A workplace culture that values and respects its employees is one that listens to them.
Understanding your team’s concerns and gathering employee feedback isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have. It’s all well and good to say that you have a positive workplace culture, but it’s another matter to have systems and processes that foster that positive work culture and make it stay that way.
This is the role that HR surveys play in your organisation. Employee survey questions act as a bridge between leadership and employees and help to maintain positive employee satisfaction. They give your people time and space to be heard, to feel seen and understood — with an overall positive impact on employee retention.
This article will cover the different types of HR surveys that measure different aspects of your organisation - engagement, teamwork, leadership and management, etc. - analyse the benefits they offer, and give you actionable ways to implement them in your own HR workflows.
Employee engagement survey questions
Engagement is what separates a job from being a paycheck to being a career.
Employee engagement is the level of emotional and mental commitment your team member has to your organisation and its goals. An engaged employee sees a future at your organisation and wants to bring all their energy and talent to the table, every day. A disengaged employee just wants to clock out, get their paycheck, and go home.
Measuring employee engagement can help you build on the energy and enthusiasm within your team, because high levels of engagement lead to improved productivity, reduced turnover, and ultimately increased revenue.
Engagement survey questions measure your employees' commitment through a series of statements. Your employees rate their agreement with those statements on a rating scale of 1-5, with 1 being “strongly disagree,” and 5 being “strongly agree.”
These questions measure pride in their work, their advocacy for the company, and to what extent their long-term ambitions align with the company’s goals. For example:
- I am proud to work for [your organisation]
- I would recommend [company name] as a great place to work
- I rarely think about looking for a job at another company
- I see myself still working at [company name] in two years' time
- I consider myself an ambassador for [company name]
- If I was offered the same job at another company, I would choose to stay at [company name]
- I would recommend [company name]'s products or services to my friends and family
You can streamline and automate the way you run engagement survey by using software like CharlieHR. Simply pick the questions you want to ask from our ready-made templates, and send them to your team in one click.
Remote working survey questions
Remote working is the way of the future. Most of the available studies that exist on the subject point to the conclusion that giving employees the option to work remotely makes them happier and more productive.
That being said, the shift to remote work doesn’t happen overnight, or all at once. Some employees benefit from being able to work from anywhere and be completely location independent. Others prefer to have a hybrid model and to have an office they can go to if they choose. Still others crave face-to-face interactions and do their best work in an office setting. Each team member feels differently about remote work.
Using remote working survey questions lets you evaluate the concerns and needs of employees concerning remote work. Questions in this vein gauge their readiness to return to the office, their perception of remote work policies, and their impact on their productivity and satisfaction.
These surveys are also conducted on a 5-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” Some prompts you can implement include:
- Overall, I’d feel good about returning to the office
- I feel my views have been listened to when planning a return to the office
- I feel our workplace is a safe environment to work in
- I’m excited about opportunities to socialise with my team in our workplace
- I feel excited about the opportunities hybrid/remote work offers
- I think the opportunity to work remotely long-term will positively impact my productivity
- I think the opportunity to work remotely long-term will positively impact my ability to collaborate effectively
All these questions give you insight into the employee experience of remote working and let you craft appropriate policies that respond to your team members' needs concerning remote work.
If you use CharlieHR to automate your Human Resources surveys, you can pick from an expert-back list of survey questions designed to assess any concerns around remote working. Want to see it for yourself? Start a free trial.
Teamwork survey questions
A company lives and dies on its ability to function and work together as a single cohesive unit. An organisation that is connected as a team leads to improved communication, innovative and unique ideas, and boosted morale.
A teamwork survey helps you analyse the interpersonal dynamics of your team, understand how much they trust and respect each other, how willing they are to hear each other’s ideas, and how well they understand the way their individual roles contribute to everyone’s success. This can help you build a work environment based on cooperation and individual respect.
Some examples of a teamwork survey include questions such as:
- I feel accepted and respected by my team
- I feel safe asking a question or offering a new idea to my team members, without fear of rejection or humiliation
- My team is committed to doing quality work
- I know what I need to do to be successful in my role
Your teams are the backbone of your company. It’s worth measuring their ability to work together.
Leadership and management team survey questions
Even the best and most self-sufficient teams need guidance from time to time.
