Job Satisfaction Survey

I probably don't need to explain why creating employee surveys should be part of every HR department, but coming up with the correct employee evaluation template or employee job satisfaction survey questions isn't as as obvious as know you should do them. I recently came across a few sample workplace survey questions I thought may help when you start writing employee questionnaires:

One thing you should notice in the example employee satisfaction questions are they are different survey question types. A general online survey best practice to remember when crafting employee survey questions is to vary the question type. It helps keep the respondent engaged and lowers survey abandonment rate.

Here at Cvent, we get asked for survey templates all the time. That's why we've created a bank of survey questions and pre-created questionnaires for all clients to utilize within their account. But it never seems to be enough. Sample employee motivation surveys, employee evaluation survey examples, sample employee questionnaire, employee satisfaction survey templates, the list goes on, and on, and on...

While this post may not give you all the answers or the complete employee survey template you're looking for, it definitely is a start. Below are some sample survey questions for employee questionnaires.


While not all of these questions are necessary (or appropriate) in any given employee engagement survey or job satisfaction questionnaire, you should see how some of them will fit into your next employee satisfaction survey template.

Is your employee survey software getting the job done? Having a survey program in place to collect employee feedback and measure employee satisfaction should be a no brainer for human resource departments. Unfortunately, a lot of departments haven't put a program in place yet, or worse, have never conducted an employee job satisfaction survey project.

You may be thinking to yourself, Why do we need to measure employee satisfaction? Our employees are generally happy. My response is, How do you know? I mean really, how can you know if your employees are actually satisfied and happy if you've never conducted a survey to ask them? No one is going to come to your office and tell you they hate working at your organization. Some HR professionals think they can measure employee satisfaction based on employee retention rates. Looking at employee retention rates isn't necessarily the best way to judge how happy your employees are. Employees who don't have high job satisfaction may stay at an organization because they're satisfied with something else, such as the work environment. Or in today's current economic environment, even the most dissatisfied employees will be reluctant to leave an organization because they think the job market looks bleak.

As you can imagine, there are many factors contributing to worker and staff satisfaction such as:


In past posts, I've recommended collecting survey responses using anonymous online employee survey questionnaires generated by an employee survey tool. By periodically conducting surveys organizations can measure employee satisfaction with management, the mission and vision, teamwork and corporate communication.

Don't forget if you use survey creation software to create employee satisfaction surveys, you should also create surveys to conduct exit interviews. After all, most of the time a satisfied employee is not going to leave an organization.

One important question you need to ask yourself when planning your online survey is who can answer the survey? Do you want your survey to be open to anyone who is interested or do you want to restrict the survey to a certain group? There are pros and cons to each approach depending on your survey goals, for example restricting your survey can be useful if there is an incentive associated with the survey questionnaire.

Cvent offers you the option to select who can answer the survey. You can choose - Anyone can answer the survey for an open survey and Only individuals on a targeted list can answer the survey for a private survey.


Using Cvent Web Surveys software gives you several ways to increase survey security and limit which survey respondents are allowed survey access.

• Limit responses. Cvent Web Surveys tool allows survey administrators to limit responses to ensure data accuracy. This option is extremely helpful if the planner wants to avoid duplication of records (aka each person only gets to vote once to avoid ballot stuffing). As an online survey creator you have the option to limit responses three different ways:



• Password Protection. Survey administrators can also set a password for their online survey questionnaire. This automatically eliminates any unwanted respondents from the mix. During the survey development, you can decide whether or not you want to use the password protection survey security setting. If you choose to, you can send out the password along with the survey invitation or you can share it in a different manner. For example, if you have an employee job satisfaction survey that is always open for employee feedback collection, you may want to host the survey password on your intranet. Since the survey is hosted on the internet, password protection keeps out respondents who may have happened on the survey via a Google search. In this case, you may not be using email survey invitations so you need another method other than only individuals on the targeted list to secure your survey.


