Sample Employee Survey Questions

Does it matter if not everyone takes your survey? What if only half your survey sample actually completes the survey questionnaire - or a third? You're never going to get everyone you invite to complete your survey. Those people conducting employee surveys, such as employee opinion surveys or workplace surveys will see the highest response rates on their survey projects. Some HR surveys see response rates as high as 90%. But if you're conducting a consumer survey, help desk satisfaction survey or customer feedback survey 90% response rates may be out of your reach.

The question remains, if I'm never going to get everyone, do those who didn't voluntarily complete your survey matter? Absolutely. Like with most things related to market research, there has been a lot of research to uncover the truth: are survey respondents different from non-respondents? It seems that research points to yes. Even early responders and late responders different, and this is probably due to interest in the survey.

There are a few things you can do to boost your response rates and limit your nonresponse bias.

1. Send email invitation reminders and partial response reminders to those on your email list. Two things happen when you do this, the first, you catch people who never even read your first email. The second benefit is you remind people who were willing to complete your survey but forgot about it.

2. Make sure there aren't any errors in your survey design. Double check your survey question logic, your question and answer choices, your graphical survey template, even your introduction on the survey welcome page.

3. Keep it short. This is a general survey best practice tip you should always follow. While there's not much you can do after you have already sent out email survey invitations and begun the data collection process, you should remember to keep your surveys short and limit the number of survey questions during the survey design phase.

It's important to keep non-response bias in mind when you're analyzing survey data and drawing conclusions from your market research results. Are your respondents different from your non-respondents? Perhaps only heavy users completed the survey, or only people with full time jobs, or only single individuals. Do those who opted not to complete your survey have a different opinion? These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself when evaluating your survey data. In some cases, it may not matter, in others it could cause you to make a decision based on skewed results.

Sometimes a goal of employee feedback programs are to improve employee performance. Following the simple survey questionnaire tips and best practices we've shared before will help you collect the data you need to make tweaks to processes - or invent new programs - to improve employee satisfaction and productivity.

What are some of these human resource survey best practice tips?

• Collect anonymous survey responses. Make sure you select an online data collection tool with the option to collect contact information or collect anonymous surveys.

• Don't ask too many personal questions. If you're conducting an anonymous employee feedback forms, employees shouldn't feel like their responses could be tracked back to them. Asking what department they're in is one thing, but asking what department, what age group they fall into and their gender may be pushing it too far - besides, do you really need any demographic information?

• Ask questions about a third party. Asking questions in the third person can sometimes make the employee completing the web survey feel less threatened. Do your co-workers You may feel like your questions are fair and unbiased, but employees may think you have a hidden motive.

• Do something with the survey results. The importance of employee surveys is unmistakable, but if you're not going to act on the results the whole surveying exercise will be in vain. More importantly, if you don't close the feedback loop, employees won't take your next survey project seriously. When you do take action as a result of the survey report, let them know changes were made because of employee's feedback!

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.

I've been asked a lot recently what's the difference is between Cvent Web Surveys branch logic and our advanced survey logic features. I can definitely see where various types of survey question logic can get confusing. Hopefully this post will eliminate the confusion! When you're creating an online survey, it's important to include question logic so survey respondents only see questions that make sense for them.

BRANCH LOGIC:

Take the following example business survey questions:


I hope you can see it doesn't make sense to ask people who saw a TV ad about how they found you on search, and vice versa is also true. But you do want to know more about how they found you through a search and have a series of questions you want to ask. Branch logic allows you do do this. You can add "branches" to your survey so only those survey respondents who saw the TV ad see questions about the ad and those who used search see quesitons about search. I think this graphic does a pretty good job of explaining how branch logic works:


ADVANCED LOGIC:

Advanced logic has the same principle, you only want people to see questions that are relevant to them. However, using advanced logic gives you more freedom to narrow down who sees a question based on up to four criteria. You can pull criteria from a survey respondent's contact information (assuming you're not conducting an anonymous survey) and how they responded to previous questions.


What this means is only people who have Marketing in their title, work in California, heard about the organization from word of mouth and did not select option A in question 8 will see this question. Unlike Branch Logic where you control a set of questions by direction a survey respondent down a path, Advanced Logic allows you to only show questions to "qualified" respondents.

Adding in logic, whether it's branch, skip, advanced or pipe improves the respondent experience and keeps them engaged. More engaged respondents mean higher response rates and lower abandonment rates. If you're in the market for kiosk survey software, market research tools, or just an online survey system that will allow you to collect customer feedback or conduct employee surveys, make sure you ask what types of question logic are supported by their enterprise feedback management solution.