A boss is someone who gives orders and demands respect and obedience from a one-sided position of power. A leader is someone who works alongside their team and demonstrates by example.
Effective leadership and management can propel an organisation to success and enable their individual team members to do their best work through better employee satisfaction, stimulated motivation, and better overall productivity. For a company to operate at its best, it's important to get a sense of employees' perspectives on their leaders or supervisors.
Leadership and management survey questionnaires give insight into these aspects of an organisation. Questions like this evaluate employees' confidence in their leaders, how well leadership can communicate their expectations, and whether they feel the work they do day-to-day aligns with the company's mission.
Questions such as these measure confidence in company leadership:
- The leaders at [company name] keep people informed about what is happening
- The leaders at [company name] have communicated a vision that motivates me
- The leaders at [company name] demonstrate that people are important to the company’s success
- I have confidence in the leaders at [company name]
- My manager gives me useful feedback on how well I am performing
These targeted inquiries can help companies identify areas of improvement in leadership styles and management practices, shaping a more satisfying, motivational, and productive work environment.
Want to see all of our HR survey question samples in one place? Download the full list here below:
Growth and career development survey questions
To stay engaged and motivated throughout their relationship with you, your employees need to feel like your organisation supports their own ambitions and long-term career goals.
In this way, a growth survey is useful for HR professionals to measure how well your employees see their future at your company, and how well they feel like they can learn and grow professionally in their current roles.
With questions that measure aspects of professional growth, such as career advancement, employee performance, skill-building, and involvement in the decision-making process, growth survey questions are extremely useful for understanding how your team members feel about their compatibility with your company:
- There is someone at work who helps me grow and develop
- I see a path for me to advance my career and professional development at [company name]
- [Company name] is a great place for me to grow and develop
- I am given opportunities to learn and develop new skills
- I am appropriately involved in decisions that affect my work
- I feel that I’m growing professionally
- I have the opportunity to do challenging things at work
With this information, you can help build a work environment that improves your team member’s job satisfaction and ultimately leads to stronger retention rates.
Want to have a look at our expert-backed list of growth and development survey questions?
How to run an effective HR survey
All of this information - useful though it is - doesn’t amount to much in the end unless you act on it.
The success of your survey relies on good planning and execution. Some well-thought-out top-level strategic decisions from the beginning stages will help ensure your questions are helpful and provide data and information you can act upon.
Let’s look at some examples of how to conduct an employee engagment survey:
- For starters, clearly communicating the purpose of your survey to the employees being surveyed helps promote their full participation.
- Keeping your responses confidential and anonymous is central to the success of your survey. When employees feel safe, and able to be honest and truthful with their answers without fear of repercussions, they provide more open and honest responses. This preserves the integrity of the survey responses and makes the insights gleaned from them more valuable.
- Regular pulse surveys allow you to check-in with your team multiple times a year. Pulse surveys are very short surveys that are repeated multiple times a year to measure the trajectory of your team’s engagement over time
It’s also worth noting that organising an HR survey manually is extremely time and labour-intensive and requires you to allocate resources and operational man-hours for distributing the surveys, collecting the responses, and analysing the data.
For this aspect, CharlieHR’s Engagement Surveys feature is highly useful for automating the whole process - from collecting the answers anonymously to aggregating the survey results. Not only does it make implementing the responses easier, but it also leads to a higher response rate and higher-quality survey responses through automatic reminders.
When you leverage automation technology and use a structured approach, you can execute HR surveys that are helpful, useful, and smart, and give you actionable insights to help build a better company.
Looking for a comprehensive list of pulse survey questions? Download our survey template.
Automate, aggregate and analyse your HR surveys with Charlie
A well-planned and well-executed HR survey enables you to create a better work culture, a better company, and a happier, more productive team.
Surveys aren’t just about collecting data - but about what you do with it. Acting on the insights you gain from your HR employee surveys is the most important step, otherwise, there’s no point to the survey at all.
Using an HR software and pulse survey tool like Charlie helps you streamline the entire survey process, from creating the questions to analysing the results.
Experience the benefits of an improved HR survey process today by starting a free trial of CharlieHR, and be a force for positive change for your company and your team.
Interested in the theory behing employee engagement? Check out these articles on:
- The psychological contract
- The secrets of employee enablement