As HR managers, you hold the key to a healthier, happier workplace – and it all starts with asking the right questions.
In this article, we’ll equip you with the most effective wellbeing questions to ask your employees, so you can truly get to know how they’re feeling.
Measuring the wellbeing of your employees is essential to creating a happy team.
The wellbeing of your employees underpins their engagement, creativity, and productivity at work.
In a recent study by HSE, work-related stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 50% of all work-related ill health in the UK last year.
When employees experience these wellbeing related issues, it leads to higher levels of absenteeism, lower employee engagement, and increased employee turnover.
Including employee wellbeing survey questions in your employee surveys will help you understand how your team is truly feeling, and give you the ability to identify when you may need to provide more support.
You need to ask yourself honestly if you believe you are connecting and engaging with staff in the best way at the moment. If you aren’t, what do you need to do? You need to get a platform like Stribe that gives you that ability. 
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.
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.
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.
The four pillars of wellbeing make up the areas in an employees’ life that contribute to their health and happiness. They are:
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.
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:
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.
These questions will help you measure your progress over time and their more general nature can also often prompt some great ideas from employees!
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.
About the author
Lucy Harvey, COO at Stribe, has 11+ years’ experience in purpose-driven leadership roles across health, wellbeing, internal communications, employee engagement, and marketing. She is passionate about creating workplaces where people are happy, fulfilled, and feel comfortable and safe to talk.
