Everybody Has a Manager. Everybody Also Has an IT Department.
Every employee is simultaneously a deliverer of service and a customer of it — of the help desk, the payroll team, the facilities crew, the finance approval queue. These internal service experiences consume real hours every week, decide how capable the company feels to work for, and are measured approximately never. Tickets get closed; whether closing them felt like service remains a rumor.
This survey is the instrument for that blind spot. Twice a year, employees — and where relevant, external partners — rate the departments they actually interact with: responsiveness, clarity, resolution, and the one thing each team should fix. The output is an internal service scorecard, and it reliably surfaces the finding no org chart shows: the silent bottleneck, the department everyone depends on and everyone works around.
How the Instrument Works
The structure keeps respondents anchored to real experience:
- Which department did you interact with most this period? A dropdown question of the internal functions — IT, HR, finance, facilities, legal, procurement.
- The service ratings. Responsiveness, clarity of communication, and whether the issue actually got resolved — three rating items for the department touched.
- The work-around check. One yes/no: have you ever avoided asking this department because it was not worth the trouble? A yes rate above a third is the sound of a process already being routed around — workarounds are shadow processes with maintenance costs.
- The one fix. For that department, a single short text: the one change that would most improve working with them.
- An open field for anything the structure missed.
Ratings arrive with context — frequency of contact via a multiple choice — because a department used weekly and one used twice a year are different datasets.
Reading the Scorecard
Department-level scores land with each department lead; the cross-department picture lands with leadership. Three findings repeat wherever the survey runs: the overloaded team nobody resourced because its service was never measured, the broken process rather than the people behind a bad score, and the department quietly excelling at invisible work. Tag each distribution link with hidden fields — site, region, employee or partner — so the response archive segments the scorecard cleanly. Twice a year is the right cadence; more often measures memory, not service.
For adjacent operational intake and feedback instruments, the business forms collection is the natural shelf.
Frequently Asked Questions
Doesn't rating internal teams poison collaboration?
Public leaderboards would; private scorecards do not. Each department sees its own results plus themes — never a ranking — and the framing matters: this is service improvement data, not a competition.
What if a department's score is unfair to the people in it?
Follow the structural thread first. Most bad internal scores trace to under-resourcing or broken process, and the work-around and open-text fields usually name the cause explicitly. A bad score with a structural cause is a budget conversation, not a blame one.
Should partners and vendors be included?
Yes, with their own link and a trimmed question set. External partners experience your contracting, invoicing, and account teams — and they will tell an anonymous survey what they would never say in a quarterly review.
How is this different from an employee satisfaction survey?
Satisfaction measures the employment experience as a whole; this measures specific service relationships inside it. A company can score well on culture while its finance queue quietly costs everyone a day a week — this instrument exists for exactly that gap.