Likert or Not: What Sports Organizations Get Wrong About Surveys
At IntelliSport Analytics, a significant part of what we do involves building surveys. Not the kind you fire off in a Google Form and hope for the best, but bespoke research instruments designed around a client's specific culture, context, and strategic goals. That process involves understanding what a client actually needs to know, identifying validated instruments, accounting for industry-specific norms, and, most importantly, thinking carefully about how the data will be used once it's collected.
The Economist published a piece this week on the secrets to a good employee survey, and it caught our attention. It articulated, clearly and concisely, why so many surveys fail and why the ones that work tend to do so for very specific reasons.
Three Conditions for Effective Surveys
The Economist explained surveys are really useful only if three conditions are met:
They are properly designed
They are used in conjunction with other tools
They lead somewhere.
That's a deceptively simple framework, but many organizations don't actually meet these standards. Organizations will build surveys (writing questions, deploying a platform, collecting responses) without giving equal attention to what comes before or after. This means that designs might get rushed or important industry/client context gets ignored. Worse, the results from the survey end up sitting in a folder or computer somewhere, waiting for a follow-up meeting that never occurs.
How we Avoid these Poor Design and Outcome Choices at IntelliSport
We think about survey design the same way a good coach thinks about game planning. You don't just react to what's in front of you, you anticipate what the data might reveal and prepare your organization to receive it.
In practice, we achieve this through several steps:
First, we don't build surveys in isolation. Every instrument we design is situated within a broader research strategy, informed by what our clients already know (and don't know) about their organization.
Second, we look at what validated tools exist, where they're appropriate, and where a more customized approach is needed given the specific culture of a sports organization. A Division I athletic department has different needs than a professional franchise or a youth sports league. The questions, the framing, and the benchmarks all need to reflect that.
Third, we push clients to think about how survey outcomes connect to other decisions. — KPI development, reframing and addressing challenges, and through follow-up data collection. A survey should never live in its own silo because the findings should inform specific actions. That might mean informing a restructuring of how a coaching staff communicates, or identifying the leading indicators of turnover risk before it becomes a personnel crisis.
Fourth, and a core value of IntelliSport, a survey can never just end. Leaders who ask their people to take a survey must close the loop. If your staff takes time to be honest with you and then hears nothing back, you haven't built trust; you've eroded it. The Economist puts it plainly: surveys that prompt no follow-up action deepen cynicism rather than enthusiasm. We've all probably experienced this or seen that play out firsthand. The organizations that get the most out of survey work are the ones that communicate back to their people — not just "we heard you," but "here's what we're doing about it."
The Case for Longitudinal Thinking
The Economist also addresses practical points regarding survey frequency. Annual surveys are, in many ways, stale and unresponsive instruments. A lot can happen in twelve months, and retrospective evaluations are prone to well-documented memory biases. People tend to overvalue the most recent and most emotionally intense experiences when looking back. Instead of getting real organizational insight, you end up measuring the mood of the last month, not the reality of the year.
At IntelliSport, we consistently push clients toward longitudinal thinking. By using repeated measurement over time eliminates the noise a single survey cannot tune-out. For instance, outliers, including the person who rates everything a “one,” and the individuals who rate everything a “five,” become easier to identify and contextualize. Longitudinal data collection allows for meaningful patterns to emerge and the researchers can point to a coherent narrative. A narrative that can withstand scrutiny and hold up when you're making a case for strategic change to a board, an athletic director, or an ownership group.
Why the Leaders of IntelliSport Chose Sports, and Why It Matters
The Economist closes with a paradox: surveys are most useful in organizations that already care about what their people think, but those organizations often have less need for surveys in the first place. Culture and listening go together.
IntelliSport Analytics made a deliberate choice to work exclusively in the sports industry. We believe sports leaders are wired for exactly the kind of honest introspection that good survey work demands. Sports leaders are comfortable asking hard questions and used to performance data that doesn't flatter. These leaders understand that the truth, even when it's uncomfortable, is more useful than the version of events that makes everyone feel good in the short term.
In the sports industry as many others, too many surveys go to die on a shelf. The work should never end when the report lands in your inbox. At IntelliSport, we support clients across the full arc of the process: survey design, data collection, interpretation, strategic planning, and implementation. Data is only as valuable as the decisions it informs, and those decisions require a partner who understands the broader ecosystem you're operating in.