analysis for the first time in the discussion and needs that basis before talking about solutions. You record principles and measures during the discussion, and the minutes are there at the end.

If you want to send something out beforehand, there are two routes:

• Release the results for the team.
• Send the summary, which you can shorten beforehand.

Anyone who comes into the discussion with finished measures mainly collects agreement. Measures that emerge in the conversation are more likely to be carried by the team.

You always find the discussion guide in the Discussions area. It shows what has already been prepared, and one click on a discussion takes you back exactly to where you last stopped.

The guide comes fully prepared. For each topic you find:

• the analysis with the statements that belong to it,
• the discussion questions for it,
• suggestions for principles and measures.

The whole thing is a text field: you can rewrite, add, delete and insert images. «Close discussion» creates the minutes as a Word document.

A principle is a generally binding rule that everyone follows. It can sound fundamental, like «we treat each other with respect», or be entirely operational, like «the daily documentation goes into folder X». At organization level, principles are usually the company values.

Principles can be defined together or set from above, and you can adjust them at any time later.

The difference to a measure lies in the time horizon. A measure is a to-do with a deadline and a status. A principle applies permanently.

You measure it through the survey. When setting it up you select from the existing questions, and the principles of the organization and the principles of the team are available there, depending on the level.

The team then rates how well the implementation works in everyday work.

The Principles area shows every principle that has been recorded. If a principle has been measured, the history is shown there as well, meaning how implementation has developed over time.

There are two routes:

• Through the conversation: You discuss the results together with the people they concern, and define and record the measures there.
• Directly from the answers: You derive the measures yourself and inform the people concerned afterwards.

Both are possible. The route through the conversation has a longer-lasting effect, because the measure comes from the team itself.

Whatever is recorded in the discussion ends up in the Measures area automatically. You do not have to enter it twice, both places show the same list.

You track the implementation in the Measures area. It holds a list of every measure that has been created, each with its status and the planned implementation period.

The list distinguishes three states:

• In progress, meaning everything that is currently running.
• Overdue, meaning everything whose end date has passed.
• Completed, meaning everything that is done and closed.

That way it is visible at a glance what is running, what is coming due and what has already been achieved.

Open the measure. At the bottom you find the Close section with a toggle, which starts out on «Not completed».

Switch the toggle and click «Save». The measure is then done and is marked as completed in the list.

Good to know: Completed measures stay visible in the list. That way it is possible to trace what came out of a survey.

You record the measure like any other and then forward it to the department responsible. The people responsible are informed about it.

It is almost always about the same three topics: salary, remote work and group-wide policies.

That way the topic stays recorded and sits with the department that can decide on it. Tell the team afterwards what was passed on and to whom.

It takes one person inside the organization who is responsible for it. Someone has to coordinate the process, follow up when a discussion does not happen, and make sure the results actually turn into measures. Without that role it stays at good intentions.

That person needs two things:

• The backing of the management team, so they can also place topics where they do not decide themselves.
• An overview across all teams, to see where something is stalling.

Moodtalk provides that overview. It shows which team has discussed the results, which measures have been recorded, what is coming due and how a value develops across several surveys. That way it is possible to trace what was said and what came out of it.

The most effective step, however, comes even earlier. Decide before the start which topics you are willing to act on, and ask about exactly those. The second survey then shows the team that answering was worth it, and the response rate rises.

Yes, you can add or remove people at any time, and at both levels.

• At team level it runs through the team settings. You add a person with email address, language and permission, remove them through the same row, and change permission, Team Lead and language directly in the list.
• At organization level the same happens in the administration, there also across several teams at once.

Adding people does not send any email. The person first hears from Moodtalk with the next survey. If an email address is wrong, you remove the person and add them again.

Good to know: If the member list comes from another system, it is synchronised automatically and the rows carry a lock. Changes then run through support@moodtalk.ch.

You can trigger the email for the running survey again by hand, in the team settings next to the person concerned. They then receive the invitation to the current survey once more.

Before you do that, two things are worth checking:

• The spam or junk folder. That is where the first email ends up most often.
• The email address in the list. If it is wrong, a second send will not help. In that case you remove the person and add them again with the correct address.

Good to know: The participation status only shows how many responses are outstanding, not who has answered. So anyone who did not receive the email either speaks up themselves, or it becomes apparent when you ask in the team.

You find the setting in the team settings under the survey settings. If it is active, all members see the results of every survey as soon as they are available.

If it is off, you decide individually after each survey. The release then runs in the Results area.

Good to know: This setting only concerns visibility within the team. Who has access at higher levels depends on the division assignments and is not affected by it.

The default is three days before the deadline, and yes, you can change it. The number of days is in the survey settings of the team, where you adjust it and save it.

The reminder only reaches people who have not answered yet. Anyone who has already filled in the survey receives no second email.

Good to know: Whether reminders are sent automatically at all is also a setting. And independently of that, you can trigger the reminder at the survey by hand at any time, again only to those outstanding.

The team type states what a team stands for, and it controls how its results feed into the organization level. You choose it in the team settings, in the same place where you adjust the team name. There are three:

• Core team, for teams that work together long-term in this configuration, for example purchasing, sales or a leadership team. These teams represent the basic structure of the organization, they are visible in the interface analysis, and their measures and analyses are shared at organization level.
• Temporary team, for groups that only exist for a foreseeable period, for example a transformation project, a task force or a focus group. They are hidden in the interface analysis to maintain clarity. Their results and measures are still included in the aggregated situational analysis at organization level.
• 1-on-1 Team, for direct collaboration between two people, for example a bilateral meeting, a coaching session or a 1:1 exchange. These dialogues stay outside: they are not included in the interface analysis, and measures and analyses are not shared at organization level but remain between the two people.

When in doubt, choose core team. Most teams are core teams, and the type can be changed later.

Yes, you can connect Moodtalk to Office 365. In the team settings you authorise the connection once, after which it is in place for your calendar and the calendars of your team members.

If you plan a survey with a discussion period, that appointment is transferred to the calendar automatically and entered as a blocker. That way the slot for the discussion is already fixed as soon as the survey is planned.

Good to know: Other system integrations do not run through the team settings. If you need one, support@moodtalk.ch is the right address.

The smallest unit is always the team. Several teams can be combined into a subdivision or a division, and all teams together form the organization.

To set up the structure, Moodtalk needs four pieces of information:

• the email addresses of everyone in a team,
• who the manager of the team is,
• which division the team belongs to,
• who leads that division.

Your contact person at Moodtalk uses that to set up the structure. After that you can create, rename and move divisions yourself.

Good to know: After moving something it is worth checking the permissions, because they move with it.