Google Forms are free to use, easy to set-up, and simple to distribute.
For busy HR folk, it seems the most straightforward and stress-free solution to use when surveying your employees.
But here’s the kicker – although Google is a tech Goliath (and we’re David in this story) – Stribe has what Google doesn’t – and that’s employee survey expertise.
Employee surveys are our bread and butter.
Day in, and day out, we’re speaking to our customers about what challenges they’re facing, what data they value most, what survey features are working best (and which aren’t).
From this feedback, we continue to build a product that doesn’t just simply collect employee feedback – but helps gain insights effortlessly, so you can create workplace change that matters.
Save a copy to see how Stribe compares to Google Forms, Microsoft Forms and SurveyMonkey.
The culture feels like it’s massively improved since we introduced Stribe. We really wanted to create a culture where people feel safe to speak up and Stribe has done that. 
Once your team’s demographic data is uploaded to Stribe, you won’t have to worry again about your reports being segmented. Stribe does all of that for you – all while keeping employee information anonymous.
This keeps your surveys nice and short (leading to better survey participation), because you aren’t wasting your employees’ time on questions like “What department do you work in?” or “Do you work from home or in the office?”
And even more importantly, it makes your survey data much more insightful!
Unless you specifically build a question in Google Forms relating to demographics (e.g. gender, age, time at organisation, department, employment status etc.) – you won’t have segmented data in your results. You would also have to do the analysis in a spreadsheet yourself manually. Not good!
It’s not uncommon for employee survey feedback to be a little ambiguous. Often, HR managers are left scratching their heads wishing that they could ask more questions to understand details better.
When this happens, Stribe has a solution. Admins can contact individuals off-the-back of independent feedback received in a survey and have a private conversation with that person to delve deeper in an anonymous messenger chat.
With this feature, the employee stays anonymous the entire time, and the admin is able to ask clarifying questions. It’s a win-win!
Google Forms has no option to do this. You’re left in the dark without knowing how to respond or what action to take, because you don’t have the full picture.
Stribe’s You Said, We Did feature makes it super easy to share your survey results and reports. Simply hit publish and your data is shared with your team in ready-made graphs and visuals.
Alongside the graphs, you’re able to announce tailored messages around the actions and next steps you’re going to take given the feedback received from employees. By sharing results in this way, you’ll gain buy-in from employees for future surveys and truly show them that their thoughts are valued.
When it comes to Google Forms, there’s no easy way to follow-up employees or leadership to tell them what’s happening as a result of their feedback. You also have to package up results and graphs yourself and distribute them manually. Who has time for that?
Google Forms makes evaluating free-text survey responses time consuming.
Without survey intelligence to help you navigate employee responses (sometimes hundreds and thousands of them), you’re forced to read each response individually and somehow determine if your team is feeling positive, negative, or indifferent about your organisation’s efforts.
With Stribe this isn’t a problem. We use machine learning magic to give you an accurate understanding of the sentiment of your surveys to help you quickly get a feel for your team’s emotions and feelings.
Stribe also pin-points common key phrases within free-text comments (and displays these ready for you to export) – so you can recognise trends and patterns fast.
Are we convincing you yet?
Stribe has a nifty feature that lets you create survey automations based on rules you set within the system.
For example – when onboarding new starters at your organisation, you’re able to send an onboarding survey automatically to employees based on the rule ‘Send survey one week after start date’. Pretty cool, right?
Google Forms doesn’t have this feature or ability – it would be a manual process for your team to calculate, identify and send.
Sending a reminder to staff who haven’t responded is a simple and effective trick to nudge colleagues to participate and boost the response rate of your employee survey. Sending a survey reminder with Stribe takes less than 20 seconds (and doesn’t break employee anonymity) – watch the how-to video.
Google Forms on the other hand doesn’t have this ability. There’s no way to identify who has or hasn’t responded unless you track this yourself manually – but unfortunately that would require breaking anonymity, which is a huge mistake with employee surveys. Read why anonymous employee feedback is so important.
Values is a unique feature to Stribe that tracks the progress of themes your company cares about most over-time. These could include things like mental health, sustainability, wellbeing, personal development etc.
Another nice thing about this feature is we don’t pre-set any of the values. You have complete freedom to choose any values based on the things that matter to you and your employees!
Values works by grouping tagged questions together in their own individual report, giving you a progress graph to better understand how employees feel about your chosen values.
It’s a clever way to see how your company’s core objectives and people strategy KPIs develop over time – and it’s one of our customers’ favourite features.
Google Forms simply doesn’t have a feature to match this – it’s a tool built for quick insights rather than focusing on long-term employee strategy.
That’s right – our final point is good old customer service!
Google Forms has some how-to resources and troubleshooting information online – but you’re never going to be able to pick up the phone or Live Chat with a friendly human being that’s happy to help you on your survey journey.
At Stribe, we’re here when you need us. We have an incredible team of People Scientists who know about employee engagement inside and out – and they’re dedicated to helping you build the best surveys to reach your organisation’s goals. Check out our case studies to see what our customers have to say about our team and using Stribe!
About the author
Starting out her early career as a journalist, Jade Madeley is an accomplished content writer with 8+ years’ experience across business, personal finance, SaaS, human resources and employee engagement. Working with Stribe, she crafts insightful content that brings complex HR topics to life and drives meaningful action.
