Generate valuable feedback with employee surveys
Employee surveys help you gather feedback on different company processes, gain insight into the working climate and collect valuable information about your customers, your product and your HR processes. Employee motivation and employee satisfaction, both important factors in a company's success, can also be examined more closely through surveys. Employee surveys allow you to tap into your workforce's knowledge, including ideas for improvement, and turn the findings into effective measures.
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Examples and templates for employee surveys
Employee surveys can pursue very different objectives. Sometimes the focus is employee retention and job satisfaction, sometimes process optimisation or quality assurance, but first and foremost they are about gathering information. An employee survey helps you make better-founded decisions, identify strengths and weaknesses, recognise trends and define objectives based on information from your workforce. Sustainable organisations involve their employees, make use of their knowledge and learn from internal feedback.
When creating an employee survey, you can use our free questionnaire templates as a starting point. Click “Use template” to copy one into your LamaPoll account and adapt it as required. Below you will find some of the most common questionnaires used for employee surveys. More examples and questionnaires are available here:
The questionnaire templates for employee surveys can be copied into your LamaPoll account with a single click and adapted to your requirements.
Employee survey: definition, use cases and tips
An employee survey is a well-established method of gathering information that companies use to obtain feedback from their employees. As a business management tool, employee surveys are particularly useful in HR policy and organisational development. Their purpose is to obtain feedback from the workforce, for example to measure employee satisfaction, encourage participation and at the same time strengthen employee retention.
The results of an employee survey can also provide a factual basis for improvement measures and support change processes as part of strategic change management. When introducing new frameworks such as the OKR method, employee surveys are also a useful way to create the data basis needed for realistic objectives and precise monitoring. Surveying employees therefore does more than capture opinions about the current situation. It also helps analyse selected indicators and identify opportunities and weaknesses.
Employee surveys step by step: for a clear guide, further tips and examples, see how to conduct an employee survey online.
Ideally, employee surveys should be conducted anonymously so that participants can respond honestly without answers being traced back to them. In practice, anonymity often leads not only to more candid responses, but also to a higher response rate. Our Helpdesk article on ensuring anonymity explains what to consider when creating anonymous surveys. To increase acceptance and willingness to participate, it is also advisable to communicate the purpose and results of employee surveys transparently. Explain what the survey is intended to examine and involve participants in the follow-up process after the survey has ended. Further trust can be created by involving the works council and, where appropriate, through a works agreement for the employee survey.
Employee surveys are an effective way to obtain a meaningful picture of the mood and views within your workforce. What is the current situation in the company? Where is there room for improvement, and where should you start? From processes and workflows to communication, motivation and satisfaction, use valuable employee feedback to identify the right areas for action after analysing the results.
Employee surveys: occasions, objectives and benefits
Employee surveys are often used when there is general dissatisfaction within a company or when an organisation wants an overview of the mood among its workforce. HR development and/or a project team gathers sensitive quantitative data from employees in order to identify potential improvements and derive suitable measures. As an HR management tool, employee surveys can support all areas of people management across organisations and industries. The data is analysed to understand employee sentiment and initiate appropriate measures to improve overall employee satisfaction.
You can find practical use cases and detailed project guides for employee surveys in our Helpdesk. We have also prepared a detailed white paper on employee surveys, which you can download free of charge: Download the employee survey white paper
Triggers and objectives
There are many different reasons to run an employee survey. Often, however, there is a specific warning sign that suggests it is time to survey your employees, for example:
- Declining performance among employees
- Demotivated employees
- Resignations
- Increasing absence rates
- A rise in complaints
The objective is to address such signals early and ideally prevent them in future. Ultimately, your organisation is aiming for:
- Employees who are willing to perform
- Low absence rates
- Motivated teams
- Quality assurance
- Overall employee satisfaction
- Employee retention
Objectives and benefits of an employee survey
Employee motivation and involvement have become major factors in organisational competitiveness. Competition and change are moving ever faster. Employees are the foundation of every organisation. Your workforce is not merely close to day-to-day operations, but directly involved in them. Your employees hold valuable knowledge and have a significant influence on your product, your service and your business processes. Employee motivation and employee satisfaction are therefore important success factors. Employee surveys help you capture employee knowledge and turn it into effective measures.
Particularly useful for this purpose: questionnaires for employee surveys.
Advantages and disadvantages of employee surveys
Online employee surveys offer a wide range of advantages. They provide a straightforward way to collect valuable feedback from employees across the organisation. This gives you insight into the current situation within your workforce while also creating a data-based starting point for comparable surveys in future.
Another advantage is that an employee survey can strengthen the relationship between employees and the organisation by giving people a voice and showing that their views are heard. You gain deeper insight into employee satisfaction and can use the survey results to identify areas that may need attention as well as areas with particularly high satisfaction. Find out directly where problems may exist. Are there conflicts? Where is dissatisfaction emerging? Is communication lacking? Your employees can provide valuable impulses for improvement.
