Breaking up a long survey

Q: Would it ever make sense to break a large engagement survey into several shorter surveys, distributed over a period of time?

A: I’ve often broken a single long survey into three separate surveys sent to mutually exclusive, mirror-image random samples–but at the same time. This way more people in total respond because they all have a shorter survey presented to them. I may repeat one or two “outcome” questions on all three versions, and of course the same demographic questions. This works best for very large companies so that the three random samples are each large enough for a small margin of error. It’s preferable to do them at the same time so that all the results capture the same moment in time so the various questions can be compared against each other. If you have a small group, I can see that surveying them all several times a year with shorter surveys could be an option.