Top 8 Questions to Ask on an Employee Satisfaction Survey

Are you asking the right questions on your employee satisfaction survey?

A good survey elicits practical and actionable responses that an organization can use to address employee pain points. This is why it’s vital to be thoughtful about the questions you’re including in your employee satisfaction survey.

If you’re struggling to think of the right questions to ask, I’ve put together a list of questions that you can use to draw insightful responses from your employees.

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Questions to Ask on an Employee Satisfaction Survey

1. How Happy Are You at Work?

If you want to gauge employee satisfaction, and find out whether they’re happy working for you, ask them. This is a direct question that anyone can answer and gives you a serious look into company morale.

The easiest way to set up a question like this is to use a Likert Scale form field on your employee survey form and have employees answer on a scale of 1 to 7 how happy they are working for you.

2. Would You Recommend the Company to Others?

Using a Net Promoter Score survey (NPS survey) form field, you can easily determine whether your employees would recommend your business as a great place to work or not.

Though this employee survey question doesn’t give you the whole story, it’s a great starting place. After all, some people may be planning to leave your company soon, but might still recommend it to others.

That said, a consistent NPS from employees shows you that you’re doing something right. To get started, read how to create an NPS survey form in WordPress. You can easily adapt this for different types of surveys.

3. Do You Understand Your Path to Promotion?

A study by Gallup found that those that are given the opportunity to develop within a company are twice as likely to stay with a company.

Make sure your employees understand what their growth opportunities are and what it takes to get promoted from within.

If you find that people are unsure about how to grow alongside your business, begin offering more training sessions to develop employees’ skills and prevent them from finding work elsewhere.

4. Do You Have the Tools and Resources to Do Your Job?

You may not realize that your employees are not reaching their full potential because of a lack of resources or tools.

Luckily, this is an easy fix that will show employees you care about their ability to do their job well. It will also improve your business too.

You can ask a simple “Yes” or “No” multiple choice question on your employee satisfaction survey form.

Then, using WPForms’ smart conditional logic, display an additional form field for those that answer “No” to find out what tool and resources they’re lacking so you can look into providing them.

5. Do You Feel Valued at Work?

You’ll retain more valued employees if you value them in return.

You may think you are appreciating those that make your business a success, but your employees may have other feelings.

• Only 21% of employees feel strongly valued at work.
• 79% of people claim that “lack of appreciation” is the reason for leaving an otherwise good job.

Don’t let your employees leave because of your lack of appreciation.

Adding to this, you might want to ask your employees how they feel their supervisors do when it comes to recognition. This can be done using a Dropdown or Multiple Choice form field to make answering simple on your employees.

Without enough recognition, morale and work engagement will begin to drop. You might even notice a loss in productivity.

The old rule, critique once, recognize twice is always a good motto for you and your managers to follow. But first, find out just how your employees feel by asking them.

6. Are You Satisfied with the Company’s Benefits Package?

This is best set up as a Likert Scale listing all the benefits you offer employees.

The benefits package you offer employees can be used to retain current employees and attract new ones to your company. Finding out where you might be missing a vital benefit is crucial to the success of your business since this plays into employee satisfaction.

7. Do You Feel Supervisors Take Feedback Seriously?

Part of growing with a company is feeling like you have a voice. No one wants to work for a company that doesn’t listen to their feedback or take their suggestions seriously.

Ask your HR department to run a survey on this. Find out how comfortable your employees are with speaking up when they have ideas or even concerns. Plus, find out whether they feel those in charge of making decisions value what they have to say.

The more involved your employees feel, the more productive and successful your business will be in the long run.

8. Do You Understand Our Organization’s Values?

It’s not enough to have your company’s vision, mission, and cultural values laid out in a document for employees to read. The last thing you want is to find out that people are working for you without any real understanding of how they’re actually contributing to the company.

Want to add another question that will shed light on how your employees feel about your company’s culture? Ask them to write three words that describe your organization’s culture. With these results you can find ways to improve your business’ culture to fit the needs of your employees.

And there you have it! You now know some vital questions to ask on an employee satisfaction survey.

Employee Satisfaction Survey – FAQs

If you have more questions about creating effective employee satisfaction surveys, you may find some of these questions previously asked by others helpful.

How often should employee satisfaction surveys be conducted?

It’s good practice to conduct surveys at least once or twice a year. This level of frequency maintains the ideal balance between giving enough space for fresh feedback to develop among your employees while also providing an organization enough time to act upon past feedback. Depending on the size and nature of your organization, this frequency can change in either direction.

How can organizations ensure anonymity and confidentiality in employee satisfaction surveys?

You can use this anonymous employee satisfaction template because it doesn’t capture any identifying information from the respondent. To further increase anonymity, you can also disable IP and cookie tracking on this form using WPForms’ GDPR enhancements. Using in-house forms and systems for collecting employee feedback could potentially be perceived as untrustworthy, so I recommend using a third-party tool.

Even more importantly, you should clearly specify the measures you’re taking as an organization to guarantee employee anonymity. This can go a long way in assuring your employees that your feedback system is truly anonymous.

How can organizations ensure high participation rates in employee satisfaction surveys?

There are usually multiple factors responsible for drawing higher participation in a survey. Some of the more impactful ones include highlighting the importance of the survey. It can be very effective to have your leadership emphasize that every individual feedback is carefully read and every response matters.

Talking about the confidentiality of the survey is another strong way to convince more employees to openly share their thoughts without fear of any backlash.

It’s also important to focus on the design of your survey itself. That entails keeping the length reasonably short, eliminating unnecessary or long-winded questions, and providing a comfortably long timeline for submission of feedback. You can also send multiple reminders to your employees about the importance of their feedback and encourage everyone to participate.

How can organizations address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in employee satisfaction surveys?

To address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in employee satisfaction surveys, you should strive to include questions that specifically address these topics.

For example, you can add survey questions intended to assess perceptions of diversity and inclusion within the workplace, real experiences of discrimination or bias, and opportunities for underrepresented groups.

What are some potential challenges or pitfalls to avoid when conducting employee satisfaction surveys?

Some potential challenges to bear in mind when conducting employee satisfaction surveys include survey fatigue (resulting from a poor survey design), low response rates, and lack of follow-up on survey findings.

You should also proactively try to combat perceptions about the ineffectiveness of surveys by openly sharing survey results with employees and stressing any policy changes you’re planning to address the issues raised in the feedback.

Successful organizations also ensure that their feedback mechanisms are an ongoing process and not simply a one-time diagnostic employed insincerely.

Next, Build Your Survey

Now you have some survey questions in mind, take a look at these guides:

• Learn how to write an effective questionnaire
• Understand how to write a summary of your survey results
• Put together an employee exit survey to get insights into why employees leave.

Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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