12 Employee Satisfaction Survey Questions To Ask

Employee satisfaction is table stakes for modern organisations. That’s because dissatisfied employees are often detrimental to an organisation’s success. 

Typically, they’re unmotivated to perform at their highest potential, affecting every aspect of their position and those around them. They can be short with clients or customers, turn in lower-quality work and not invest their full potential in solving problems. 

For that reason, a job satisfaction survey can help you pinpoint and solve employee issues before they evolve into problems that become potentially destructive. 

Workplace satisfaction could mean something different for every employee. That is why a well-written staff satisfaction survey will break down the employee’s working life into smaller areas. 

That way, you get a more precise picture of where the problem lies while also identifying where your workplace excels. 

Below are some common survey questions you can use to collect the most useful responses…

Employees aren’t able to work at their best with outdated equipment. Asking this question will help you identify tools or programmes that need to be updated. Additionally, knowing exactly what needs to be replaced can help with budgeting for the expense. 

While working from an office was the norm, remote work is a must for many employees in a post-COVID shutdown world. But not everyone thrives working from home. This question helps determine who is excelling in a work-from-home position and who may need a bit more support.

This question is a fairly straightforward measure of an employee’s workload and how it impacts their ability to enjoy their personal time. A good work-life balance in your company helps mitigate stress among your workers and create a healthier company culture. 

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Your company’s culture is a major influence on employee happiness. A frustrating and derisive workplace creates a stressed, unmotivated workforce that struggles to keep up or feel motivated by their work. Asking this question helps you pinpoint what may be negatively affecting company culture and how you can help mitigate those issues early on.

A workplace support network among colleagues greatly affects employee happiness. Having friends at the office can help mitigate the build-up of stress and keep your workforce productive in the long term. That can’t happen if employees are isolated from each other, so this question helps you determine where they may be feeling disconnected and identify opportunities for you to help.

Diversity is an increasingly important value for today’s candidates. Even if your workforce includes people from many backgrounds, they might have trouble getting comfortable in a new environment where not as many people share their backgrounds or experience. And while your hiring practices may reflect a diverse hiring pool, that may not be perceived in action if your employees say otherwise. Use the employee satisfaction survey to get the view of workers on your company’s diversity efforts. 

Whether a simple clarification or a big question, your employees should know where to go when they need answers. Without this structure in place, workers may feel unsupported and lost within your organisation. Asking this question helps the HR department identify weaknesses in the company’s communication network that might slow productivity.  

Most employees want to feel like they’re contributing to the company’s success and want a way to share their ideas. As a result, it can be disheartening to work in a workplace that never considers their decision-making opinions or asks for them in the first place. Asking this question in a survey can reveal if employees feel like their opinions aren’t being taken seriously. 

Employees who take on the lion’s share of the work may feel frustrated that others aren’t pulling their weight. Whether that is because they believe that’s unfair or they’ve burnt themselves out, those employees won’t be as productive as they were before. This question can help find areas in the company where task distribution is unbalanced and HR can find ways to even it out.

Feeling attached to and inspired by the work they do is quite important for many employees. Without this emotional connection, your workforce may struggle to feel motivated to handle the day to day that gets the job done. A few workers feeling unsatisfied isn’t unexpected, but if the survey reveals many dissatisfied folks, it’s time for HR to step in and examine what’s going on.

An obvious path to success is reliant on crystal clear instructions and feedback. Use the employee satisfaction survey to measure how employees feel about the clarity around their jobs, daily tasks and company goings-on. Their responses can shed light on areas that can be hard to assess otherwise.

The simplest way to measure your employee’s satisfaction in the workplace is to include this question in the survey. It’s not completely reliable because some of your workers may be uncomfortable answering honestly, but it can give you a sense of where they stand. 

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How you introduce an employee satisfaction survey to employees is just as important as the questions you put in it. How you handle the distribution can determine the quality of your workforce’s response. Some tips to remember while planning your survey include:

• Anonymity. Ensure your employees understand that their survey answers won’t be linked back to them. Knowing there will be no repercussions for their participation will help ensure you get the most honest answers. 

• Brevity and Tone. Keep questions brief and avoid jargon so that they remain  as clear as possible to your employees. If they are easy to understand, it makes for more precise and useful information.

• Length. While the first survey can be more comprehensive to get the best overview of your workforce, it should be shorter afterwards. That way, you avoid an overload of information while still tracking how your employee’s satisfaction has improved or worsened. 

• Frequency. You’ll have to send out surveys repeatedly and consistently to see how your efforts have improved the workplace. Annual surveys are popular with most businesses but tend to be longer and more inaccurate because some employees will be hard-pressed to remember the previous 12 months. Shorter surveys sent out throughout the year can be more effective. 

Employee satisfaction surveys can help you identify issues that keep your workforce from performing at its best. 

HR should ask questions centring around management, workplace culture, the nature of their employees’ work and the work environment. 

A short, anonymous survey should be sent out several times throughout the year with brief and clear questions to help ensure the most accurate answers. 

Employee satisfaction surveys are undoubtedly useful for keeping your employees happy and motivated to do their best. But creating and running any type of survey is a time-consuming process — not to mention all the data to analyse afterwards. Save time by using Personio’s employee survey template to help increase employee engagement.