It's Monday morning, and you find your latest employee wellness survey has landed in your inbox.
You expect a few complaints about workloads and remote work.
Instead, your report shows that your employees feel overworked, stressed, and unappreciated.
This is hard to reconcile with the supportive culture your organization promotes.
Your managers seem like approachable people, and you deal with concerns quickly, but those quiet comments about burnout and isolation now look like red flags.
As an HR professional, you know you need to figure out what's going on before low morale starts impacting productivity.
Research shows that employees with strong physical, mental, and emotional health tend to be more engaged and motivated at work.
And that kind of workplace supports a healthier bottom line.
But if you're only going to conduct a wellness survey once a year, make sure they are useful by asking the right questions and acting on the answers.
Otherwise, they'll become a checkbox exercise and your employees will wonder why they bothered going through the process.
In this article, you'll find 9 employee wellness survey questions to ask your employees to find out what they need from you.
You'll also find out why employee wellness isn't a one-off initiative and how regular surveys can help you keep up during times of change.
Sparkbay automatically collects feedback about job satisfaction at regular intervals (70% of our clients opt for monthly surveys).
With these responses, the platform creates clear reports with a score out of 10, allowing you to track satisfaction and identify your top improvement opportunities.
You can also drill down based on manager, department or tenure, and compare your results to similar organizations in the same industry as yours using Sparkbay's proprietary dataset.
You'll also receive a library of actionable steps from successful organizations to help your managers get up to speed and act on what your employees are telling them.
Here are the crucial questions every company should ask in their employee wellness survey.
Why are employee wellness survey questions important?
General health and stress management
Our organization takes adequate actions to promote employee wellness.
Does your company proactively promote employee wellness?
As an HR professional, you want to make sure your organization isn't reactive when it comes to employee health.
Is there a plan in place to encourage regular exercise, healthy eating, stress management, and work-life balance?
This question forces employees to consider whether your company's wellness initiatives are sufficient, relevant, and engaging. It gives you an opportunity to identify areas of improvement.
I work in a physically and psychologically healthy environment.
Employee well-being is both a physically and psychologically healthy work environment.
A physically healthy environment is a clean, comfortable, and ergonomically designed workplace.
A psychologically healthy environment is one where employees feel safe, respected, and valued.
Asking this question will give you insights into how employees view their work environment. This can help you identify areas of concern, whether it's related to air quality, ergonomic problems, or bullying and harassment. You can then make the necessary changes to foster a healthier environment.
The mental health resources available meet my needs.
Work-related stress and mental health concerns are on the rise. This question helps you determine whether your organization provides enough mental health resources and if employees find them useful.
Are your employees aware of the resources available?
Do they feel like they're adequate?
Use the responses to identify communication or resource gaps and improve your mental health support initiatives.
Corporate culture
I can have open discussions about anxiety and stress at work.
Creating an open culture where employees feel comfortable discussing their stress and anxiety is crucial for promoting mental wellness.
If employees feel like they can't share how they're feeling for fear of judgement or retribution, your culture is suffocating and unhealthy.
Use your employees' feedback to nurture a culture of openness, empathy, and psychological safety.
I don't feel judged if I take time off.
This question probes around the culture of taking time off within your organization.
Taking time off - whether due to illness, vacation, or personal reasons - is an essential part of an employee's well-being.
If they feel they will be judged or face adverse consequences for taking time off, it's a sign that your organization may inadvertently promote burnout and overwork.
I feel supported when I am dealing with personal or family issues.
Personal and family issues have a major impact an employee's mental well-being and work performance. This question assesses whether your organization offers the support employees need during trying times.
This support can be in the form of flexible work hours, leaves, or emotional support from team members and managers.
If employees feel unsupported, it's crucial to understand why and implement strategies to better support them.
Workload and work-life balance
I find my workload reasonable.
This question gives you an insight into whether employees are feeling overworked.
A heavy workload can lead to stress, burnout, decreased productivity, and a decline in the quality of work.
If employees report that they find their workload unreasonable, you can take steps to address overwork, whether it's through redistributing tasks, hiring additional staff, or providing better project management training.
I can communicate openly with my manager about workloads and performance expectations.
Open communication with managers about workload and performance expectations is crucial for maintaining a work-life balance and avoiding burnout.
If employees feel like they can't express their concerns about their workload, this can lead to dissatisfaction and decreased productivity.
Use their responses to promote open and honest communication so that managers and employees are on the same page about workload expectations.
My work schedule is flexible enough to deal with family or personal life.
This question gauges your organization's work-life balance.
Work-life balance is critical for employee wellness, preventing burnout, and promoting job satisfaction.
If your employees find their work schedule inflexible, this can lead to stress and decreased productivity.
Employee wellness is not a one-off initiative
Employee wellness surveys are an invaluable tool for any organization. They give you insight into your employees' well-being and the effectiveness of your organization's wellness initiatives. As an HR professional, these surveys are one of your best tools for identifying issues related to workload, corporate culture, stress management, and more.
Each question in your employee wellness surveys serves a unique purpose. By understanding the purpose of each question, you can better interpret your employees' responses and take the right actions. Whether it's improving mental health resources, promoting open discussions, or ensuring a healthy work-life balance, your actions can help you build a healthy, productive, and happy workforce.
So use these surveys wisely, listen to your employees, and make their well-being a priority.
The benefits of a robust employee survey platform
A robust employee survey platform such as Sparkbay can help leaders understand obstacles and opportunities and focus their efforts where it matters. It can also track engagement and satisfaction over time to identify which actions are working and which aren't.
That tracking only takes you so far if the numbers stay at the surface, which is why it is important to be able to segment data based on demographics such as tenure and role.
Sparkbay allows leaders to interrogate their data in any way they want to uncover deeper insights about their people, so the obstacles and opportunities hiding behind an overall score come into view.
Those insights are only worth as much as what follows them, because surveying employees serves no purpose if leaders do not take advantage of the opportunities they discover.
With Sparkbay's automated coaching, managers can act on easy-to-implement strategies instead of sitting on a report they aren't sure how to use.
These tools drive action to ensure you meet your employee-centric objectives.
Deciding where to act also means knowing how your results compare, and leaders need to compare their survey results with industry benchmarks to understand how they are doing.
Using the right survey platform, you can compare your survey data with others in your industry, similar-sized companies, and top employers, which puts a single score in the context of organizations that look like yours.
Most of that work happens at the team level, and manager dashboards help managers visualize their survey results all in one place.
With these dashboards, managers can easily track employee experience trends, and identify strengths and opportunities.
None of that helps if the tool itself gets in the way, and you don't want your managers to waste valuable time on a clunky, hard-to-use platform.
We designed Sparkbay with simplicity in mind, so your managers will master our intuitive dashboards in no time.
Speed counts as much as simplicity here, since taking action is the most significant part of your survey strategy.
That's why Sparkbay's real-time results let you expedite your process and propel insights into action.
All of it rests on the questions you ask in the first place: to get the insights you need, you have to ask questions that resonate.
Sparkbay offers science-backed questions on key workplace topics such as diversity and inclusion, change management, employee benefits, and more.
Measuring and improving employer branding through employee pulse surveys is straightforward and effective when you adopt an approach that works.
If you're interested in learning how Sparkbay can help you build a more engaged workforce, you can click here for a demo.
