Looking to survey your employees to measure employee engagement? Need some ideas on coming up with your own employee engagement survey questions?

In this blog, you’ll learn:

12 employee engagement survey questions to ask + free templates.

Employee engagement survey question types

Bonus tips to make your engagement surveys more effective

12 Employee Engagement Survey Questions to Ask

This guide will give you an overall idea of the different types of employee survey questions you can ask to maximize engagement and boost satisfaction.

Before we dive in, here’s your survey starter pack with free survey templates that you can customize as your own.

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#A. Employee Satisfaction Questions

Engaged employees are 44% more productive than the employees who rarely feel satisfied. Which is obvious in hindsight; when an employee is delighted, they spontaneously engage in team activities and act confident.

On the other hand, a dissatisfied employee impacts their work culture negatively. By doing the bare minimum, dissatisfied employees are a drain on other employees’ productivity.

Survey tools like SurveySparrow’s sentiment analysis feature can help you identify the mood and satisfaction level of an employee based on their response. The following employee engagement survey questions can help you gather the responses you need to slice and dice employee sentiment.

1. What do you feel about your work today?

You can ask this question to understand how your employees feel about their work every day. You can make the survey more conversational with images, emoji or GIFs to represent your employee’s mood.

Consider using Rating questions or Image-based survey questions. Don’t be afraid to get creative with thermometer sliders or smiley sliders. You can also leave a field for an open-ended answer – this allows employees to give more in-depth responses.

2. Are you satisfied with our current benefits and compensation programs?

If any employee on your team feels they are underpaid or the company’s benefits programs are not good enough, they will be dissatisfied.

The best way to know if they want a change or improvement in their compensation is by asking them. SurveySparrow’s Yes/No questions or open-ended questions are the best formats for questions like these.

3. Do you feel happy to work with your team?

This is another important question. Team engagement is infectious; if one of the team members feels unhappy or low, the mood can spread pretty quickly.

In these kinds of questions, you can consider using open-ended employee engagement survey questions. It will allow your employees to explain why they are feeling happy or unhappy about their team. If you receive negative feedback from your employee, then you can use it to tackle the cause of the problem or talk to your employee directly.

#B. Future Orientation Questions

47% of people actively looking for a new job highlighted “company culture” as the reason for leaving. So the message is clear. To improve employee retention, you must work on your work culture. But conversely, to maintain the work culture, employee retention is essential!

To put it another way, gathering employee feedback, and then acting on it, leads to a good work culture, a better workplace and better retention. And you need to start even before you onboard the employee. Here are a few examples of future orientation questions to ask your employees.

4. Do you see yourself working here after five years?

You probably have some goals in mind for the job role, in terms of responsibilities and career growth. This question will help you understand your candidate’s plan. It will help you to know whether they are interested in staying at leats for the next few years, and if not, the reason why.

SurveySparrow’s Voice Transcription feature can help you accurately capture your candidate’s emotions, and understand their real-time thought process behind every open-ended answer.

5. Do you see good scope for career development at our company?

According to a 2017 study by SHRM, only 30% of the employees felt happy about their company’s development programs. We can safely assume that that number has gone up since the start of the Great Resignation.

When employees feel that their manager is not thinking about their personal and professional growth, they tend to leave the company. That’s why it’s critical to add this question to your employee engagement surveys. Employee engagement questions like these can guide your HR team toward a more well-rounded development program.

6. Have you recently thought about leaving the company?

You might receive a bitter answer with this question, but it’s always better to know the truth. Moreover, with SurveySparrow, you can edit individual responses to remove profanity or insults.

While asking this question, consider making the employee engagement surveys anonymous so that your employees feel comfortable enough to give an honest opinion.

#C. Employee Alignment Questions

Alignment questions help to understand the personal feelings of an employee and what matters to them. With these types of employee engagement questions, you can discover what motivates your staff to reach their work goals.

7. Do you feel your manager values your success?

One of the proven employee engagement survey questions, this question will show you how your managers invest their time and effort for the growth and development of your employees.

