In an era that has created drastic shifts in the way we live and work, it’s more important now than ever to check in on employees and ensure that they feel valued and heard. Understanding the employee experience helps you cultivate an environment that allows them to put their best foot forward.
Creating a better experience for your employees leads to benefits for the entire company. Boosting employee happiness increases productivity and engagement, leading to higher performance, reduced turnover, and overall better output for your company and customers.
And it all starts with employee experience surveys.
What is the employee experience?
Employee experience is how workers think and feel about each aspect of their employment and their journey with the company. This includes their perception of the company culture, their direct role, interactions with leadership, lifecycle stages, and the physical and technological environment of the workplace—among others.
By understanding how the different touchpoints of the employee experience are received by workers, companies can easily identify areas for improvement and opportunities to increase employee satisfaction.
Why is measuring employee experience important?
In order to offer the best employee experience, companies need to first evaluate how they’re doing. Instead of speculating what employees want and need, employers should gather feedback from the perspectives and voices that matter most: their employees.
One of the best ways to do with is with a survey. Surveys provide a safe, anonymous space for employees to share feedback comfortably and with full honesty. Employee experience surveys allow you to efficiently gauge how your employees are feeling, listen to their concerns, and act on their feedback.
Surveys are also a great way to measure the results of your employee experience efforts. By employing surveys at regular intervals, you not only maintain a pulse on how your employees are feeling, but can track how those feelings change over time. This allows you to measure the results of your employee experience developments and continue building a better experience and culture for your workers based on your progress.
Choosing employee experience survey questions
Before administering an employee experience survey, it’s important to understand which aspects of the experience you are seeking feedback on and how you’ll be able to turn those findings into action.
An employee experience survey is not one-size-fits-all. Your company may have specific touchpoints or programs related to the employee experience that you need to specifically evaluate in your survey, but in general, there are a few key areas that you will likely want to cover, including:
- The employee’s direct role
- Company culture
- Management
- Diversity and inclusion
These four aspects are crucial to your employees’ relationship with the company and are areas where they should feel supported. Using survey questions, you can dive deeper into how employees perceive these aspects of their experience, and how that impacts their work and job satisfaction.
Survey questions about the employee’s role (and team)
At the core of every employee experience is their role within the company. By asking employees specifically about their relationship with their work and their team, you can better understand how they feel about their day-to-day responsibilities and interactions.
Here are some examples that address key topics from team support to personal fulfillment and compensation:
Think about your team (e.g., analytics, dev, marketing, sales, etc.). How supported do you feel by members of that team?
- Completely supported
- Somewhat supported
- Neither supported nor unsupported
- Somewhat unsupported
- Not supported at all
In addition, if you have teams that regularly work across functions you can also ask:
How supported do you feel by others who are NOT a part of your team, but you work with them regularly?
- Completely supported
- Somewhat supported
- Neither supported nor unsupported
- Somewhat unsupported
- Not supported at all
For either of these questions, if employees choose either “somewhat unsupported” or “not supported at all”, you can follow up with this open-ended question to get more actionable feedback:
{if somewhat unsupported or not supported at all} What specifically needs to happen or be said in order for you to feel more supported? {text-box}
Another way to help gauge employee’s relationship with their current position and the company is to ask the extent to which they agree with certain statements like the ones below. For these questions, you can use a Likert scale from completely agree to completely disagree as your multiple-choice options.
What is your level of agreement with the following statements:
(Include statements like):
- I am satisfied with my own contribution toward making the {company name} team successful.
- I feel that I am contributing to the growth of {company name}.
- I feel personally fulfilled being a part of the {company name} team.
- I feel that I am appreciated and valued at {company name}.
- Work-life balance at {company name} is sustainable.
- I am happy working at {company name}.
Here are some additional questions you can include related to effort and compensation, using a scale from very challenging to very easy or very satisfied to very dissatisfied:
How challenging is your current role?
How satisfied are you with your current pay?
