The 22 most effective employee wellbeing survey questions to ask your team

Why should you include wellbeing questions in your employee survey?

Wellbeing survey questions are a great way to measure, track, and improve the wellbeing of your employees.

They give you the data to help you understand the wellbeing of your employees and create evidence-based wellbeing strategies that meet their needs.

Not only do the questions help you understand your employees’ wellbeing, but they also give you insights into how they’re feeling in relation to specific areas. Helping you create targeted approach to your wellbeing plan. 

What is purpose of an employee wellbeing survey?

You can understand broad employee wellbeing KPIs by using employee engagement statistics such as absence rates, employee turnover and reasons for leaving.

However, employee wellbeing surveys allow you to be one step ahead, and address any underlying issues before they begin to have a negative impact on the organisation. 

The goal of an employee wellbeing survey is to measure employee wellbeing, understand what areas of employee wellbeing are scoring badly, and gather ideas from employees for improvement.

The format of employee surveys means they’re a great way for you gain a deeper understanding of how your employees’ view wellbeing.

Depending on your organisation’s size, getting feedback from many of your employees can be difficult.

Employee wellbeing surveys give you a flexible way to gather detailed feedback from all of your employees. Their anonymous format gives employees confidence that they can be honest and share truthful, detailed feedback – something you may not always get from other feedback sources such as manager one-to-ones. 

How often should I survey employee wellbeing?

Stribe recommends surveying employee wellbeing monthly, but this depends on a few factors that will be unique to your business.

For example, if you are a larger organisation, you may want to consider quarterly to give you more time to process the results. The bigger your organisation, the longer it can take to analyse and create change from wellbeing surveys.

If your organisation is going through a period of change or a busy time then you should consider running an ad-hoc survey to give you insights that will help you support your employees during that time.

Understanding employee needs during this busy periods will help you improve wellbeing and reduce absenteeism and staff turnover – saving you money in the long run. 

Learn more about how often you should run employee surveys for your organisation.

What are the pillars of employee wellbeing?

The four pillars of wellbeing make up the areas in an employees’ life that contribute to their health and happiness. They are:

• Emotional wellbeing
• Physical wellbeing
• Social wellbeing
• Financial wellbeing

All four pillars are important and if one is lacking, the rest can also suffer.

For example, an employee’s financial wellbeing can affect their mental wellbeing, and their emotional wellbeing can have an impact on their physical wellbeing. 

That’s why we always recommend including a question to represent each area of wellbeing in your employee survey. This gives you all the information you need to develop a well-rounded employee wellbeing strategy that covers all four pillars. 

How to structure your survey questions for the best results

Before we dive into the best wellbeing questions to ask, let’s take a look at our recommended employee engagement question structure. 

If you don’t spend time thinking about the way your questions are structured, you risk creating more questions than answers when you try to analyse your results.

We believe that all questions should be:

• Easily measured 
• Clear and simple to understand 
• Not leading employees towards an answer
• Applicable to everyone who is answering the survey
• Followed up by a text response to give you qualitative data
• Followed up by an action to create positive change and show employees you value their responses.

How to write great survey questions

The 22 best workplace wellbeing survey questions to ask employees

As important as it is to check in on your employees with wellbeing in mind, it’s also important you’re asking the right questions. 

We’ve put together a list of the best staff wellbeing survey questions to use in your next employee survey.

The questions will help you understand the levels of wellbeing within your employees, and see where they need support.

We’ve broken them down into the four areas of employee wellbeing to ensure you have a well-rounded view of employee wellbeing and can support improvement in all areas.

Overall Employee Wellbeing Questions

These questions will help you measure your progress over time and their more general nature can also often prompt some great ideas from employees!

• On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you at work? Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Very Unhappy – Very Happy)
• Overall, I feel well (emotionally, physically, etc.) Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Strongly Disagree – Strongly Agree)

Financial Wellbeing Survey Questions

• How much are financial worries currently affecting your mental wellbeing? Answer Type: 1-10 (Not at All – A lot)
• I often lose sleep worrying about my finances. Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Never – Always)
• I feel confident I could handle a major unexpected expense. Answer Type: 1-10 (Strongly Disagree – Strongly Agree)
• In the past two weeks, how often have you felt worried about the cost of living? Answer Type: 1-10 (Never – Very frequently)
• How well do you feel [Organisation Name] supports your financial wellbeing? Answer Type: 1-10 (Not at all – Very)

Emotional Wellbeing Survey Questions

• How often do you start the day feeling refreshed and full of energy? Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Never – Always)
• How would you rate your current mental wellbeing? Answer Type: 1-10 (Very poor – Excellent)
• My organisation cares about my mental health. Answer Type: 1-10 (Strongly Disagree – Strongly Agree)
• My organisation has a culture where employees are encouraged to speak up. Answer Type: 1-10 (Strongly Disagree – Strongly Agree)
• When I ask my manager for support, they can give me what I need. Answer Type: 1-10 (Never – Always)

Physical Wellbeing Survey Questions

• How is your physical health in general? Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Very bad – Very good)
• In the last three months have you ever come to work despite not feeling well enough to perform your duties? (Yes/No/Don’t Know)
• How would you rate how well rested you feel before work? Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Not at all – Very)
• I regularly reach my exercise goal for the week. Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Never – Always)
• How many hours of sleep, on average, do you get a night?

Social Wellbeing Survey Questions

• How would you rate your relationships with your peers at work? Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Very bad – Very good)
• How would you rate the wellbeing support from your manager? Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Very bad – Very good)
• I have a healthy work-life balance. Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Strongly Disagree – Strongly Agree)
• I feel my organisation respects setting boundaries between work and home? Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Strongly disagree – Strongly agree)
• How satisfied are you with the relationships you have with your colleagues? Answer Type: 1 – 10 (Not at all – Completely)

Choosing the right software for your employee wellbeing survey

If you’d like a platform that takes all the leg work out of surveying your employees, we’re here to help.

Stribe’s flexible surveys make it simple for you to engage your employees, especially for those who are the hardest to reach.

This makes it easy to gather both instant and frequent insights to help you better understand your team. Our people science team are always on hand too. They will help you create, plan and launch successful surveys – as well as maximising the rest of the tools within Stribe.

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