With that said, if you do not ask your employees the right questions, you may not be able to get all the insights you are looking for. In order to help you receive relevant and actionable feedback, we’ve asked seven small business leaders to share what questions they always include in their employee surveys. Keep reading to hear their responses and have your notebook ready to jot these ideas down in!
What can your boss or manager do to ensure your personal well-being?
This question allows for an employee, anonymously or not, to express any difficulties they may have that could impact their work performance. If an employee is not at their personal best, they may not perform as well professionally either. It also shows that you care about your employees and are willing to work with them.
Rex Murphy, American Pipeline Solutions
If they could make any company change, what would it be?
Ask them for their recommendations on how to improve their workplace experience. If they could make any change, what would it be? Often, if a problem is significant enough, you will see the same solutions offered by several employees. Once you start to see the same recommendations over again, that’s when you can tell that there is a real change you can make.
Henry Babich, Stomadent Dental Lab
Is management a reliable resource for you to call on?
As a person in management, you should ask your employees if they feel like you are a reliable resource for them to call on. It is important to know how your employees view you and if they feel like you are doing your job as a supervisor well. Employees should always know they can count on you to assist them when they need it. Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in your job and forget that a whole group of people rely on you and look to you as a leader.
Ryan Nouis, TruPath
How would you describe your work-life balance?
In our monthly surveys, a question checking on the mental health of our employees is imperative to our company culture. Questions like, “Do you feel like you can talk to someone or ask for help with mental or physical health issues at work?” or “How would you describe your work-life balance?” opens the door to important conversations and lets our employees know that they work with people that care about their well-being! Mental health should be one of the most important topics to survey on.
Kayla Centeno, Markitors
On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend your organization as a good place to work?
This question allows you to calculate your eNPS, or employee Net Promoter Score, a universal benchmark in business. This identifies how many internal promoters and detractors you have. Based on these scores, you can very quickly determine where you stack up against other companies as a great place to work. You can also identify if there are issues you need to identify and address, if a significant portion of your employees wouldn’t recommend your organization, something is wrong! If your score is high, you can leverage that for recruiting and ask your employees to recommend friends. You can also celebrate a great culture! Every employee survey should start here, it is the bellwether of your company culture.
Beth Gross, Spear Education
How safe do you feel in our work environment?
Every employer should be taking proper safety and health precautions to fight the spread of COVID-19, and then surveying employees to see what they missed. In our experience, employees have voiced to employers that they’d like to see the installation of touch-free restroom supplies like automatic flushers, faucets, and dispensers. By ensuring that the work environment is as touch-free as possible, employers clear the path for people to return to work safely.
Elliott Greenberg, TouchFree Concepts
Do you feel you can be your authentic self at our company?
Feeling like one needs to wear a mask at work is exhausting. It detracts from performance, and has a negative impact on intent to stay. It can also be distracint if you are not comfortable without a mask! If employees feel they cannot be themselves at your business, you need to know about it.
Matt Marturano, Orchid Holistic Search
How likely would you be to recommend our company to a friend?
The responses you get from this employee survey question say it all. We want employees to love working for our company so much that they want to share it with their friends. Include a follow-up to this query, asking each participant to explain their answer. If they are highly unlikely to recommend the workplace or have reservations, we need to know how to solve the problems.
Ron Kubitz, Forms+Surfaces
Terkel democratizes thought leadership. Sign up at terkel.io to answer questions and get published.