I came across an interesting conversation today where someone was objecting to conducting a customer satisfaction survey because they were concerned the customer questionnaire would only reveal negative customer feedback. This is definitely the wrong attitude. If you think online survey results will only contain negative feedback, it's even more important you select a feedback management tool or survey designing software TODAY and create a customer satisfaction survey tomorrow. Then start fixing the problems that are resulting in all the negative feedback.

Fortunately, the person who thought they would only receive negative feedback will probably be proven wrong. Unless your organization has some serious issues you've been turning a blind eye to for awhile, no survey - customer or employee survey - is going to result in all negative feedback. If everyone hated your company, then you would have no customers and/or no employees. So relax.

The misnomer here is that only unhappy people complete survey questionnaires. This is not true. Happy customers complete them too. Even people who don't have strong opinions either way complete surveys. I honestly cannot say it enough: conducting business surveys to measure customer satisfaction or employee loyalty is essential to all organizations.

Don't be afraid of negative feedback. It's actually a good thing because it forces you to make improvements. Your organization isn't perfect, and there is always more room for growth. Sign up for a free trial today and begin collecting feedback from customers and employees.

How much money are you losing each year due to poor customer experience? A new study on customer experience and consumer behavior found Australia, New Zealand and India suffer combined losses of $5.6 Billion (USD) in revenue because of organizations' failure to meet customer expectations.

According to a recent Kelly Services survey report showed 75% of respondents appreciate the opportunity smartphones and laptops give them to stay in constant contact with work. However, only a third are working longer hours. The Kelly Services workplace survey had 100,000 survey respondents from 34 countries across North America, Europe and Asia.

According to the employee survey, more than 55% of respondents claimed to be happy with their current work-life balance, while 87% say having the capability to work anywhere, anytime, creates motivation and a better work-life balance.

Interesting survey results:

• Survey respondents in North America are happier with their work-life balance than any of the other regions in the study. European respondents employee satisfaction with work-life balance is the lowest across the globe.

• 30% of respondents in North America work longer hours as a result of new technology, this is lower than Europe (33%) and Asia (41%).

• Northern America baby boomers are experiencing a better work-life balance than other generations. In Europe, Gen Y places a greater emphasis on work-life balance than other generations.

• The opportunity for telecommuting or working remotely is important when deciding where to work despite the area of the globe. It is the most important in North America (92%), followed by Asia (89%) than Europe (84%).

George Corna, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Kelly Services, concluded flexible work practices, working from home and other family-friendly arrangements have improved work-life balance and boosted organizational efficiency.

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.

One type of online survey questionnaire we don't talk about a lot is website marketing research and web usability surveys for your web pages. Often times we narrow in on market surveys, customer surveys and employee surveys leaving out a wide range of other types of surveys. Web site survey tools can help you quickly build surveys and polls to gather visitors feedback to help you improve your website. According to an article published in the current issue of BtoB Magazine, websites rank at the top for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers when it comes to online marketing tactics. If websites are so important, how can you not take the time to gather feedback about your web pages?

You can use the website feedback survey questions below as a site survey template for gathering user feedback. For many of these questions, you will need to change the options so it makes sense for your particular website.

Lots of surveys have incentives where all survey respondents will receive a copy of the survey report for completing your questionnaire online. This is great because you're sharing the data - and it gives respondents even more reason give honest feedback.


I've mentioned in the past over 80% of our webinar attendees say they share their survey results with others in their organization. There are lots of reasons to share your survey reports such as building credibility and authority or as incentives. The question shouldn't be whether or not you should share survey findings, it should be how should we share our survey findings. Some organizations email customers and prospects, while others put out press releases. My suggestion: share it on your organization's blog!

According to a Nielsen report, 10% of internet time is spent on social networking and reading blogs. This percentage is likely to continue to grow. A New Media Lab research reports claims 77% of active internet users read blogs. While a single blog doesn't have that kind of reach, blogging has become a trusted source for news and information. Posting on your blog is a good way to provide readers, whether they are potential clients or current customers, good news from a customer satisfaction survey, industry survey, employee morale questionnaire, etc. People often just think of blogs as a way to communicate with people outside the organization. However, they're also a great way to let internal employees know what's going on. For example, posting satisfaction metrics in a blog post can let employees know their hard work does not go unnoticed.

While what you share and how you share does not depend solely on the survey questionnaire feedback, but here are some examples of how posting findings could benefit your organization:


A lot of times blogs are just reaggregating other information from the web, but what can you expect over a million blog posts being written every day. The new mentality is to share and spread information. Bringing new and fresh content to your blog helps to engage readers. Particularly if your survey research findings are somewhat unexpected. You might generate conversations among your readers (possibly buzz on other blogs too) about the findings, possible reasons for them, even possible action items.

