What is employee wellness survey?
Employee wellness survey is a set of survey questions primarily asked to establish a direct correlation to their happiness, productivity, and rate of retention.
It is used to gauge and understand how much importance employees give to their wellness and wellbeing at the workplace.
Let me share a little secret with you, which most people will hesitate to share. If you inspire your employees, they will work harder for you and set your company on the path of success. Pretty simple right?
But, do you know what is the game changer here? It is the employee wellness survey.
Top 20 questions to ask in your employee wellness survey
An employee wellness survey helps you understand the wellness preference of employees in the workplace. Employee wellbeing is directly proportional to the employee(s) performance at work. A recent study conducted says merely 12% of organizations across the globe consider employee wellness a priority. This survey can help you understand what exactly is the employee(s) outlook concerning wellbeing.
Free survey template: Employee Wellness Survey Questions + Sample Questionnaire Template
Below are the top 20 questions you can use in your survey:
Survey questions for employee wellness
1. Considering your overall experience with employee wellbeing, how likely are you to recommend your friends or family to work with us?
2. Personally, is employee wellness important to you?
3. Do you follow any exercise or training routine?
4. List down the fitness activities you indulge yourself in.
5. Do you often snack during your work hours?
6. Have you invested in a good health insurance plan?
7. Please list down all the medical examinations you have had in the last six months.
8. Do you feel stress from work is affecting your personal life?
9. Do you think you will be interested in attending a wellness program at work?
10. What do you think should be the duration of each session?
11. Do you think conducting wellness programs during office hours is helpful?
12. Will it be helpful if the organization provided a healthy snacking option?
13. Please list down if you have any medical conditions.
14. Do you use any tobacco products?
15. Do you consume alcohol?
Survey questions for demographics assessment
16. What is your Gender?
17. Please specify your ethnicity.
18. Please write your date of birth
19. Please specify your relationship status.
20. Is there anything else that you want to add to help us improve employee wellness in our organization.
Learn more: 7 Demographic Survey Questions for Questionnaire
Tips to run a successful employee wellness survey
If you are looking to start a new corporate workplace wellness program from scratch or simply looking to improve your current program, sending a survey to your employees to collect their feedback should be a part of your regular process. For example, you may have conducted a training program for your employees, a simple way to collect their feedback is to deploy a post-training evaluation survey to get the relevance of training imparted.
Although employee wellness survey is found everywhere in organizations, they do lack the focus of participation; this only means one thing, they don’t produce the desired result. Here are the four tips to help you run a successful worksite wellness employee interest survey within your organization:
Tip 1: Ask the right questions, always
The first and most important aspect of the employee wellbeing survey is asking the correct survey questions. This is where most of the survey creators err. Instead of focusing on asking the right questions, most professionals focus more on the aesthetics of the survey. Don’t get me wrong that is equally important.
Don’t spend too much time on making your survey look beautiful or make your questions flowery. Instead, focus solely on the purpose of the information that you would like to procure after deploying the survey. The purpose of your survey should be to gather the following information:
- How are your employees using your current wellness program?
- What is it that your employees expect of the wellness program?
- Do your employees need a new wellness program?
Every question you ask should be able to answer the value of investment of your various initiatives. The questions you ask could vary from one organization to the other. If you focus your questions around current needs and future requirements, you will be able to get appropriate answers.
Tip 2: Communicate effectively
Once you have added appropriate questions to your employee wellbeing survey that centers around the attributes mentioned above, you can now shift your focus on effectively communicating about the survey. This, again, is a common stumbling block for survey creators as it is difficult to create proper channels of communication for a voluntary survey.
Once again, there is not the “one” solution for how you should communicate effectively will all the members of the team. Here are some interesting tips to get timely results:
- Know the best practices: The marketing team in the organization generally has a creative way of spreading the message. Connect with them and how to understand how you can communicate with the rest of the employees and make them aware of the survey.
