Last updated July 2026
Your first month as a new HR Manager is all about understanding your people.
You’ll have meetings with leadership, conversations with managers and plenty of opinions coming your way.
But none of those conversations tell you what your entire workforce is thinking.
That’s where an employee survey comes in.
A well-designed, anonymous survey helps you move beyond assumptions and gives every employee an equal opportunity to share honest feedback.
More importantly, it gives you a reliable starting point for prioritising your next steps.
When you’re new to an organisation, there’s often pressure to make improvements quickly.
But making changes before you’ve understood the employee experience can lead to solving the wrong problems. An anonymous pulse survey allows you to:
Why ask it?
This simple question provides a high-level snapshot of overall employee sentiment.
Think of it as your baseline.
While it won’t tell you why employees feel the way they do, it quickly highlights whether engagement is generally healthy or whether deeper investigation is needed.
What the answers tell you
Follow-up question
What’s one thing we could improve that would make the biggest difference to your experience at work?
Why ask it?
Employee voice is one of the strongest indicators of engagement.
If employees don’t believe their opinions matter, they’re far less likely to contribute ideas, raise concerns or participate in future surveys.
The CIPD Good Work Index consistently highlights employee voice as a key driver of job quality and workplace wellbeing.
What the answers tell you
Follow-up question
What would help you feel more heard?
Why ask it?
Sometimes engagement isn’t the problem, rather it’s frustration.
Employees may be motivated but held back by poor systems, unclear processes or lack of resources.
This question helps uncover operational barriers that HR may not otherwise see.
What the answers tell you
Follow-up question
What could help you do your job better?
Why ask it?
Managers have one of the biggest influences on employee engagement.
Gallup research has found that managers account for a significant proportion of the variance in team engagement levels, making this an essential area to explore.
This question helps identify whether employees are receiving the coaching, communication and support they need.
What the answers tell you
Follow-up question
What contributes to you feeling this way?
As a new HR Manager, it’s tempting to ask everything, but it’s important to resist the urge.
A concise pulse survey is far more likely to achieve strong participation than a lengthy questionnaire.
The best first surveys are:
Your first survey doesn’t need to be perfect.
Many new HR Managers delay launching their first survey because they’re worried about asking the wrong questions.
But your first survey isn’t about perfection, it’s about creating a starting point.
Once you understand what matters most to your people, every future survey becomes more focused, more valuable and more impactful.
Listening early gives you the confidence to prioritise the right actions, and shows employees that their voices matter from day one.
One of the biggest challenges for new HR Managers is simply finding the time.
Between onboarding, stakeholder meetings and day-to-day HR responsibilities, building a survey from scratch can quickly fall down the priority list.
That’s why Stribe includes:
Choose from ready-made employee engagement, wellbeing, onboarding and pulse survey templates, then customise them to suit your organisation.
Need a survey on a specific topic? Simply tell Stribe what you’re trying to understand, and the AI Survey Writer generates relevant, professionally structured questions in seconds.
Employees can respond with confidence, helping you collect more honest and meaningful insights.
Instead of manually reading hundreds of comments, Stribe automatically identifies key themes, highlights trends and produces executive-ready summaries that make reporting to leadership much faster.
With Stribe, you don’t need to start from a blank page.
Use customisable survey templates, generate questions with AI, collect anonymous employee feedback and receive AI-powered summaries that help you turn responses into action.
Whether you’re in your first HR Manager role or joining a new organisation, Stribe makes it easy to start listening from day one.
About the author
Starting out her early career as a journalist, Jade Madeley is an accomplished content writer with 8+ years’ experience across business, personal finance, SaaS, human resources and employee engagement. Working with Stribe, she crafts insightful content that brings complex HR topics to life and drives meaningful action.
