Jacob ShriarEmployee surveys are great, but more often than not, they’re boring, bland, and way too long. It’s important for companies to try a softer approach, and use things like employee pulse surveys.
Usually, survey questions are vague, and not very exciting to answer. They also often use corporate buzzwords that just add confusion for employees. The better way to do it is by focusing a survey on a few questions, and being as specific as possible.
You should also use different answers than “strongly agree” or “strongly disagree,” make it more fun, and more specific.
Remember, the deeper you get into the actual day-to-day of an employee, the more you’ll be able to uncover in terms of how they’re feeling.
Most employee surveys will be pretty vague, and focus on broad things like how satisfied they are with their job, their manager, or their pay, but there are plenty of other things that affect engagement.
Companies would be wise to create different types of employee surveys to address all of these different areas, and then look for patterns or overall themes across those topics.
Let’s go through some employee survey samples that you can use to get inspired from.
1. Relationship With Colleagues
While it’s important to understand how employees feel about their managers, asking them how they feel about their coworkers is arguably even more important.
The research clearly shows that if you feel connected with your coworkers, you’ll be happier and more engaged.
Research also shows, that if you’re ignored at work by your peers, it has an even bigger psychological effect on you than being bullied.
An example of a question you could ask to measure relationship with colleagues is:
Which of these describes your relationship with your coworkers?
– I don’t like any of them
– We’re strictly coworkers
– I try to be friendly with some of them
– I’m friends with most of them
2. Wellness
For many companies, wellness is an afterthought. Some companies don’t believe it’s their responsibility to look after the health of their employees.
Even without looking at the research, and there is a lot, it makes sense that if your employees are healthier, they’ll be more productive, have more energy at work, take less sick days, etc.
It’s really in the company’s best interest to have healthy employees, so it’s important to find out how healthy employees are.
Knowing that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, here’s an example of a question you could ask to measure wellness:
Which of these describes what you ate for breakfast today?
– Nothing
– Sugary cereal
– Eggs and bacon
– Fruit
3. Self–Evaluation
Most traditional surveys never answer the question of “what’s in it for me” for the employee.
The surveys are focused on the company itself, but it’s even more important to have the employee understand where they stand in the company.
Allowing employees the chance for that retrospective is a great exercise to get them thinking about how they can improve. As a manager, you can use that data to help you in performance evaluations.
An example question you could ask is:
On a scale from 0-10, how productive were you this week?
4. Personal Growth
Personal growth is the key to employee engagement because it’s what truly motivates us as people. The desire to grow, the sense of freedom and autonomy from making our own decisions, and the need to feel like we’re part of something bigger.
These are very important metrics to be tracking over time, because since they’re so meaningful to us, if they start to slip, they need to be fixed right away.
There are many questions you could ask around autonomy, mastery, and purpose, but one example is:
On a scale from 0-10, rate your sense of autonomy at work.
5. Company Knowledge
They say you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.
It’s hard for an employee to have the same amount of passion as someone like the founder or CEO, since they haven’t been through the tough times.
It’s important for employees to know the history of the company, to get a better sense of how they got to where they are today, and where they plan on going in the future.
One question you could ask to test this is:
Do you know the company’s founding story?
– Don’t know, and don’t care
– No, I never heard it, but I’d be interested to
– Yes I know it, but I don’t think much of it
– Yes, it’s very inspirational
6. Work Environment
There is a lot of psychology behind an employee’s work environment, things like the color of the walls, the ergonomics of their chairs and desks, and other small things that can have huge effects on productivity.
It’s important to be measuring their satisfaction with their environment, as it could be costing you money in lost productivity.
It would be great to get qualitative feedback around this, since this is a great place to make quick changes.
As an example, you can ask an open-ended question like:
If you could change one thing about your work environment, what would it be and why?
7. Stay Interview
Stay interviews are similar to exit interviews, except they’re done when an employee is still working there, not when they leave.
Stay interviews are an incredible way of understanding what’s working well and what’s not about your culture.
Instead of conducting stay interviews with select employees every now and then, make it a continuously measured thing.
As an example, asking something like this can help you in your recruiting messaging:
What’s one thing {company} does that makes you want to stay here?
What Are Some Other Employee Survey Samples?
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