It’s important to evaluate if your managers are working on each and every employee’s professional goals. One way to do this is with Manager 360 Feedback surveys (preferably anonymous).

8. Do you feel inspired by your company’s mission and vision?

The primary purpose of this engagement question is to know how your employees relate to the company’s goals. If they cannot believe and connect to the company’s vision and mission, they won’t engage actively.

Also, new employees may not be clear about your company’s values and missions. So, it’s important to include this question in your employee engagement surveys.

9. Do you think your work and accomplishment are being recognized at our company?

37% of employees reported they consider recognition as the most important aspect of staying in a company. Most of the employees seek appreciation for their efforts from the team leader or manager. And if employees feel that they are not well-appreciated in the company, they’ll be less productive.

So, you must include this question in your employee engagement surveys to ensure proper employee recognition across the board.

#D. Open-Ended Employee Engagement Survey Questions

Open-ended questions allow your employee to provide more detail and context to their answers. Questions like voice transcription, single-line or multi-line text can provide new (sometime surprising) insights. They can also give you the employee’s sentiment and opinions which are difficult to capture with MCQs alone.

10. What areas do we need to work on?

You can add this question in the employee satisfaction survey to understand your employee’s recommendations about the work culture. With this question’s help, encourage your employees to identify problems within the company or provide solutions to improve workplace culture.

11. How can we boost engagement at work?

Encourage your employees to provide recommendations on how to boost engagement at work. When you value your employee’s opinion, they will be happy to see their opinions matter to your company.

12. Is there anything else you’d like to share about our company’s employee experience?

This question can be basic, but it’s essential to include in the employee engagement surveys to ensure you aren’t overlooking any feedback.

Let’s take a look at why employee engagement surveys and employee experience management are crucial.

why is employee engagement crucial

Understanding employees is the primary key to growing your business. But you won’t be able to understand your employees if you don’t know about them. And the best way to know your employee is by asking the perfect survey questions at the right time of their employee journey map.

Is there a perfect employee engagement survey question?

Ah, we get it…nothing’s perfect. But near perfect employee engagement survey questions will help you to get real-time insights and crucial information about your employees. A good quality engagement survey question will have some significant metrics:

Employee motivation levels
Staff alignment with organizational goals
Employee productivity

Employee engagement surveys will boost employees morale and team productivity. It will sustain a positive work culture and create a win-win situation for you and your employees.

Employee Engagement Survey: Question Types

Before we discuss our list of 12 amazing employee engagement survey questions, here is a list of five different types of online survey questions, with a few examples:

Open-ended questions
Multiple Choice Question
Image Choice Questions
Rating Questions
Opinion Scale Questions

1. Open-ended questions

Open-ended or text input/voice input questions allow your employee to answer survey questions by typing or voice transcription. In other types of survey questions, the responses are pre-selected, for example, Likert scale questions, multiple-choice questions, etc.

Open-ended employee engagement survey questions are best to gather qualitative data. With these types of survey questions, you can know your employees’ feedback in their own words.

Here are some examples of open-ended questions:

What do you feel about our learning and development programs?
If we could change just one thing about our company, what would it be?

You can use open-ended questions to learn about the needs and expectations of your employee from the company. Open-ended survey questions are effective when you start taking surveys for the first time. When you don’t have enough information about your employees, you can conduct these surveys to know about them.

But there are a few drawbacks in using these kinds of questions, including:

Employees are less likely to answer open-ended questions, as they require more effort and time to answer than a simple yes-no question.
It can be challenging to analyze the results of open-ended surveys.
Multiple open-ended questions will bore your employees, and they might give less useful answers.

2. Multiple Choice Question

Multiple-choice questions are most popular among all the employee surveys. These types of questions allow you, the employee, to select an answer from a list of multiple options.

Mostly used in quizzes and texts, multiple-choice survey questions help to analyze data efficiently. With these kinds of employee engagement survey questions, you can provide a more effortless and engaging survey-taking experience to your employees.