How satisfied are you with your current benefits (excluding pay)?
What’s great about including these multiple-choice questions in your employee experience survey is that you can easily quantify and track the satisfaction or support of certain statements over time. However, to dig deeper into how employees feel about your company and collect unfiltered feedback, it’s best to use open-ended questions– but more on that later.
Employee survey questions about management
Surveys are a great way to give employees a safe space to share how their relationship with management impacts their engagement and job satisfaction. Management plays a pivotal role in the employee experience and productivity and therefore should not be overlooked.
One study by the Gallup Business Journal found that up to 70% of the variance in a team’s engagement can be explained by the quality of the manager. Therefore, gathering feedback on management is a crucial aspect of understanding and improving the employee experience. Here are some examples of questions to ask:
How supported do you feel by management/leadership?
- Not supported at all
- More often unsupported than supported
- Unsupported as often as supported
- More often supported than unsupported
- Completely supported
{If more often unsupported than supported or not supported at all} What specifically needs to happen or be said in order for you to feel more supported by management? {Free-text}
What is your level of agreement with the following statements:
(Include statements like):
- My manager sets clear goals for the team.
- My manager is invested in my success.
- My manager offers regular constructive feedback about my performance.
- My manager handles disagreements in a professional manner.
- My manager is open to my ideas and suggestions.
Employee survey questions about culture
Company culture includes the employee and manager relationship but also refers to the higher-level values, beliefs, and behaviors that define the workplace. When a company’s values align with those held by its’ employees, it helps build an environment of trust and cooperation in the workplace, leading to better relationships within and outside of the company.
This is why it’s especially important to understand how employees perceive your company and its’ culture– and whether that perception matches the culture the company aims to have.
Here are some questions that can help you find out:
How would you describe to a friend who is not familiar with {company name} what it is like to work there? {Text-box}
What words or phrases would you use to describe the work environment at {company name} at the moment? {Text-box}
From the perspective of an employee, what is {company name} doing well? {Text-box}
Overall, how satisfied are you at work?
- Very satisfied
- Somewhat satisfied
- Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
- Somewhat dissatisfied
- Very dissatisfied
{if answered somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied}: From the perspective of an employee, what specific actions must {company name} take to make you more satisfied at work? {Text-box}
Thinking about {company name} what are you most excited about? {Text-box}
Thinking about {company name} what is your biggest concern? {Text box}
Employee survey questions about diversity and inclusion
One of the most important aspects of fostering a great company culture and experience is ensuring employees of all backgrounds and identities feel heard, included, and equally supported. In any customer experience survey, you should include questions that give employees an opportunity to voice their experiences. Here are some examples:
What is your level of agreement with the following statement: At {company name}, my voice is valued and heard.
How frequently do you feel that your identities (age, gender, ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, etc.) have had a negative impact on how people treat or speak to you at {Company name}?
- Never
- Rarely
- Sometimes
- Often
- Always
{If answered sometimes, often, or always} If you are comfortable sharing, in what way(s) do you believe your identities have had a negative impact on the way people treat or speak to you at {Company name}? Please share anything you would like. {Free-text}
When conducting employee experience surveys, it’s essential to collect honest and unfiltered feedback and give respondents space to speak their minds. One of the best ways to do this is by using open-ended questions like these.
However, manually coding and filtering through free-text answers can be time-consuming and challenging. Thankfully, GroupSolver®’s platform makes it easy.
Tap Into Your Employees’ Experiences with GroupSolver®
GroupSolver®’s platform can seamlessly turn your employee feedback into organized and analyzed data– so you don’t have to. Using our AI and crowdsourcing technology, we unlock a deeper view into your employees’ experiences while providing them a safe and engaging space to share feedback and even gauge their agreement with other colleagues’ points of view.
Find out more about our employee experience solutions or request a quick demo to see how it works.
Looking to gain insights on the customer experience? Check out Our Guide to Improving the Customer Experience.
