Burnout: The 10 best employee engagement survey questions

Burnout occurs when the stress or pressure from our work and personal life reaches a certain point, it either becomes too intense or lasts for too long. And according to Westfield Health’s research this year, close to half (46%) of UK workers are close to burnout.

Burnout is hard to spot, but common symptoms include exhaustion, lack of sociability, irritability, and a decline in mental and physical health. If you are burned out, you could be struggling to manage your work or personal responsibilities, and coping mechanisms only help you for so long.

As a result, you must discover which of your employees are struggling, so you can prevent burnout from occurring – or getting worse within your teams. After all, employee burnout usually isn’t something that just goes away on its own. If it’s left to develop, employees suffering from burnout can develop more serious physical and physiological illnesses such as depression, anxiety and hypertension.

(For more information on spotting burnout and what to do next, check out our extended guide 😃)

To combat this growing issue, organisations large and small are turning to employee burnout surveys as their solution. These surveys give you all you need to know about the state of your organisation and your employees in relation to burnout. When you know which employees need support or treatment, it’s easier to make the positive workplace change to help them.

These surveys also work wonders in preventing employees from developing full-fledged burnout, as you’ll be more likely to catch any issues early than organisations without regular employee feedback.

One of the best ways to survey your employees 

Before we dive into the best questions to ask your employees, let’s take a look at our recommended employee engagement question structure. We believe that all questions should be:

• Clear and simple to understand

• Not leading employees towards an answer

• 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.

Here are a few examples of our question (Q), follow up (F) and action (A) survey framework:

Some of the best financial wellbeing questions to ask

Baseline questions:

The questions are used at the beginning of a survey to collect information on the status of your teams. This is important to be able to track the trends and successes of any initiatives or workplace change after the baseline level is established.

• How would you rate your overall stress levels when you’re at work? On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being very high)

• How would you rate your mental health at work? On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being excellent)

Detailed workplace questions: 

• How would you rate your ability to complete your current workload in your contracted time? On a scale of 1-10 (10 being always)

• How would you rate the ratio of staff in your team to the amount of work needing to be completed?  (10 being very good)

• How often do you have to work overtime to finish your work? On a scale of 1-10 (10 being always)

• How often are you able to take mental breaks from your work, when needed? On a scale of 1-10 (10 being always)

• How often are you able to engage in physical fitness outside of work? On a scale of 1-10 (10 being always)

• How often do you start the day feeling refreshed and full of energy? On a scale of 1-10 (10 being always)

• How comfortable are you asking for time off/annual leave when you feel the need? On a scale of 1-10 (10 being always)

• How comfortable are you to go to your manager if you experience workplace stress ? On a scale of 1-10 (10 being always)

Follow up questions

As seen in the illustration above, follow-up questions are great for gaining more insight. Unlike your main question, a follow-up question lets your employees give text based answers so they can add more context to their responses.

Examples of follow-up questions you could use:

• Why do you feel this way?

• What can we do to improve this score?

• What can we do to improve this for you?

• Please give more detail

Stribe surveys

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

Stribe’s highly customisable pulse surveys make it simple for organisations to engage their employees, especially for those who are the hardest to reach. This makes it easy to gather both instant and frequent insights to better understand your team. Our people science team are always on hand too, helping you to create, plan and launch successful surveys – as well as maximising the rest of the tools within the platform.

Stribe connects people, helping them feel happier, safer, and heard in their daily work life. Simple.

If you’d like to learn more, you can get in touch here 😃