24 of the Most Engaging Employee Survey Questions

Employee surveys are a tried-and-tested way to understand exactly what your team members think, feel, enjoy, and dislike. These surveys are your opportunity to engage team members and capture data that can move your company in the right direction. 

The key to a successful employee survey is to ask the right questions. In this guide, we’ll share:

• Our top 24 employee survey questions
• An employee survey template
• An engaging alternative to traditional surveys

24 employee survey questions to drive better responses 

Your employee engagement survey results will only be as useful as the questions you ask. Figure out your overall goals, then choose questions that allow you to dive deeper and uncover people’s true feelings about a topic. 

To help you plan an engaging survey, we’ve brought together our top employee engagement survey questions. There’s a mix of direct and open-ended questions that cover topics like: 

• ✅ Employee engagement
• 😊 Team relationships
• 💼 Management relationships
• 🍹 Company culture
• 📣 Communication and feedback
• 💻 Remote work
• 📈 Professional development and career growth
• 💸 Company goals and outlook

Let’s take a look at our sample questions for each of these categories and why they’re the right ones to ask: 

Employee morale and engagement

So many factors influence employee morale and engagement. Your culture, team relationships, and work environment can all change how someone feels about their day-to-day job satisfaction, how they engage with their team, and their overall mood. 

Here are some of the best employee satisfaction survey questions you can ask to understand how engaged your team members are:

Team relationships

Company culture is something we talk about often, but team culture is just as relevant. How your employees feel about and work with the people in their immediate team can have a huge impact on their overall employee experience. 

Here’s how to take a closer look at how your team dynamics and relationships are playing out:

Management relationships

Your team members put in a lot of hard work, and they want to know their manager cares about not just how they perform but their overall wellbeing. A difficult relationship with a supervisor can lead to disengagement, so it’s great if you can spot and resolve problems early. 

These sample questions can help assess relationships between management and their teams: 

Company culture

The work culture at your company makes a big difference to whether someone feels happy and supported, or whether they’re tempted to search for a new opportunity. Your approach to work-life balance, remote working, and team events is a big influence. 

Here’s how to ask your team members how they feel about your company culture. 

Communication and feedback

Open and honest communication should be a priority for any company that wants to be inclusive and attract the best talent. After all, asking for and acting on employee feedback is one of the best employee retention strategies.

Here’s how to understand how communication, transparency, and feedback are working at your company:

You might discover that people feel left out or unable to speak up. If that’s the case, use tools like Polly to introduce more inclusive ways of working — so everyone feels like they can use their voice for good. 

Remote work

At some places, remote work feels like a breeze, but at others, it’s a struggle. Your team members’ work environment contributes to their overall employee experience, and it’s even more important to a remote work experience. 

Here are some great questions to ask your team members about your approach to remote work:

Professional development and career growth

Everyone cares about their career development, but each employee will have their own unique goals, desires, and passions. Use your employee survey questions as a chance to uncover what these are, and find out how you can support them to make the most of their career. 

Here’s what to ask when it comes to professional development: 

Company goals and outlook

As well as personal goals, you want your team members to feel like they’re contributing to and agree in general with your company goals. Team members that aren’t aligned can quickly feel out of place or might decide to look for another opportunity with a better fit. 

Here’s how to uncover more details about your team members’ take on company goals and future plans: 

No time to create a bespoke employee survey?

If you’re short on time but still want to send a traditional employee survey out, try our Quarterly Employee Engagement Survey template. It features 13 expertly selected questions designed to help you capture valuable insights from your team members.

Polly makes it easy to run employee surveys through Slack or Microsoft Teams. Not only that, but you’ll enjoy higher response rates as people can reply in context — without interrupting the flow of work. With integrations for your favorite communication tools and a survey template, you’re already a step closer to running better surveys more often — and getting useful data from them. 

A more engaging alternative to traditional employee surveys

Traditional employee surveys help you gather useful insights on employee sentiment, happiness, engagement, and experience — but they do have drawbacks.

These long-form surveys can take a long time for your HR team to put together, adding to their to-do list. They also only capture a moment in time, so you’re working from old information by the time you get the chance to act on it. 

An exciting alternative to a traditional survey is a pulse survey. Thanks to their size, frequency, and user-friendly nature, pulse surveys can help you capture more valuable results, more often. 

Pulse surveys are great because they: 

• ✅ Are short, typically with 1-5 questions
• ❔ Feature easy-to-answer questions with multiple-choice answers
• 📗 Cover a specific topic — e.g. employee happiness
• 🔁 Run regularly and frequently, so you can see data trends form
• 🙂 Don’t take much time or energy for respondents to complete
• 📈 Help you set a benchmark, then measure engagement levels over time

You don’t have to ditch traditional employee engagement surveys completely. Introduce pulse surveys as an extra way to collect data and measure trends. Try a combination of traditional employee surveys and pulse surveys until you find the perfect balance for your team members. 

Get better results with these employee survey questions

Asking your team members to complete an employee engagement survey every quarter or year can feel like a struggle. If your past questions in the past have felt uninspiring, you may need to update your employee survey questions with some of the ideas above. Also, make sure to send pulse surveys into the mix to get a better picture of what your employees really think.

Whether you want to run traditional employee surveys or experience the difference that pulse surveys can have, Polly can help. Use our tools to put together, schedule, and view results from your own surveys and polls — or try our templates for a quick-start route to more employee engagement. See why Polly is great for HR professionals today.