employee retention survey questions

Creating Employee Retention Survey Questions to Improve Your Workplace

Creating Employee Retention Survey Questions to Improve Your Workplace

employee retention survey questions

You’ll need to have a set of pertinent employee retention survey questions to create the necessary insights for your employee retention survey and overall campaign. This will help you take solid action against employee turnover and solidify a good reputation for your business. 

While many employees stay at their jobs for a year and more, a considerable portion of them still leave. 31% of employees have quit their job within the first 6 months of working; that’s practically one-third of the workforce.

Employee retention is clearly a prominent challenge that employers and HR departments have to crack; there are a few silver linings, however. For example, 80% of employees feel more engaged when their work is consistent with the core values and mission of their company. 

Most importantly, listening to your employees’ concerns plays an influential role in employee retention, that is why it is critical to survey your employees. In fact, 90% of workers are more likely to stay at a company that takes and acts on feedback.

Hence, you’ll need to form relevant questions to power your employee retention survey. 

This article contextualizes and provides key examples of employee retention survey questions so that you can reap all the needed insights for retaining your employees. 

How to Approach Employee Retention Survey Questions

To approach ideating these questions, you must first put your own employee retention survey and campaign at large into perspective. This means you need to mull over why you are conducting this survey, taking aspects such as the year’s quarter, time and main issues you’d like to address.

This is because the employee retention survey is a kind of employee feedback survey; it can also be labeled as an employee satisfaction survey, as the point of it is to make your employees happy in order to keep them. As such, you’ll need to first identify the priorities of your employees and your HR department.  

The Aspects of Employee Retention

employee retention

There are several key drivers of employee retention that you can prioritize, or at least keep in mind for the future. These include:

  1. Growth opportunities
    1. Employees will be hard-pressed to leave if they can grow professionally in your company.
    2. If employees don’t see a future with your company, they’ll look for opportunities elsewhere.
  2. Employee fulfillment
    1. Employees stay in job positions and environments that they love, rather than solely in those that earn them money.
    2. Employees need to feel that their individual skills are valued.
  3. Employee trust
    1. Employees seek to be trusted enough to be autonomous in their tasks.
    2. They seek to be trusted enough to handle their responsibilities without being micromanaged. 
  4. Ease of collaboration
    1. A non-hostile workplace is a necessity; such an environment not only decreases employee attrition but stimulates collaboration. 
    2. As humans, employees need some degree of socialization; collaboration provides this, along with helping the company.
  5. Supporting processes and workflows
    1. Expectations and processes need to be well-structured and clearly defined so that employees operate correctly and with confidence. 
    2. Employees need to know that their efforts are aligned with their teams’ goals so that they can accomplish their tasks without worry. 

As you plan these survey questions and contemplate their priorities, you may come across several issues that need to be addressed. There are two ways to approach this scenario; you can ask questions on multiple topics in each survey, or you can divide the questions into multiple surveys.

In the former approach, your employee retention survey is going to be longer, so you’ll need to provide employees with the approximate time it will take to complete it.

The latter approach involves examining your employees by each survey they take. Given that these will be divided based on the main concern they address, they will be short. Since they all deal with employee retention, you’ll need to send them out in close proximity of each other.

Contextualizing Employee Retention Survey Questions

After you find the main needs and concerns of your survey — or—  if you don’t know where to become in terms of ideating, the below list will guide you. This list addresses various key question topics to aid your employee retention survey. 

By considering each topic, you’ll be able to contextualize the point of your survey and which survey approach is best for your team.

To approach this survey, consider asking questions in relation to the following concerns:

  1. Pinpointing the company culture 
  2. Learning how to respond to employee needs in a timely fashion
  3. Discovering the biggest employee pain points
  4. Finding whether employees understand the larger goals/roadmap of the company
  5. Gathering insight into whether there is conflict among team members
  6. Taking the proper action to make sure everyone is treated well
  7. Understanding employees’ professional growth goals
  8. Seeking employees’ issues and desires in terms of their pay
  9. Detecting instances of burnout or those that lead to employee burnout 
  10. Rewarding employees with employee recognition and acknowledgments of good work
  11. Identifying the common threads of those who leave the company
  12. Assuring that all employees understand their goals and objectives
  13. Minimizing any stress employees may experience
  14. Allowing employees to feel fulfilled, trust and appreciated
  15. Understanding general thoughts about the work environment

Discuss these ideas with your HR and/or people team. Some topics will carry much more weight than others, depending on your employee turnover rate, your company’s trajectory, its employee retention issues and more.