The main advantages of employee surveys at a glance
- Feedback: a straightforward way to obtain honest feedback from your employees
- Employee retention: strengthen the long-term relationship between employees and the organisation
- Employee motivation: identify possible causes of conflict, staff turnover, dissatisfaction or other problems
- Identify opportunities: uncover problems and recognise potential for improvement
- New perspectives: benefit from ideas and impulses that come directly from your workforce
- Data and benchmarks: build a fact-based knowledge base and establish a starting point for follow-up surveys
Disadvantages of employee surveys
There are no major inherent disadvantages to an online employee survey. However, you should allow for the staff resources and time required for preparation and questionnaire design. It is also important to address employees' concerns about anonymity. If participants provide only socially desirable or guarded responses, the organisation may draw the wrong conclusions and lose the opportunity to benefit from valuable feedback.
Be aware that an employee survey can create expectations. If the subsequent analysis shows a strong desire for change or a need to improve the working climate, the organisation should investigate the causes and take action. If employees expect measures but nothing follows, frustration and a gradual loss of trust may result. The potential disadvantages should not deter you from running a survey. With good preparation, transparent communication and a genuine willingness to involve employees and act on their feedback, an employee survey can deliver substantial benefits.
Employee survey case study
Like customer surveys, employee surveys can answer key questions with relatively little time and cost: which measures are right for employee retention, quality optimisation and reducing staff turnover?
The answer can help protect you from poor decisions or inappropriate measures and often reveal simple, practical approaches to important improvement processes. One example: many studies show that direct managers influence employee satisfaction, staff turnover and the number of days employees are absent.
But what this means in detail, and what employees ultimately consider important, can be explored through an employee survey:
- Is excessive pressure the problem?
- Would the team like more support and development?
- How important is regular feedback?
How much an employee survey can achieve in a short time
An example of an efficient and successful employee survey
What are the benefits of an employee survey?
Employee motivation and retention
An employee survey actively involves your employees in organisational change. It can strengthen loyalty and improve cohesion within teams.A basis for HR decisions
Employee survey results provide clear findings: they show how employees assess HR work. Comparing results with similar organisations can also provide a useful benchmark.Early warning system
Regular employee surveys reveal how satisfied your employees are. Emerging dissatisfaction and its causes can be identified early, allowing you to recognise risks and opportunities for HR development and respond accordingly.Building trust
When employees see that their responses are taken seriously, they feel involved in positive change. Handle survey data sensitively as well. This can strengthen trust in the organisation and support employee satisfaction and loyalty.Improving internal communication
Employee surveys give your workforce an opportunity to provide anonymous feedback on a wide range of company processes. You can use this feedback to improve processes across the organisation.Employee surveys are a sensitive instrument of human resources management. They involve collecting data from an organisation's employees. One or more people from HR development are usually involved in projects of this kind. Download the employee survey white paper
6 golden rules for your employee survey
Frequently asked questions about employee surveys
An employee survey is a structured survey within an organisation. It measures how employees experience their work, management, communication, collaboration, workload and organisational culture. Good employee surveys do not merely collect individual opinions; they provide a reliable overall picture. What is working well? Where are the risks? Where should the organisation take concrete action?
Employee surveys make visible what is often discussed only informally in everyday working life. They help identify problems early, improve management and collaboration, and plan measures more effectively.
The key point is that an employee survey is not an end in itself. It is useful only if the results are analysed, communicated and translated into concrete improvements.
A good employee survey should be simple, clear and varied. A combination of scale questions, multiple-choice questions and a small number of open questions has proved effective.
Scale questions make results comparable, for example with statements such as “I receive the information I need to do my job.” Open questions provide additional insights from everyday working life, but should be used sparingly. Two or three well-chosen open questions are often enough, such as “What is working well?” and “What should be improved?”
A useful check for every question is: what will we do with the answer later? If a question does not support a decision, analysis or measure, it probably does not belong in the questionnaire.
There is no fixed “right” number, but there are useful rules of thumb. For many organisations, 25 to 40 closed questions provide a good framework. This is enough to cover key topics such as management, communication, collaboration, workload, development and organisational culture without making the survey unnecessarily long.
As a general rule, an employee survey should take around 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Pulse surveys should be considerably shorter; 5 to 10 questions are often sufficient. The exact number matters less than completion time. The longer the questionnaire, the greater the risk that fewer employees will participate or that respondents will simply click through towards the end, reducing data quality.
Yes. In most cases, an employee survey should be conducted anonymously. This is important not only for honest responses, but in practice is often also the legally safer approach. Particularly for sensitive topics such as management, workload, conflicts or trust, it should not be possible to draw conclusions about individual people.
Anonymity is determined when the questionnaire is designed, not afterwards. Anonymous means more than simply not asking for names. The more important rule is to collect only demographic information that cannot identify anyone within your specific workforce. If a team has only one woman, do not ask for gender in that group. If a department consists of three people, do not offer that department as a separate filter. If you plan carefully in advance which real groups can be created by combining different characteristics, you do not need to block results retrospectively, and you avoid suppressing meaningful analyses simply because only a few people in a large group responded.
If a survey is not anonymous, this must be communicated clearly. Who can see the responses? What will they be used for? How long will they be retained? The next section explains this in more detail.
