How to write your own employee survey questions

When it comes to employee survey questionnaire design, we recommend using proven frameworks where possible.

For instance, People Insight’s employee surveys are based on our PEARL, BELONG, and THRIVE frameworks. These have been designed by organisational psychologists to provide actionable insights based on robust benchmark data, so you know how your organisation’s results stack up.

However, we know that you’ll also want to ask custom employee feedback questions to explore something unique to your organisation. In these cases, follow our best-practice advice to design survey questions that give you the best possible data to act on.

How long should an employee survey be?

Most employee surveys contain about 35 questions. An employee survey should take 10-15 minutes to complete. A pulse survey is usually shorter, so will include only 10-20 questions.

People are usually happy to spend time completing a survey if it covers topics that matter to them but it is important to get the balance right. Asking too few questions can leave you with unclear data that’s hard to act on and may create “organisational blindspots” so employee concerns are missed. Equally, if a survey is too long then respondents may get bored and give up or put less effort into answering questions.

Choosing the right survey: Pulse or annual?

Leading organisations are adopting a much more agile approach to employee listening. They run pulse surveys throughout the year for a variety of reasons:

First, to measure employee engagement.

Second, to find out how to improve employee retention.

Third, to assess the employee experience and company culture.

Fourth, to understand diversity and inclusion within the organisation.

Fifth, look for signs of stress and burnout.

Sixth, to understand the impact of change. For example, a change to strategy, training, company culture or management.

Finally, it could actually end up being all of the above.

Of course, it’s vital to tailor employee survey questions to your specific needs. You may have an inkling as to why people aren’t on board with the latest initiative, or a hunch about why there’s so much sick leave in a particular division. Asking the right questions means not only getting survey data you can act upon; it means having an impact on driving your organisation forwards.

Types of employee survey questions

You can combine different types of survey question to gather data about how people are feeling and what factors influence this. Quantitative questions are helpful to give a robust measurement of your survey theme (like engagement) and a benchmark to build on. Qualitative, or free-text, questions add to this by inviting employees to expand on their experiences and inform the actions you take as a result.

Likert survey questions

Likert survey questions are the most common questions in employee survey design. They ask respondents to state how much they agree or disagree with a statement. The Likert scale is standard practice in employee survey design and helps give consistency across reporting and benchmarking.

To ensure that your survey responses are accurate and sound, we recommend presenting response options in ascending order, like this:

Survey question: I am proud to work for this organisation

Response options: 1. Strongly Disagree 2. Disagree 3. Neither agree nor disagree 4. Agree 5. Strongly Agree

How to write employee survey questions

There’s an art to question design and our employee survey consultants are absolute experts at this. If you choose to write your own survey questions, follow our golden rules for a clear and actionable questionnaire:

1. Use statements, not questions. Best practice questionnaire design uses statements which respondents can agree or disagree with, rather than actual questions.

This is good: I believe action will be taken as a result of this survey

This is not good: Do you agree that things will change after this survey?

2. Keep your questions short. Your respondent is more likely to stay focused if questions are succinct and to the point.

This is good: I feel valued for the work that I do.

This is not good: I usually feel that my manager and my team mates really value me for the work that I do in my job on an ongoing basis.

3. Keep the language neutral. Avoid using leading language, so employees are free to respond honestly.

This is good: I understand the new strategy at company X.

This is not good: Would you say that the exciting new company strategy makes you feel great?

4. Focus on a single issue Avoid listing a number of issues or groups within a question, in order to focus responses.

This is good: Senior leaders make the effort to listen to staff.

This is not good: The board and line managers make the effort to listen to staff.