Here is an example of a multiple-choice question:

employee engagement survey questions.

Multiple choice questions are easy-to-use, and you can analyze the data correctly with graphs and charts. However, the only drawback in a multiple-choice question is that they limit the answers in a specific list of options.

For instance, in the above example, there are four options available. Now, if someone wants the company to focus on a different aspect to improve, they won’t tell about it.

You can solve this issue by mixing up the multiple-choice question with an open-ended employee engagement survey question. In this way, your employees can share their answer that isn’t available on the list. Here’s how:

Of the following, choose the aspects that you think the company needs to improve on.

Career Development
Company Culture
Compensation
Benefits
Other (allows open-ended answer)

3. Image Choice Questions

If you want to make your employee engagement survey questions more engaging and exciting, you can use the image choice questions. With these types of employee engagement surveys, you can add images to make the questions appear appealing.

Here is an example of an image choice question:

Image-choice questions will give your employees a break from the boring text type surveys. And you’ll be able to measure employee satisfaction without any hassle.

4. Rating Questions

If you want to conduct an employee opinion survey, then rating questions will be the best pick. Using ratings, you can ask your employees to rate your company’s services, employee management, or employee benefits programs.

employee engagement surveys.

You can evaluate the answers in real-time with employee feedback surveys. This will help you to determine the NPS or Net Promoter Score®. NPS surveys help you understand how likely your employees are to suggest your company as a great place to work.

Here is one more example of the rating question that you can use for your employee engagement surveys:

How would you rate the quality of our employee experience management programs?

5. Opinion Scale Questions

The opinion scale, aka ordinal questions, is a typical 0-10- point scale that shows your employee’s reaction or the level of agreement or disagreement with a statement. The Net Promoter Score questions are perfect examples of rating scale questions.

If you want to add numerical value to your employee engagement survey questions, you can use opinion scale questions. These survey questions are also significant to measure employee satisfaction and engagement.

Bonus Tips: Some Awesome Features to Make Your Employee Engagement Surveys More Effective

There are multiple employee engagement surveys software available in the market to conduct effective online surveys. But, finding the right survey software to create engaging surveys can be challeneging.

However, we’ve listed some features you should consider before purchasing a survey software to free your load.

User Interface: This is the most important yet overlooked feature while conducting employee engagement surveys. People tend to leave a survey halfway when it becomes too boring or lengthy. That’s why you should keep your employee engagement survey questions short and crisp as it will increase the completion rates.

User Experience: Ensure your employee survey software has an efficient user experience. If your software doesn’t provide 24*7 support, free demo, and tutorials, then it isn’t the right software for you. A perfect survey software will be easy to use, and it will provide an amazing employee experience.

Automated Survey: Does your survey software provide auto-reminders? Can you automate your online surveys on scheduled intervals? If yes, then you’re using the right software to conduct employee engagement surveys. The more automation your survey software offers, the easier it is for you and your company.

360 Degree Feedback: Does your software provide a 360-degree assessment? While choosing employee survey software, make sure it contains the 360 employee assessment feature. For instance, with SurveySparrow’s 360 Degree feedback software, you can create a custom 360-degree feedback survey, customize employee reports and emails, increase growth and productivity.

Wrapping up

Engaged employees are productive hard workers who are positive and passionate about their organization. They not only value their organizational culture but also provide value to the customers. After all, happy employees equal happy customers right!

With SurveySparrow’s multiple online survey templates and themes, you can create and analyze amazing online surveys that enable workforce engagement. Now that we’ve offered you various exciting survey questions, you can start crafting engaging surveys right away.

With the right employee engagement survey questions, you can understand your employees personally and professionally. Once you get your employees’ opinion about your company, you can improve the work culture and create a win-win situation.

Do you have any favorite employee engagement survey questions of your own? If yes, share them with us in the comment.

Till then, happy surveying!

12 Amazing Employee Engagement Survey Questions To Ask