The decisive question is whether the survey is genuinely anonymous. If individuals cannot be identified, directly or indirectly, no personal data is processed and the analysis generally falls outside the scope of the GDPR. This is one reason why anonymous surveys can be legally attractive.
As soon as responses can be attributed to individual people, directly or indirectly, data protection obligations apply. These include a clear purpose, transparent information, collecting as little personal data as possible, secure processing, and a clear deletion or retention policy. In practice, this means collecting only the data genuinely required for the analysis.
Demographic questions are a common source of problems. Information such as department, length of service, location or gender can identify individuals when combined, even if no name is requested. The more detailed the breakdown, the more quickly anonymity can be lost in practice.
Important: participation is generally not compulsory. Employee surveys are usually not necessary for performing the employment relationship, so there is normally no legal basis for requiring participation. Participation is voluntary.
If there is a works council, it should be involved at an early stage. The legal position depends on the specific design of the survey.
According to the case law of the German Federal Labour Court, a voluntary and anonymous survey can generally be conducted without co-determination over the questionnaire itself. However, there are two important points. If digital survey software is used, it may be subject to co-determination under Section 87(1) no. 6 of the German Works Constitution Act (BetrVG), because such an IT system may in principle be capable of monitoring behaviour and performance. Irrespective of this, Section 80(2) BetrVG imposes an information obligation: the employer must inform the works council about the project in good time and comprehensively.
In practice, involving the works council is almost always useful. It builds trust, helps clarify data protection questions and increases acceptance of the survey.
For a comprehensive employee survey, an annual cycle is usually sufficient. Short pulse surveys can also be useful quarterly or after important changes, for example following restructuring, changes in management or major projects.
The follow-up process matters more than frequency. If an organisation keeps asking questions but makes no visible changes, trust can decline and participation rates may fall. It is better to ask less often, analyse the results properly and follow up on concrete improvements.
After the survey, the results should be analysed, prioritised and translated into concrete measures. A clear process is useful: analyse the results, select the most important areas for action, assign responsibilities and later check whether the situation has improved.
Communication with employees is particularly important. What did the organisation learn? What will change? What will not change, and why? Without visible follow-up measures, an employee survey can damage trust. Employees may quickly conclude: “We were asked, but nothing happens anyway.” In the worst case, that can be worse than not asking in the first place.
For very small teams, a simple questionnaire may be sufficient. Once anonymity, multiple locations or departments, recurring surveys or professional analysis become important, dedicated software is usually more appropriate.
Good software helps not only with distributing the survey, but also with data protection, analysis, comparability and tracking measures. Particularly for sensitive surveys, this is often more reliable than manual analysis using spreadsheets.
An employee survey does not have to be expensive. With LamaPoll, it can already be carried out using the Basic plan (€49 per month). For a typical survey, around two months is usually sufficient, including preparation, implementation, analysis and a generous buffer. This means the cost of a complete employee survey can often be covered by around two months on the Basic plan.
The plan price is less important than the work around it: a well-designed questionnaire, clear communication and consistent analysis. If the survey is planned carefully, a straightforward plan is often sufficient.
Expected response rates for employee surveys are considerably higher than for customer surveys. With external surveys, a response rate of 3 to 4 per cent may already be welcome, whereas much higher figures are realistic for internal surveys. Well-designed and well-communicated employee surveys often achieve response rates of 60 to 80 per cent, and very well organised surveys can exceed this.
A high participation rate is not an end in itself, but it is important for obtaining robust results. It depends mainly on three factors: credible anonymity, clear communication of the purpose and visible follow-up measures from previous surveys. If employees are convinced on these points, participation is usually much higher.
With LamaPoll, you can get started very quickly. In many cases, you can have a complete draft ready the same day and send it directly to colleagues for review, often faster than preparing a PowerPoint presentation. It is particularly quick if you use one of our employee survey templates as a starting point.
The actual preparation time then depends less on the technology than on internal coordination. Which topics should be included? Who needs to be involved, such as the works council? With a template, the questionnaire itself can be ready in a short time.
Conclusion on employee surveys
An online employee survey can be a valuable opportunity for your organisation. Gain a data-based view of the current situation and the mood within your workforce. Find out directly where there is room for improvement and how you can take concrete steps to increase employee satisfaction. Although creating and analysing a survey requires staff resources and time, the advantages can clearly outweigh the effort involved. The results can benefit not only organisational culture, but also make an important contribution to your organisation's performance.
We successfully use LamaPoll for our customer and employee surveys. Ease of use, helpful personal support and the high level of data protection offered by LamaPoll are particularly important to us.
What is LamaPoll?
LamaPoll is a survey tool for creating employee surveys and measuring employee satisfaction. You can use it to create, conduct and analyse all types of employee survey. Create your employee survey in just a few steps, apply your organisation’s corporate design and invite employees conveniently by email or via your intranet. You can quickly gain insights that help improve employee satisfaction. You can register for our survey tool free of charge and immediately conduct surveys for up to 50 employees with no obligation. If you need more responses to your online employee survey questionnaire, simply choose one of our monthly plans. You can also use our employee survey questionnaire templates and examples.
