If you’re a shipowner or ship manager of a small to medium sized shipping company, it can sometimes feel like it’s hard to know what’s actually going on aboard your vessels and what life on a container ship is like for the seafarers who work for you. If only there was some way to get feedback directly from the people that count: your crew.
Well, the good news is, now there is.
It’s called the Questionnaires feature and it’s something we’ve created within the Martide platform especially for employers who want to get honest answers to their most pressing questions.
An exciting new feature for employers: Questionnaires
The great thing about Questionnaires (if we do say so ourselves…) is that they’re completely customizable. Want to find out what your seafarers think about the food they’re served onboard? Ask them. Wondering if there are certain things about your maritime recruitment process that they find off-putting? Now’s your chance to find out.
Plus, not only can you ask the questions you want, you can also ask them how you want. For example, if you’d like a detailed response, you can ask for that. If you prefer yes or no answers, that’s available to you too.
Related: Why Asking for Feedback Can Boost Your Crew Retention Rates
So that you can get started collecting feedback and making changes, if need be, to your systems, procedures or processes, we’re going to walk you through using the new Questionnaires feature.
Creating a new questionnaire
First of all, log into your Martide account and click on your profile picture in the top right hand corner. In the drop down box, click on Settings. Like so:
You’ll see that we’ve also highlighted two boxes on the main screen: Questionnaires and Answered Questionnaires.
We’ll cover Answered Questionnaires further on in the post (spoiler alert: they’re exactly what they sound like!) For now, click on the Questionnaires icon and you’ll see this screen:
As you can see, this is very intuitive: To create a new questionnaire, click the big blue Add button. Meanwhile your current questionnaires will be displayed below. For now we’re going to focus on creating a new one.
First of all you’ll need to give your questionnaire a title/description. In our example we’re going to be asking the crew that have recently disembarked from our (fictional) vessel The Black Pearl a few questions.
You’ll see from the drop down list that you’re now able to choose the format you want this first question to be in: Paragraph, Multiple Choice, Checkboxes, Linear Scale, Multiple Choice Grid, or Checkbox Grid.
Feel free to play around with these options until you find the format that suits you and your specific questions best.
For our first question, we’re going to choose Checkboxes. Take a look at the screenshot below and you’ll see:
- We’ve selected our format (Checkboxes)
- We've added the title/question
- We’ve added two options - the only replies possible for this question: Yes or No
Click the little trash can icon at the side of the boxes if you want to discard a question type or an option to start again.
If you want to add a third, fourth, fifth etc option as a response, click the plus sign next to Add Option. If you’re done and want to move on to the next question, click Add Question.
Your questions can be in different formats each time - there’s no need to stick with the format you selected for your first question. In our example questionnaire, we’ve chosen to go for a multiple choice style answer next:
Next we’re going to ask a question that requires a little more input from the seafarer:
Keep on adding questions until you’ve covered everything you want to ask and then click the blue Save button. Your questionnaire will now be visible on the main Questionnaires page:
You can edit or delete all of your questionnaires here too.
Sending a questionnaire to a seafarer
Once you’ve created your questionnaire, you need to add it to your relevant Recruitment Pipeline. This works in the same way as the other stages you’ve added to a specific pipeline, such as English Test, Document Validation, Medical Check, Visa, Skype Interview and Negotiation. To add your questionnaire, go to Settings > Pipelines:
Select the pipeline you want to add the questionnaire to by clicking on Edit. When the pipeline page opens up, click the blue New Stage box in the right hand corner. You will then see this pop up box:
Choose Questionnaire and then complete the information as required in the following screen:
When you’ve finished, click on the blue Save button at the bottom of that page.
And that’s it - you’ve added a new questionnaire for all seafarers in that particular recruitment pipeline to answer, as part of the process.
Once a seafarer has completed this stage, you’ll be able to view all of your completed surveys in the Answered Questionnaires section under Settings.
We hope you find the Questionnaires feature really useful and that it gives you some deeper insight into what your seafarers are thinking and feeling about working for your shipping company.
If you’d like to read a more factual step-by-step guide to this feature, please feel free to take a look at our dedicated Support page for Questionnaires here.
Meanwhile if you’d like a refresher on using Pipelines, we have a handy guide to creating a pipeline here.
