There are no two ways about it: the landscape of the modern workplace is changing. Companies that prioritize employee engagement and employee satisfaction above the bottom line are poised to reap the benefits of increased productivity and reduced turnover.
But what are the driving forces behind employee engagement and satisfaction? The answer lies in the employee experience.
In this article, we dig into what it means to measure employee experience by providing leaders like you with 25 examples of employee experience survey questions.
The importance of employee experience
Employee experience refers to every tangible and intangible aspect of the employee lifecycle, including:
- The employee's role in the organization
- The employee's relationships with management
- workplace culture and employee morale
- The centrality of diversity and inclusion in the workplace
When you measure employee experience, you view your organization from the employees' perspective. You gain insights into how your team members feel about various aspects of their jobs, their daily needs, and how your company could improve for its employees.
Managers can use the employee survey results to create action plans, the goal being to improve the employee experience and employee satisfaction within and among their teams.
Elevating the employee experience is a gift that keeps giving. When you take care of your employees, you can expect benefits like:
- Increased productivity
- Higher employee engagement
- Greater employee satisfaction
- Reduced employee turnover
- Better company performance
Differences between employee experience and employee satisfaction surveys
Employee experience may sound similar to employee satisfaction, but the two are not interchangeable. Surveys that measure employee experience are looking for feedback on how employees perceive the organization and how their perception affects their engagement, motivation, and so on.
On the other hand, employee satisfaction surveys seek to measure employee happiness. It is now well documented that a better employee experience results in higher employee satisfaction, so managers may send out short employee satisfaction survey questions every other week or every month to keep their finger on the pulse of their team's emotional well-being.
Employee experience surveys can be longer and less frequent, or they could be short Pulse Surveys for quicker employee feedback. They measure things like employee engagement, job satisfaction, and alignment with the company's culture and values.
25 employee experience survey questions
With the availability of easy-to-use employee survey software like Officevibe, you don't have to sit around a table with other leaders and guess what your employees need. You can ask them for feedback through employee survey questions, which will help you identify roadblocks and develop action plans to overcome them.
The questions you ask should seek an accurate overview of the employee experience in your organization. You can get a combination of qualitative and quantitative data by asking open-ended questions as well as those that use a scale or choices. The goal is to gather actionable feedback that you can use to make improvements.
Questions about an employee's role in the company
Most of an employee's experience with your company comes from their daily responsibilities and interactions with managers and other team members. You can ask survey questions that gauge an employee's experience in their role. These employee surveys relate to management, work environment, personal growth, and overall job satisfaction.
Just a few examples of what employees can answer about their role on a scale of 1 to 10 include:
- How much do you feel that your company values your role?
- How supported do you feel by your manager?
- How well does your company maintain a work-life balance?
- How would you rate your current pay?
- How happy are you in your current role?
You can also ask open-ended employee satisfaction survey questions, such as:
- What is your least favorite aspect of your job?
- What is one thing that could make your job easier?
Questions about management and leadership
According to research by Gallup, half of adult Americans have left a job to get away from a manager. Leadership quality has a significant impact on how employees feel and overall job satisfaction. A genuine employer-employee relationship can improve the employee experience by creating a safe place for employees to provide constructive feedback and address their needs and concerns.
You can use employee satisfaction and engagement surveys to judge how management affects the employee experience by asking questions assessing how well a manager performs leadership tasks. These questions can help gauge how an employee feels toward their management team.
- How satisfied are you with the frequency of feedback from management?
- How happy are you with the quality of feedback from management?
- Are you satisfied with how your manager handles conflict?
- How satisfied are you with your manager's response to your issues and concerns?
Open-ended employee satisfaction survey questions on leadership include:
- What is one way that your manager could improve communication?
- How would you like management to recognize your achievements at work?
- What do you wish your manager would be more transparent about?
Questions about company culture
Company culture includes the values, beliefs, and vibes of the organization. A well-cultivated workplace culture leads to engaged employees who feel an emotional connection to their job and organization. Slack's State of Work report found that 84% of employees who clearly understood their company's strategy felt aligned with its vision and values.
Employee experience surveys can provide feedback on whether your company's values coincide with how your employees perceive them. Ideally, your employees should feel connected to the organization and believe they're doing meaningful work. When this is true, you'll have higher employee engagement levels.
The following are questions you can ask in an employee experience survey about company culture:
- Which three words would you use to describe the culture of the company?
- Do you see professional growth and a clear career path with the company?
- How would you rate employee morale (on a scale of 1 to 10)?
- If you could change one thing about the organization, what would it be?
- How likely are you to recommend working here to a friend (on a scale of 1 to 10)?
- Do your beliefs align with the company values?
Questions about diversity and inclusion
An employee engagement survey is a crucial tool for determining how your team members feel about diversity and inclusion in your organization. Most surveys are anonymous, allowing you to get genuine feedback from employees who might feel uncomfortable voicing their concerns about how the organization treats people of different backgrounds and identities.