I just created a survey to gauge Cvent employee interest in playing in a local softball league this fall. It got me thinking after yesterday's post where I suggested using online surveys to collect employee feedback for product enhancements. Perhaps it's not obvious how human resource departments or any other department can use online questionnaires to survey employees.

One of our sales team members has been trying to organize a company sponsored softball team for years. This year, it looks like it might finally happen - if there's enough people who want to play. But how do you easily find out in a company with over 475 employees who wants to play, when they're available and what positions they can play? It could be a lot of emails to manage and spreadsheets to keep track of responses. Or you could build an online survey in ten minutes and email the survey to employees. Much less work to manage data collection via an electronic survey than responses via email. If you want to know every time an employee completes your survey or online poll, you can set up triggered email alerts within the survey software to receive all the survey responses or just the ones that meet certain criteria. In this case, I might want to set up a triggered alert when an employee says they want to play.

My survey example is only one use of web surveys for collecting feedback from employees. You can do a quick employee poll to get suggestions for happy hour events or even lunch orders. Not every survey project needs a lot of planning. When you need to quickly poll employees on a topic, surveys will do the job there as well.

How else have you used surveys to gather employee feedback quickly other than formal job satisfaction or employee performance appraisals?

Are your survey scales balanced? Typically when you think of survey questions using a scale, you think of each point holding the same amount of weight with the same number of options on either side of the middle point.


However, sometimes people don't stick to this surveying rule of thumb and lean towards using unbalanced scales. Here are a couple cons to using unbalanced scales and reasons why you should use balanced scales:

• Unbalanced survey scales create bias data: Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Unsatisfied. What about people who are Very unsatisfied? It makes the data look better than it may actually be.

• Unbalanced scales can be frustrating for the survey respondent. If someone is very unsatisfied, they want to mark they are very unsatisfied in your customer survey. Not allowing them to tell you how they feel could make them just abandon the survey all together.

• Balanced scales give the surveyor more analysis options than unbalanced scales. While this is a topic for a seperate post, many people will apply numbered interval scales to balanced scales for the purpose of completing their survey analysis. Interval scales give a wider range of analysis potential over ordinal survey question types.

That said, unbalanced scales can be useful when you know there will be an overwhelming response in a specific direction. A good example is customer services feedback surveys or employee surveys about benefits. Take these sample survey question:


I urge you to seriously think about why you want to use an unbalanced scale. If used inappropriately, they could quickly bias your data.

If you're beginning to plan your next survey project, I encourage you to attend our webinar on best practices for conducting web surveys. Then when the time comes, our professional survey services team would be happy to consult with you on your questionnaire design to flush out any question issues like this one.

Survey email alerts, also commonly referred to as triggered email alerts, are a must-have feature for online survey software. Why? So you can respond to customer or employee feedback from HR questionnaires to product evaluation to customer service surveys. Yesterday, I wrote a post on tips for listening to feedback. Timeliness in closing the feedback loop should be a priority for organizations looking to improve how they respond and implement changes in reaction to comments.


A common form for feedback collection is web based surveys. So it should be no surprise when I say you need to have email alerts triggered to quickly respond to customer questionnaire or employee survey responses. Not every survey needs triggered alerts and you don't always need them for every respondent, so Cvent's Web Survey tool gives you three options for survey email alerts:

1. Alerts at the question level. If a client responds to a customer satisfaction survey saying they are very dissatisfied with your product or states they are unlikely to renew their contract, it may be appropriate to set a task for their account manager to follow up. Follow up as soon as possible. I find the sooner you can follow up with someone, show them that you're listening and want to resolve any issues, the easier it will be to win them back. The longer a customer has to think about a problem and stew about the pain it's caused, the bigger deal it's going to be later - possibly a deal breaker.

2. Alerts based on survey score. Many people use online surveys as a lead generation tool, for many of those users scoring leads to help the sales team prioritize follow up is important. In cases like this, you may decide you want to receive an email alert when someone scores over a specified number on the survey to ensure the team is following up with the hottest leads. The same idea could be used for educational surveys where you may want to know when a professor receives below a certain score on teacher evaluations completed by students.

3. Alerts for a completed survey response. There will be cases where you want to know when someone completes your survey and how they responded. Be careful with this, when you have a large survey sample, you don't want to be receiving emails every minute to let you know someone completed the survey.

With Cvent, surveyors have the opportunity to send the survey alert to five people and include a custom message in the alert. If you're using survey question level alerts, you can have different alerts be sent to different people as well. Meaning, if you want your customer care team to know when someone gives good feedback on a call they had, but the sales team to know when someone is unlikely to renew, you can set the alerts up that way.

Sign up for a product demonstration to learn more about Cvent Web Survey software features.

