We’ve also heard repeated requests for something else you want: improved collaboration tools. And that’s why we’re pleased to introduce an important new feature we’ve just added: Editor Notes.

In the past, your best bet for getting feedback on a survey was resorting to the tried-and-true “email flood” technique. You know what that is, right? It’s the one where you send out a survey test link to the rest of your colleagues, then wait for a few minutes until your inbox is flooded with suggestions about things that don’t work or don’t look right in the survey.

You might have also experienced the popular “passive-aggressive co-worker” scenario, where one of your colleagues goes into the survey and makes changes on their own. (And doesn’t let anyone know about it, naturally.) If you’ve experienced this particular situation, you know that it’s not very fun to login to a survey you’ve spent lots of time building, only to find that a question changed by a co-worker has messed up all your logic.

At SurveyGizmo, we’re not a fan of either of the above scenarios. And we want to make it easier for you to collaborate with your teams to create amazing surveys. Which is why we’ve launched Editor Notes!

Editor Notes are quick notes that you can add to your in-design survey. If you have a multi-user account, you can have discussions about your survey’s elements with other account users. The back-and-forth can go on as long as you want it to.

If you have a single-user account, Editor Notes still work for you! You can use them to create notes to yourself about different elements, or annotate your surveys for future reference.

Additionally, if you contact our awesome Support team with a question about a specific survey question, we can now leave you Notes in your survey about your issue. (Sometimes it’s easier to see the solution right inside your survey, rather than having to go back and forth from a support ticket.)

The collaboration possibilities are endless.

We’ve made Editor Notes really easy to use. To create an Editor Note, just click on the Add Note link at the top right of any element in the survey editor. If notes have already been added to a survey element, you’ll see a running tally in place of the Add Note link.

Editor Notes are active in your account now – go give them a try!

We asked ourselves, what kind of outcome do we want for the company overall? The obvious answer is revenues and profits, but we took it down a level and looked at the key drivers of those metrics. The short answer: customers, but more specifically happy customers.

So that led us to decide that our profit sharing program should have five key features:

1. Incent employees to grow the customer base
2. Incent them equally to keep existing customers happy
3. Incent them to help the organization run efficiently
4. Be transparent and engender teamwork
5. Reward should be on-going and immediate

Growing the customer base, while satisfying existing customers

Second, we asked ourselves what we value as customers of other companies. Is it good service? An awesome product? All of the above? Obviously, it varies, but we felt that for a service like ours, both product and customer service are critical to success. The thing we valued least was salesmanship. So that means at a core level we value not just making the sale, but building a great product, and offering fantastic support to go along with it.

Each role inside SurveyGizmo contributes to the whole and we wanted to respect that. Our sales people aren’t commissioned and the wall between support and sales is a pretty small one — easily jumped over. It’s fun explaining this when we hire to either side. We wanted a plan that got everyone involved.

Efficient and Team Oriented

Finally, one of our core values is teamwork. As a small company we need to pull together and pitch-in without regard for who gets the credit. So we wanted our profit sharing plan to reward all employees, not just star performers. Based on those principles, co-founder Scott McDaniel came up with a simple, yet effective structure. So simple we can say it in one sentence. Here it is:

For every active customer we have at the end of every month, we place $2 into a pool to be shared equally by all employees.

And that’s it. New employees must be with the company for 60 days before they can participate, but that’s the only string attached. There are no complicated formulas or hidden agendas. We don’t hold back until the end of the year and hand out checks disconnected from the day to day effort. And most important, we are equally incented to delight existing customers as much as we are to get new ones.

Employee Feedback

Last week at our book club meeting we asked employees to give us their feedback on the profit sharing structure and it was overwhelmingly positive. Here are some of the reasons we like it:

• It’s very simple to understand.
• It’s transparent. Our admin console keeps a running tally of the number of customers, so all employees know at a glance roughly what to expect in their next paycheck.
• It rewards retention as well as new business. A lost existing customer is just as painful, perhaps more so, than a lost new customer.
• It serves as a natural break on hiring too far ahead of growth. Every new employee decreases everyone’s percentage slightly. So if we bring on new people and don’t gross up the difference in 60 days (when the new hire’s share kicks in), it affects everyone’s share. This forces us to ask, “How will bringing this person on help us grow our customer base?”
• It’s a terrific recruiting tool, particularly in this economy.

Of course, no bonus system is perfect. For example, you could argue that this one is flawed because it has a short-term bias. But this has worked well for us, so we’ll continue to let it ride.

How do profit sharing or bonus programs work in your companies?