• Include a Verification Process. A verification process is used to help prevent computer generated responses. An image of five characters is displayed to the user, also known as a CAPTCHA. The user must correctly type the characters to continue.

• Use Secure Socket Layers (SSL). SSL uses a cryptographic system that uses two keys to encrypt data − a public key known to everyone and a private or secret key known only to the recipient of the message. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer support SSL and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers. By convention, URLs that require an SSL connection start with https instead of http.

I recently finished reading Company by Max Barry. The short version of the story is someone had the idea to create a "fake" company to test out management theories. However, due to a variety of factors, worker satisfaction is practically non-existent and employee morale is in the toilet (although the group of "researchers," called Alpha, claim it makes them more productive). Barry gives a great employee satisfaction survey example of what not to do as an organization. At one point in the story, the main character initiates an employee satisfaction survey. Unfortunately, employees don't believe the survey is anonymous or Senior Management plans to make any changes based on survey results. Instead, employees believe if they answer "in correctly" they may be terminated.

If you're beginning to think about putting an HR survey program in place to conduct job satisfaction questionnaires or employee morale surveys, here's a hint: make sure employees believe the survey is anonymous and they will not be investigated as a result of their feedback. In my opinion when it comes to staff surveys, nothing is more important than preserving the survey respondent's anonymity. Barry took it to an extreme having employees look for tiny, hidden watermarks on the paper survey with markings of employee numbers.

Another important lesson for survey writers and survey project managers is if your employees do not believe the organization plans to make improvements based on feedback, your survey is probably worthless. Employees wont spend time thinking about their answers and providing constructive feedback. More likely than not, they will breeze through the questionnaire giving "correct" answers. Why bother?

While the last lesson is something that must be addressed with organizational culture and building trust between management and employees, the anonymity issue is easily solved with a web survey tool. Most online survey software has the option to build surveys that are anonymous. Take advantage of that feature when creating surveys to collect employee feedback.

When you sit down to because the survey writing and question creating, take a minute to review these tips for what types of questions to avoid.

To copy or not to copy? One of the great features of Cvent's web survey software is the clone or copy survey feature. By copying a past survey you can save time, in not only question creation, but also in the actual graphical survey design. If you've never created an online survey - regardless of the survey application - you may not understand what a time saver this can be. Selecting the right color scheme, loading the correct images, making sure everything lines up the way you want in the web survey template can all eat up a chunk of time, and before you know it it's lunch time - or worse, the day is over and all you've done is design the graphical layout of your survey! So having a clone web survey option is - in my book - a must have. We've said before, when it comes to surveys, respondents judge a book by it's cover. And I think they should. In this wonderful world of technology, there's no excuse for having an ugly looking survey, particularly when you could be reinforcing your brand. Furthermore, ugly surveys do not make for a very good survey respondent experience.


However, I want to warn against simply copying a survey and emailing questionnaire invitations out to an email list. Why would you do that? Perhaps, you argue, you want to run the same product survey template in a different state, region, country, etc. or you want to be able to bench mark against last year's customer service feedback or job satisfaction survey. These are fair points but is there other information you realized you needed to improve your product? Was your customer questionnaire perfect? Could you improve your staff opinion survey? Of course you can! Nothing is ever perfect, and when it comes to surveying improving the quality and reliability of your survey data, you should be striving to get the strongest data possible. You're probably planning to use the data you collect to make business decisions, and with that in mind, why would you ever argue for simply copying an existing survey without evaluating the questions you asked last time and if the questionnaire could be improved?

In today's economy, there are a lot of people looking for jobs. Some of those candidates are the cream of the crop, but how do you weed out the unqualified applicants from the qualified? It can be a real struggle for the HR department to identify the best candidates. It's no secret that asking pre-interview questions or providing job applicants with a pre-interview questionnaire can save you from having to speak with people who are not a fit from the start. Using an online survey tool can help facilitate your search. Cvent's Web Survey software gives human resource departments the ability to create online surveys and questionnaires for job candidate screenings. By applying survey scoring to responses, HR execs can spend more time looking at qualified applicants and less time with the duds.