Employee feedback will help human resources and management identify issues in the workplace and quickly address them. Asking these questions and, most importantly, acting on them, will improve employee well-being, employee retention, and employee satisfaction.
To measure employee satisfaction and experience regarding diversity and inclusion, you can ask questions like:
- How diverse is the company regarding age, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, disabilities, sexual orientation, etc. (on a scale of 1 to 10)?
- Have you had a negative experience at work due to your identity?
- How comfortable are you expressing your cultural and social beliefs in the workplace (on a scale of 1 to 10)?
- What is one thing the organization could do to become more inclusive from now on?
- Do you feel that the company provides equal opportunities for career growth to every employee?
- How well does the company accommodate those with disabilities (on a scale of 1 to 10)?
How to measure employee experience
Employee experience surveys use an amalgamation of workplace metrics, such as:
- employee satisfaction
- employee engagement
- employee recognition
- employee retention
In other words, you are measuring different aspects of how the organization affects employee happiness and vice versa. Primarily, these survey questions should focus on determining what the company might do differently to provide its employees with a fantastic place to work. You can also track the success of your employee engagement efforts.
You should ask employees to rate their answers on a scale of 1 to 10 to get quantifiable data for your employee experience records. If you categorize the questions using the parameters you want to measure, you'll be able to track trends for each one.
{emphasize}If your plate is already full, don't worry: you have options to make this process quicker and easier. Officevibe's survey platform can do the heavy lifting for you!
Our surveys use 10 metrics along with 26 sub-metrics of employee engagement to give managers a detailed view of their team's experience at work.{emphasize}
Key benefits of employee experience surveys
At Officevibe, our employee experience surveys are customizable for capturing feedback in different areas of the organization, allowing you to analyze overarching trends in employee satisfaction throughout your company.
By conducting employee experience surveys, you can:
Find out how your employees are feeling
One of the benefits of this comprehensive survey is gaining a clear understanding of the overall employee experience, including work environment, relationships with their team and direct managers, and whether they feel included in the organization's culture and values.
Solving issues in these areas will lead to happier employees and better company performance. Depending on the employee feedback, you might find that you need to improve career development or how you approach employees with experience gaps.
Obtain actionable feedback
Remember why you're asking questions in the first place: to make improvements. Employee experience surveys give you employee feedback that you can use to develop new initiatives.
For example, your employee satisfaction survey might reveal that over half of your team want leaders to recognize them for their work more often or differently. You can devise a plan to implement a structure for more recognition from management.
Survey any location, department, or team
Employee experience includes everything that affects the team members in your organization, which means your surveys can ask questions related to any team or department. The survey can be a general questionnaire for the whole company or a quick Pulse Survey for fewer people.
Make employees feel valued and heard
Asking for your employees' new ideas and opinions and acting on their concerns makes them feel empowered. Because of your survey and subsequent actions to improve based on the results, they'll see how giving honest feedback and participating at work can lead to change. This can boost employee engagement, productivity, and performance.
Employee experience surveys best practices
You've learned the types of questions you can ask, so we'll share some employee survey best practices:
Identify the purpose
Before you begin, answer these questions:
- Why are you conducting this survey?
- How are you going to use the feedback from this survey?
For example: "The survey aims to identify the most important factor in high turnover in the sales department. We'll use the results to pinpoint the problem and develop a plan to correct it."
Communicate your strategy
Employees are more likely to participate in the survey and give sincere feedback if they know the purpose of the questions and what they plan to do with the results.
If you send an email with the survey link, try to include the following details:
- the purpose
- whether it's anonymous
- how long it should take
- the deadline
- results from past survey-induced initiatives
Avoid survey fatigue
Besides communicating with your team, you can avoid survey fatigue by keeping the length short enough to complete in 10 to 15 minutes. Ensure that your questions focus on a particular topic to keep it concise. The length and cadence of your surveys will depend on your organization, but it's best not to overwhelm your employees with long, weekly quizzes.
Create a follow-up plan
Show your employees that you're listening by using their feedback to create an action plan. Once you have the data, you can generate a report to show your team the survey results. From there, you can discuss key issues and develop strategies to improve.
Find out how you can enhance employee experience with Officevibe
Every company is unique, and the things that factor into employee experience vary, depending on the type of organization, industry, number of employees, etc. Officevibe is an employee-centric platform that works wherever your team is. We provide a simple way to gather anonymous employee feedback that you can use to increase employee satisfaction and keep your employees happily engaged at work.
At Officevibe, we provide an innovative employee experience platform to help business leaders like you see the big picture regarding the relationship between employee engagement and your company's overall performance.
Officevibe's Pulse Surveys give managers real-time feedback on the employee experience with easy-to-read reports that you can share.
Sign up and try Officevibe for free today!