Did you know you could import survey answers into Cvent? It's true. It's as simple as importing a list of contacts. The tough part, in my opinion, is understanding why you would use it. Here are two basic scenarios I think of when thinking of importing answers to an online survey:

Scenario 1: I conducted some type of business survey offline or out of the web survey software and need to load the answers into the survey for analysis or future needs.

Scenario 2: I have information about my respondents prior to their responses. For example, I'm conducting an employee feedback survey surrounding staff opinions. It's important to me to know which department the employee works in so I can ask appropriate questions, route them down the correct question path using branch logic with my survey questions and analyze survey responses based on department. However, I already know which department they're in - I don't need to ask. In addition to slightly shortening my questionnaire, I ensure the respondents cannot lie on this question and skew my survey findings.

While Scenario 1 has value if you're using an offline survey method or multiple survey data collection methods, Scenario 2 packs more of a punch. If you're using Cvent for your online survey project, here's one way to go about achieving Scenario 2. First, create an online survey just as you normally would. Include all your skip, branch and pipe question logic during your survey question creation. Second, hide the question about which department an employee works in. Third, import survey responds into your employee survey.

Developing and designing a survey can definitely be a challenge. That's why we offer web survey services through Cvent's Professional Services Group. We can help you identify cases such as this scenario through a survey review and consultation, that can personalize the respondent experience while improving the quality of your survey results. Learn more about what online survey services our team can offer for your next online survey project.

I was reading through Bruce Temkin's 6 Laws of Customer Experience (CxP) yesterday, and I was struck by how well a survey program fits in with his CxP laws. I talk about implementing online survey programs to gather customer feedback all the time, to the point that I sometimes feel like a broken record. Often though, employees are overlooked as an essential part of the customer experience especially if they aren't front-line employees. For that reason, my favorite two laws are numbers four and five:
Obviously, conducting client surveys to find their satisfaction levels is important for customer analysis, product enhancements, customer service feedback, etc., but checking in with employee's satisfaction is equally important. Here are a few of the highlights from Bruce:

Various types of employee feedback and HR surveys can include questions to evaluate how your organization is doing when it comes to fostering the correct environment for providing amazing customer experiences. A quick online survey can show management if they're doing a good job communicating organizational goals, motivating employees, boosting morale by celebrating their successes, etc. One of the best ways to measurce customer experience is to measure employee loyalty and morale using surveys.

Employees are an organization's biggest asset; but if employees aren't motivated, don't understand or are just expected to churn through tasks, they could also be your biggest liability when trying to boost customer retention. A good first step to checking in on your customer experience is to check in with your employees through some type of employee satisfaction survey.

If your organization doesn't currently conduct employee surveys or conducts paper based surveys, I'd recommend signing up for one of our online product demos or a free trial of the Cvent Web Survey software.

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 I begin to plan a survey project, I follow the six step process for market research. But there's always critical decisions to be made throughout the development of a survey: what kind of sampling method to use, what questions to ask, what survey method is best for this project? One we often take for granted is whether or not to conduct branded or blind research. Like with most decisions, there are pros and cons to both approaches.

Blind Survey Research. Blind surveys are where the sponsor or organization conducting the survey is unknown. This means any organization information is not presented in the questionnaire. If you plan to use email marketing to solicit responses for an online survey, you'll need to consider a third party. Due to CAN-SPAM rules, you must identify the organization you are sending emails from and include address information. This rules out the possibility of you emailing survey invitations to respondents from your own email client.

Branded Survey Research. Brand surveys don't try to hide who is conducting the survey. The brand is right there on the survey. With Cvent, it's easy to conduct branded surveys that match your organization's color scheme and include your logo. With Cvent's new survey URL customization feature, you can take that a step forward and include your organization's name in the URL.

So what are the pros and cons? Surveyors tend to see higher response rates with branded survey research because people are more willing to complete a survey when they know who is sponsoring it. On the other hand, you have the possibility of introducing acquiescence bias into your survey results. People tend to have the need to please and acquiescence bias is just that. It's where the respondent has a tendency to agree with questions or give positive feedback to the survey conductor regardless of their true feelings. You'll need to weigh the pros and cons of branded versus blind surveys and decide for yourself which is right for your project. For a customer or employee survey it wouldn't make sense to do a blind survey, so in some cases your decision is easy. Market researchers on the other hand may struggle a bit more.

Organizations can use this same model to enact similar programs to include customers in product enhancements conversations with product surveys.  An employer can host an internal website with relevant information about the industry, their products, and HR information and include employee surveys.  With more and more people using the internet and availability of easy to use web survey applications, what's your excuse for not implementing a similar program to have a conversation about important issues?

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.