When creating questionnaires in My Effectory, you’ll see both themes and topics. They both help you organise questions, but they work in different ways. Knowing the difference will help you choose the right questions and get the results you need.
Themes
Effectory provides insight into HR themes that are most relevant for organisational performance. Each theme is based on a fixed set of questions. In the Question Library, you can see why a theme might be relevant for your organisation and which questions it includes.
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Why they matter: If you include all questions from a theme, you’ll get both individual question scores and a theme score: the average of all answers to those questions. This is useful for tracking trends over time and comparing results with benchmarks.
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Where they appear: Themes don’t show in the survey itself, but you’ll see them in your results dashboard and reports.
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Example: Employee Engagement is a theme, with 4 questions that together provide one score.
Topics
Topics group together related questions on a similar subject. All questions in a topic belong to the same question set.
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Why they matter: They make it easier to structure your questionnaire and select relevant questions. Each question in a topic is scored individually: there is no combined topic score.
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Where they appear: Topics show in the survey itself, but not in your results dashboard.
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Example: Growth & development is a topic, with 7 individual questions, each with its own score.
Themes vs. topics at a glance
| Themes | Topics | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Obtain insights about a specific HR theme | Group questions about a similar subject |
| Scoring | Individual question scores and overall theme score | Individual question scores |
| Where you see them | Results dashboard | Survey |
| Example | Employee Engagement | Growth & development |
Where to view themes and topics
You can explore all available themes and topics in the Question Library, which is available separately for each project.
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Go to the Themes & topics tab to browse all options.
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Each item is clearly labelled as either a theme or topic, and shows the number of questions it contains.
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For every theme, you’ll find an explanation of its relevance and the list of questions it includes.
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For each topic, you’ll see just the list of questions.
This is the best place to review your options before building a questionnaire.