You can set up as many questions as you want, setting scores for each question. Integrating trigger emails with the survey, hiring mangers can receive emails when an applicant receives a score equal to or greater than a specified score. But don't forget there may be more to some of these stories, be sure to include some open ended questions in your HR survey to gain more insights to the applicant's history.

An added benefit to conducting online pre-interview job questionnaires is having more information to help guide the interview. The interviewer can bring in examples from responses to ask for more clarification and explanation, as well as identify other qualities (like how well the candidate puts words to paper) which you can't get from an interview.

Survey scoring is an excellent feature in any HR survey software. This is one example of how survey scoring can save you time as an HR exec. Do you use online survey scoring in employee performance evaluations or job satisfaction surveys?

If your human resources department conducts job satisfaction surveys, employee performance reviews, or staff opinion feedback forms chances are they've thought about implementing exit interviews or perhaps they already have. Exit interviews are an excellent way to gather honest feedback about what the organization is doing well and what it needs to improve. A major benefit of conducting exit interviews is that human resource managers rarely receive frank, honest feedback from employees.

While some exit interviews are face-to-face meetings, we're seeing the use of electronic or online questionnaires more and more. It's important to always respect a departing employee's right to decline an employee questionnaire, but using anonymous web surveys can encourage more employees to participate. After all, there's not much in it for a departing employee besides potential risks.

Here are some example survey questions to get you started developing an online questionnaire:


If your organization does not conduct HR surveys, some employees may question why their feedback is suddenly being requested or how the organization plans to use it. These are valid concerns. I want to stress the importance of having a HR survey program in place to continually assess the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. Implementing an online survey program to conduct any range of staff surveys is a good idea for any organization. We've talked about the benefits of conducting HR surveys in the past. After all, your employees are your biggest asset.

How green are your employee survey practices? In celebration of Earth Day, I wanted to spend some time talking about how Human Resources executives could green up their HR surveys. It's really popular to be seen as a "Green Organization" these days, but some people have the misconception that being green means you're spending more. This isn't necessarily true. We consume six times more paper today than 50 years ago, with the average office worker using 20 reams of paper annually (that's 10,000 sheets!). Just cutting paper consumption can save organizations money.

But how does this relate to greening up your employee surveys?

If you conduct employee evaluation surveys, job satisfaction surveys, staff opinion surveys, or any other type of HR survey, you have the opportunity to cut your organization's paper consumption just by moving your survey project online. Web based HR survey software can eliminate the need for paper surveys. Furthermore, you can gather more of the information you need. Anonymous employee online questionnaires could yield response rates as high as 80 or 90 percent.

Taking your employee surveys to the web have more benefits than just cutting the human resource department's paper consumption. Check out our past blog posts for some additional benefits to using HR survey software to send web based surveys to staff.

When was the last time you surveyed employees to understand job satisfaction?  Staff opinion surveys can tell you a lot about the organization’s culture and overall employee satisfaction.  With organizations asking employees to do more with less time and resources, keeping the workplace positive and productive should be a top goal.  Every day, I read about job burnout and added stress at work, both these factors can increase the cost of doing business.  In this economy, most organizations are trying to cut costs, not increase them.  We recommend using employee questionnaires to identify possible areas to cut costs, reallocate resources or boost productivity.  You may find adding a break room would give employees space to relax for a few minutes and boost productivity when they return to their desks.  Most employees are happy to share their cost cutting ideas and program ideas with employers.  You may find that the best cost cutting ideas come from the trenches and not senior management. 