Key Examples of Employee Retention Survey Questions

Now that we’ve covered the approach to this survey and prived various topics for formulating your questions, it’s time to focus on the questions themselves. 

employee retention question examples 
The following lays out various employee retention question examples  (along with follow-up questions) that you can use to fill your survey:

  1. On the scale of “extremely agree” to “extremely disagree,” how would you rate the following: I have a clear understanding of my objectives and requirements?
    1. Question Type: Likert scale question
    2. Employee Retention Survey Topic: Assuring all employees understand their goals and objectives
  2. On the scale of “extremely agree” to “extremely disagree,” how much do you agree with the following: I feel like I am able to reach my full potential at [company name]?
    1. Question Type: Likert scale question
    2. Topic(s): Allowing employees to feel fulfilled, trust and appreciated
  3. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions about the company culture?
    1. Question Type: Multiple-selection, multiple-choice and open-ended answer options
    2. Topic(s): Pinpointing the company culture 
  4. What has been the most difficult aspect of your position?
    1. Question Type: Multiple-choice and an open-ended answer option
    2. Topic(s): Discovering the biggest employee pain points
  5. How can [company name] or your manager minimize any stress you have from your job?
    1. Question Type: Multiple-selection, multiple-choice and open-ended answer options
    2. Topic(s): Minimizing any stress employees may experience
  6. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the following?: “I understand the direction and goals this company has in the near future.”
    1. Question Type: Scaled question
    2. Finding whether employees understand the larger goals/roadmap of the company
  7. Have you ever experienced conflict between you and another team member
    1. Question Type: Yes or no
    2. Topic(s): Gathering insight into whether there is conflict among team members
    3. Follow-up questions: 
      1. Describe the issue. (Open-ended question)
      2. How did you handle it? (Open-ended question)
      3. How often have you had this issue? (Numeric answers)
  8. Do you have everything you need to succeed in your position?
    1. Question Type: Yes or no
    2. Topic(s): Learning how to respond to employee needs in a timely fashion
    3. Follow-up question: 
      1. If no, which of the following do you need most urgently? (Multiple-selection, multiple-choice listing supplies, technical courses, work-life balance, hours, clear expectations, etc.)
  9. What can [company name] or your manager do to assure you are treated with respect?
    1. Question Type:  Multiple-selection, multiple-choice and open-ended answer options
    2. Topic(s): Taking the proper action to make sure everyone is treated well
  10. How satisfied are you with the following?: I am satisfied with my career path and promotion plan.
    1. Question Type:  Matrix question (from very unsatisfied to very satisfied)
    2. Topic(s): Understanding employees’ professional growth goals
  11. How satisfied are you with the following?:  I am satisfied with my salary/commission/other earnings.
    1. Question Type:  Matrix question (from very unsatisfied to very satisfied)
    2. Topic(s): Seeking employees’ issues and desires in terms of their pay
  12. Are you easily irritable or constantly exhausted?
    1. Question Type: Scaled from “not at all,” to “very much so”
    2. Topic(s): Detecting instances of burnout or those that lead to employee burnout 
    3. Follow-up question: If answers on the higher portion of the scale are provided, ask: “What would make you less exhausted?” (Multiple-selection, multiple-choice and open-ended answer options)
  13. Do you feel that you are recognized when going above and beyond?
    1. Question Type: Yes or no
    2. Topic(s): Rewarding employees with employee recognition and acknowledgments of good work
    3. Follow-up question: If “no,” ask: “What can [company] or your manager do to grant you recognition and appreciation?” (Multiple-selection, multiple-choice and open-ended answer options)
  14. Based on your knowledge and intuition why did past employees leave the company?
    1. Question Type:  Multiple-selection, multiple-choice and open-ended answer options
    2. Topic(s): Identifying the common threads of those who leave the company
  15. If you had to do it all over again, would you apply to this position
    1. Question Type: Yes or no
    2. Topic(s): Understanding general thoughts about the work environment
    3. Follow-up question: Why? (open-ended question)

Avoiding Employee Turnover

It is an absolute necessity to gather employee feedback, as these critical insights help you run your business in a way that’s conducive to employee retention. The more survey research you conduct, the more you’ll be attuned to the needs, desires, pain points and thoughts of your employees.

That way, you can retain your talent, while strengthening the reputation of your business. After all, happy employees who choose to stay at your company are far more likely to give you a high eNPS score on the eNPS survey. In order to collect employee feedback and carry out the eNPS and employee retention survey, you’ll need a strong online survey platform. 

Such a platform should make it easy to create and deploy employee surveys. It should offer a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a poor mobile environment.  

The survey platform should also feature advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers

Additionally, it should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific respondents, instead of only deploying them across a vast network. 

When you use a survey platform that offers all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to make good use of your employee retention survey questions and foster a positive work environment.