Open enrollment comes just once a year; but the chance to gauge employee interest in your benefits is an effort you should be making year-round. In order to build a loyal and engaged workforce, you need to understand what employees think of their benefits. Are they useful? Easy to understand? What benefits outside of your current offerings would they find the most valuable?

You can send out as many surveys as you want, but if you’re not asking the right questions, you probably won’t get  useful data. And in 2023, that comes down to gathering information not only about employee sentiment around your benefits, but how they feel those benefits support their financial and mental wellbeing.

How to Create an Effective Employee Benefits Survey

Asking the right questions can help you tailor your benefits package to best meet the needs of your workforce—which is an easy way to boost employee loyalty, make your company more attractive to new hires, and keep everyone satisfied without additional spend. (Remember, there are plenty of free benefits that don’t cost you a thing but can provide meaningful value to your workforce!)

In general, follow these best practices when crafting your survey to ensure ample participation:

Keep it Confidential

Your employees may not feel comfortable providing honest, open feedback if they know they’re being tracked. Make survey results anonymous–and communicate this ahead of time–so they can give you the truly valuable feedback you’re looking for.

Offer Write-In Options

Multiple choice or Yes/No questions may be straightforward, but be sure to provide at least some questions that have write-in options for people to provide free responses. You may also decide to include a comment box at the end of the survey that gives people a designated amount of space to make any remarks they like. Open-ended questions can be more useful in helping you collect honest feedback than a simple yes/no.

Keep it Concise

Busy employees are likely to put off or avoid a survey that’s too long or complex. Whittle down your survey to a handful of questions that get down to the heart of the matter, and prioritize the information that’s most important for you to know. People can start off strong on a survey but lose steam as it goes on and include less and less information.

15 Sample Survey Questions

We’ve provided a few key examples below; tailor the questions to specific data points you’re hoping to collect or initiatives you’re considering. Provide a range of open-ended, ranked, and multiple choice questions in your employee benefits survey for the best results.

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Keeping employees happy and motivated is no small feat—but asking the right questions with surveys like these is one of the best places to start. Fine-tune your questions and your approach so you get honest, useful data that can help you create an engaged, loyal workforce in 2023.

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