If you’re thinking about surveying employees, whether it’s to conduct employee performance evaluations or job satisfaction surveys, Cvent’s Web Survey software can help get your survey program started.  Cvent’s online survey tool has templates and question libraries, such as sample employee survey questions, to help get your HR surveys off the ground in minutes. To learn more about using Cvent's Web Survey software for your survey management needs, sign up for a product demonstration.  

If you’re considering doing employee surveys, whether they’re staff opinion surveys or job satisfaction surveys, consider conducting them online. Cvent clients who switched from the paper-and-pencil survey method to web based surveys saw a dramatic increase in survey responses. Using an online survey software company such as Cvent has a number of benefits, including:

• Reducing concerns about anonymity
• Using email reminders to decrease survey abandonment
• Gaining more insight into employee opinions due to longer responses
• Collecting data quickly and conveniently via the web
• Detecting “ballot box stuffing” by limiting the number of responses

If you're part of a high-tech company or a small firm, you’re likely to see the highest response rates from using Internet surveys. Surveyors conducting employee surveys should aim for a 75 percent response rate. Following best practices could yield response rates as high as 80 percent to 90 percent.

If you’re currently surveying employees and getting less than a 65 percent rate of response, sign up for one of our product demonstrations to learn more about how you can increase response rates for your HR surveys.

Upon learning about Cvent's online survey software, some organizations and businesses will say to us, "This sounds great...but I just don't see how I could use it here at XYC Company." Oh, how they'd be surprised.

Web surveys are used for a whole lot more than you realize. In fact, we'd be willing to bet you've taken at least one web survey in the last few months, whether it was a customer satisfaction survey, a marketing research survey, a job satisfaction survey, or something else entirely. The survey may have been a minor blip in your busy, fast-paced life, but to the surveyor, you provided invaluable business intelligence.

Consider the example of Internet Retailer's 2008 online survey of U.S. online retailers. Using the web survey, Internet Retailer discovered that letting customers rate products is a top spending priority at e-commerce sites. In fact, just over 57 percent of web-only retailers cited customer ratings and reviews as an emerging technology priority, followed by video or interactive rich media at 55 percent. Blogs or forums, social networking, personal product recommendations, and digital downloads or streaming media ranked third at roughly 36 percent each.

Giving ratings and reviews top rank shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given the research on online shoppers in 2007 by Bazaarvoice and Vizu. They found that 44 percent of online shoppers named this feature as the most useful on retail e-commerce websites.

Both these surveys offered key insights to web retailers. Not only do they give direction on what their customers are looking for as they shop and make purchases, but they also highlight the trends of the industry, not to mention the priorities of competitors.

The results of these web surveys would certainly lead to some new key business decisions for a retailer that wasn't investing heavily, or at all, in ratings and reviews. So there it is, just another way web surveys are improving the way companies do business.

We've talked about using a progress indicator bar to encourage participants to finish a survey. Such a feature can motivate your respondents to complete a survey by displaying how much they have left to complete. What other factors play into whether or not your survey participants finish a longer survey?

• Incentives. Incentives are a big motivator for people to take surveys. We've given a few tips on incentive pitfalls to avoid, but certainly a lot has to be said for them. Used wisely, they can boost survey responses on longer surveys.

Remember to consider your audience before selecting your survey incentive, and know that a guaranteed incentive is much more likely to get a response than a possible reward (e.g. win a $10 gift card versus be entered to win at $10 gift card).

• Interesting subjects. Does your survey audience care about what you are surveying? You wouldn't create a customer satisfaction survey and send it to a random list of contacts, after all, you'd send it to those contacts who have interacted with your customer satisfaction team in the past. Don't blindly send surveys out without first analyzing your contacts.

• Meaningful outcomes. When people have strong opinions about something, they are more likely to want their voice to be heard so that something can be done about it. Letting participants know that responses from a customer satisfaction survey will be used to structure how you handle customer questions is likely to prompt plenty of opinions. Tell participants that your job satisfaction survey will be used to make changes in benefits, salaries, etc., and you can bet that employees will take it.

