Employee Questionnaires and Surveys: Best Practices and Samples

For years, doing business was a little like shooting an arrow while squinting in the dark. You had a general idea of what you wanted to hit, and how, but you didn’t have all the information you needed to get a clear shot. Not anymore. One of the beautiful things about today’s technology is how we can track nearly everything. How many clicks we’re getting on a particular ad. Which products customers are most likely to recommend to their friends, and therefore the ones that have more virality built into them. All this information has made it much easier for companies to make more informed choices on external matters such as design, customer service and marketing.

But what about internal matters? We know now that company processes, culture and team satisfaction are incredibly important factors in a company’s success. We also know that it’s important to regularly check in with our team members using one on one meetings or daily or weekly reports. How about getting more insights?

Why use employee questionnaires?

Like many other management tools, employee questionnaires can be used to target a number of company goals. Here are just a few ways you could use them:

To identify issues and fix hidden problems:

To identify and build upon your company’s strengths:

To identify improvements:

To improve culture and employee engagement:

Whatever you’re aiming for, try to find a good balance between conducting regular employee questionnaires so you can keep track of progress, and not be overloading your employees or yourself with action items. So experiment. Perhaps try small, targeted employee surveys every two weeks, or conduct a larger quarterly team survey, or mix it up. When you’ve settled on what suits your company, the key becomes implementing them regularly and making them a part of your company’s day-to-day work. On Status, you can do this by setting up a recurring topic that will automatically and regularly remind your team members to submit their insights on particular questions.

Ready to start experimenting? Here’s a best practices guide to conducting employee surveys.

Effective Employee Questionnaires: 7 Best Practices

Establish your objective:

Decide on the appropriate questions:

Decide whether the feed or survey will be private or public and whether you want responses to be anonymous:

Plan your communication:

Encourage participation:

Go through the results:

Act:

Should you have anonymous or non-anonymous employee questionnaires?

Conventional HR says we should only run anonymous surveys because otherwise, employees will be too afraid to be honest. But recently, a debate has sprung up over whether this is actually the best approach. This is because anonymous employee surveys often have two main issues:

Anonymity favors the vocal minority:

Lack of traceability:

For these reasons, we’re fans of direct, transparent, and non-anonymous feedback. We think that people will take more time and give more thought to their responses when they know they have to stand by their statements. We also think that the ability to go back to someone who’s reported an issue or offered a suggestion to give them more support or invite them to be part of the solution is too powerful to miss out on.

Ultimately, if employees are scared to state their mind in surveys, that’s more a cultural issue than a survey issue.

You can read more about how to improve internal communication here.

Employee Survey Types

So now you’re armed with a step-by-step guide and tips and best practices, what survey should you start off with? And what sort of questions should you ask your employees? Here are some ideas:

Employee Satisfaction Survey

Employee Pulse Survey

Organizational Culture Survey

New Hire or Employment Questionnaires

Employee Exit Surveys

The combination of data analytics and customer-centered design tools is making it easier than ever to track and develop our companies’ external processes. But don’t forget to reflect inwards as well and check in on your employees and company culture. There are so many ways that to target your questionnaires to get the information on how your company is tracking. The examples above are only the beginning.

So now that you’re armed with our best practices, it’s time to choose objectives and plan an employee survey.