- Give time to revert: You must set a time to receive responses for the deployed survey. Setting up a timeline will help people respond in time. At the same time, don’t fall in the trap of wanting the results fast.
- Communicate in a proper channel: Depending on the demographics and work habits of your employees, choose the right channel to communicate with people. It could be over an email, chat apps, or SMS, whatever is preferred by the population.
Tip 3: Reward your employees
It is always a good practice to reward your employees for the time they have invested in responding to the survey. Of course, you are providing them the free wellness session, but that may or may not inspire everyone.
Gift your employees with:
- Meal coupons
- Gift cards
- Company based incentive, like free healthy meals for a week for anyone who participates in the survey.
Tip 4: Use data to implement the program
Once you have closed the survey and received the responses, you should have the necessary information you need to roll out the wellness program. This data is important and can be used throughout the year to benchmark it with the previous data.
Consider, for a fact, for an organization, data in any form is gold, and your employees are the goldmine if you need authentic information, ask the right questions to collect the data. For example, once you have received the responses to your survey, you will now know precisely how many employees are interested in a wellness program.
From this list, you can again filter and pinpoint the different physical activities employees have chosen. So the following year, when you send them the survey, your questions will be more specifically directed.
Benefits of conducting employee wellness surveys
Now that we understand what types of questions should be included in an employee wellness service, let’s look at the benefits of conducting workplace wellbeing surveys:
- Finding work-life balance
Finding a work-life balance is crucial for all employees. Some of your employees may be parents, some of your employees may be attending some classes, while some may be traveling long distances to come to work. Employee wellness surveys will help you identify the concerns of these employees and help address them. You can pass on the data collected to managers so they can provide flexibility or help as and when needed.
- Identify gaps
Not all organizations run employee wellness programs. It is, however, crucial that all organizations have some sort of wellness program in place, big or small. Conducting workplace wellbeing surveys will help you identify any gap areas in your programs and bridge them effectively.
- Provide competent health insurance plans
Organizations must provide market comparable health insurance plans. Conducting worksite wellness surveys will help you identify what employees feel about your insurance plans, and what possible additions can be made to it for employees’ benefit.
- Improve employee satisfaction
Employee wellness affects employee satisfaction in a lot of ways. Any health issues or medical conditions may hamper an employee’s performance and satisfaction at work. Conducting surveys can help identify these issues and provide necessary help to all employees concerned.
Employee wellness survey dos and don’ts
Dos
1. Keep it short – Don’t pile on questions in your survey. Keep your survey short and to the point to avoid survey fatigue. Keep your survey less than 10 minutes, and make sure to test it before you deploy it.
2. Keep the first question easy – You are not deciding on what you want to buy from a grocery shop! Keep the first question simple. The employee surveys that you find on google are not tailored enough to extract meaningful information.
3. Allow open-ended responses – Responses to open-ended questions may feel like time-consuming, but it’s where you will get the most relevant information. You need to ask the questions these questions towards the end of the survey.
4. Ask questions to understand the perception – You need to ask questions that will help you understand the perception of the employees towards wellness. This information is especially helpful when you want to have a year on year comparison of the data collected.
Don’ts
1. Avoid asking leading questions – As the name suggests leading questions pushes respondents to answer in a specific manner wholly based on the way they are framed. These questions already contain information. The responses to such questions are biased.
2. Don’t ask vague questions – Asking questions that are not directly related to the topic can lead to an increased rate of survey dropout. You must keep your survey respondents engaged so that you get useful data.
3. Don’t keep every question in the compulsory option – Some survey respondents are not comfortable answering all the demographic questions. Don’t put your respondents in a spot. If the survey requires them to furnish personal information, then give them a choice.
4. Don’t keep every question mandatory to answer – Always keep a timeline associated with submitting the survey. One week is a good time for respondents to submit their responses. Keeping the survey open for a long time would again lead to a higher survey dropout rate.
If you wish to learn more about the workplace wellness survey, kindly write to us.