When survey participants see how important the survey outcome is to them and how they could benefit from it, they'll be more inclined to participate.

We love elections. But as the 2008 presidential election night approaches, it's hard not to feel a bit dismayed.

Understandably, we're statistics geeks at the Cvent Survey blog, and there’s no time like election time for getting access to pools of data about the American public.

Two days ago, a Suffolk University study revealed that Barack Obama led John McCain by 10 percent in the polls. This statistic by itself might seem very revealing, but in fact, it tells very little unless there is some point of reference that speaks to its significance. This article recognizes this, and goes on to explain that the two presidential candidates were literally tied in the same poll just one month ago. The results indicate the first time this year that Obama had a double-digit lead in Nevada.

As you can see, comparing the same survey data over two points in time can add a whole new dimension of meaning to a single statistic. Nevertheless, if we’re really interested in what’s going on in the election, we should still be left with many unanswered questions. You wouldn’t be content on Super Bowl Sunday knowing only the half-time score, would you?

The fascinating thing about all the data an election poll gathers is that there are so many different ways you can extract meaning. One of the most common ways pollsters and researchers do this is by running cross-tabulation analyses between different data points.

A cross-tabulation analysis, or cross-tab, is a very simple and powerful way to reveal relationships between two or more survey questions. By laying out two questions in a grid, it allows you to easily compare how different respondent groups answer a question, allowing you to spot any patterns or trends.

Let’s take one of the survey questions from the Suffolk poll as an example. Question 17 in the poll data excerpt below asks if the respondent approves or disapproves of the job George W. Bush is currently doing as president. Along the top of the report, you can see other survey questions that were asked to the same respondents for cross-tab purposes:



By means of the cross-tabulation table, we can now make some pretty insightful deductions:



So, 55 percent of those who approve of Bush support McCain, versus only 8 percent of Bush supporters who say they will vote for Obama.

Look at the line below for even stronger supporting data. Nearly 90 percent of Obama supporters disapprove of Bush. Those voting for McCain, on the other hand, are split fairly evenly (55 percent and 40 percent) between those who approve and disapprove of the current president.

This immediately shines a very insightful light upon the voters, allowing us to make informed deductions. Perhaps this shows some cohesiveness and unity among Obama supporters. There’s a lot of ways you can go with this data, but the key here is that by running cross-tabulation reports, you can get to a level of insight in your data that is impossible to glean from simple linear statistics.

Many companies are using cross-tabs to get valuable data points that impact their business. For example:

• Market research surveys that reveal a gender or age group’s propensity toward a certain product.

• Customer service surveys that reveal discrepancies in service quality between different geographical regions.

• Employee job satisfaction surveys that reveal some type of association between the number of overtime hours worked and satisfaction with their salary.

As you can see, the options are endless—the only question remaining is what kind of relationship or insight do you want to know more about?

Do you worry that your employees only show up to the office for a paycheck? If you're a non-profit, having employees with this mindset can be dangerous to the vitality of your agency. People often join non-profits for reasons much greater than the money, so it may be more difficult to detect what will maintain and bolster job satisfaction. Job satisfaction surveys can be a great way to gauge the health of your agency's morale, and help you to address potential issues now -- instead of paying for them later.

What exactly is a job satisfaction survey? It's much more than simply asking if employees are happy with their salary. Questions should include topics such as whether employees think sufficient training is available to improve their performance; what level of confidence employees have with internal departments such as Human Resources; and employees' feelings on how the agency is promoting its mission. Be sure to include open-ended questions when applicable. They will generate ideas for changes and give your employees a forum to discuss their concerns.

A job satisfaction survey should be more than asking, "What needs fixing?" Ask your employees what brightens their day at work and what makes them proud of their contributions toward their agency's mission.

Sometimes the answers you obtain from your job satisfaction survey may not be easy to swallow. However, content employees are an absolute necessity to continue your agency's mission.