20 Powerful Questions To Ask In Your Next Employee Survey

Sometimes the best ideas come from your employees, but are you listening? Conducting an employee survey can uncover a treasure trove of information. To help you build your own employee survey, I’ve put together my top 20 questions that provoke thoughtful answers. Each company is different so ask yourself, “what information am I looking to receive?” and structure your questions accordingly. The most important thing is to get employees thinking beyond basic “yes/no” questions. The impact of each question is explained in parenthesis. For best results, consider making your survey anonymous to encourage employees to leave open and honest feedback. I recommend using Wufoo to build your survey online.

On a scale of 1-5 (1 being the lowest, 5 being the highest) please rate the following questions:

1. I feel challenged in my current position. (Impact: are you doing all you can to engage and challenge your people?)
2. I feel like there is opportunity for advancement within the company in the future. (Impact: do you have a clearly defined career path for your employees?)
3. I fully understand what is expected of me in my position. (Impact: Do you have clearly defined job descriptions, and is this clearly communicated from your management team on a regular basis?)
4. My manager cares about my success. (Impact: What’s the perception you employees have about their manager’s role regarding their success?)
5. I feel comfortable giving feedback to my manager. (Impact: Does your company culture encourage or discourage feedback?)
6. In the past week, I’ve received feedback from my manager. (Impact: Are your managers giving feedback to their team members on a regular basis?)
7. My manager contributes to a positive culture within my department. (Impact: Are your managers adding to, or subtracting from, your vision of what your company culture should look like?)
8. I feel like I am in the right position. (Impact: Have you aligned each person’s strengths with the appropriate job?)

Open-ended survey questions:

1. Where do you see the company in five years from now? (Impact: Is your vision of where the company is going understood by your employees? If the answers to this question are all over the board, you might need to spend more time sharing, and clarifying, your vision.)
2. Where do you see yourself in five years from now? (Impact: If they don’t see themselves working for your company, it might be time to work on defining the different career paths within your company.)
3. What do you love most about working for our company? (Impact: Understand the value employees find in working for your company. These answers can also help you identify ways to attract new talent.)
4. If you were in charge tomorrow, what would be the first thing you would fix? (Impact: Everyone has a list of things they would change, but this makes them identify the biggest “thing” they would attack if they were in charge. This always generates some interesting responses.)
5. What do you feel your department does really well? (Impact: See what they think they’re doing really well. You have your own opinions. Different answers might shed light on unidentified opportunities.)
6. What issue(s) keep occurring that we need to fix for good? (Impact: This will help identify ongoing problems that you might have forgotten about - sometimes problems that don’t get fixed eventually become status quo.)
7. Is there some task or operation in your position that you think is totally unnecessary? (Impact: This helps you find and eliminate redundant or unnecessary operations that might help save money and make processes more efficient).
8. What is something our competition does better than us? (Impact: A different perspective is always powerful, and helps stimulate ideas on where the company might be falling short.)
9. What is something we do better than anyone else? (Impact: A different perspective helps identify additional ways the company creates value.)
10. What is an opportunity that you think we are missing as a company? (Impact: Some of your best ideas come from your people. If you don’t ask, you won’t know.)
11. Are there any risk factors you see that aren’t being addressed properly by the company? (Impact: Employees see details that you might not, and some of these could harm the company if they’re not brought to your attention. People are highly susceptible to the Bystander Effect, which explains why employees might not bring a potential risk to your attention.)
12. What is one thing you could be doing better? (Impact: Gain a better understanding of where employees think they might be falling short which enables you to find ways to help them improve.)

Engaging your employees is key to obtaining feedback that can help you see what’s going on down below. Good leaders focus on the big picture - any other method would result in information overload which can lead to analysis paralysis. You have to filter out information in order to stay focused, but it’s important to check the temperature directly from your employees. You never know when (and where) you might discover a hidden nugget of insight that could save your company from a costly mistake, or where the next brilliant idea will come from. Chances are, your employees can help.

Do you have questions that you’d like to add to this list? If so, please leave them in the comments for others to use.

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Connect with Jason Olsen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JTPO