Assumptions about how your team is feeling are almost always wrong in at least one direction. The person you think is fine might be quietly disengaged. The person you assumed was struggling might actually feel energised. A well-run survey replaces guesswork with real signal, giving people a channel to say what they would not raise in a meeting, and giving you data to act on rather than a vague sense of the room. But the signal you get depends entirely on whether people trust that responding is worth their time. That means keeping it short, being transparent about what you are asking and why, and, critically, doing something visible with the results.
A survey only builds trust if people see that something changes afterwards.
How to run a survey people actually complete
Completion rates drop sharply after ten questions. If you want honest responses from everyone on the team, keep the survey focused. Twenty questions is about the upper limit for something people will complete in full; fewer is usually better. Tell people upfront what you are trying to understand and how you will use the answers. Vague surveys with no stated purpose feel like box-ticking, and people treat them as such.
Anonymity matters too. People are far more likely to share genuine concerns when they know their name is not attached to their response. If your survey is not anonymous, you will hear what people think you want to hear rather than what is actually going on.
- Keep it shortAim for five to ten focused questions rather than twenty broad ones. Respect that completing a survey takes time.
- Explain the purposeTell people what you are trying to learn and what you will do with the results before they start.
- Share the resultsFeed back what you heard, even briefly. 'Here is what came through' shows people their responses were read.
- Act on two or three thingsYou cannot act on everything. Pick the most important themes and be explicit about what you are going to do differently.
The questions
Engagement & wellbeing
- 1.On a scale of 1–10, how energised do you feel about your work at the moment?
- 2.How well are you managing to maintain a healthy balance between work and personal life?
- 3.Do you feel that your workload is sustainable, or does it regularly feel overwhelming?
- 4.How motivated do you feel to do your best work right now, and what is driving that?
- 5.Is there anything affecting your wellbeing at work that you think the team or I should be aware of?
Team & culture
- 6.How strongly do you agree that our team communicates openly and honestly?
- 7.Do you feel that different perspectives and ways of working are respected within the team?
- 8.Is there a culture of sharing credit and recognising each other's contributions?
- 9.How comfortable do you feel raising a concern or disagreeing with a decision in this team?
- 10.What is one thing about our team culture that you would most like to see improve?
Manager & support
- 11.Do you feel that your manager supports your success and genuinely cares about your development?
- 12.How clearly does your manager communicate what is expected of you?
- 13.Do you receive feedback that is useful and specific enough to help you improve?
- 14.When you raise a concern or ask for help, does your manager respond in a way that is helpful?
- 15.Is there something your manager could do differently that would make a meaningful difference to your experience?
Growth & direction
- 16.Do you feel that your role is helping you grow and develop in the direction you want to go?
- 17.How clearly do you understand where the team or organisation is headed, and how your work connects to that?
- 18.Are there skills or areas of expertise you want to develop that you are not currently getting the opportunity to work on?
- 19.On a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to still be here and enjoying your work in 12 months?
- 20.What is one change to your role, the team, or how we work that would make you feel more invested in being here long term?
What to do with the results
Reading the results yourself is not enough. Share back what you heard: a brief summary of the key themes, including the things that came up more than once and anything that surprised you. People need to see that their responses were actually read, not just collected. Even if the results are mixed or uncomfortable, sharing them honestly signals that the survey was worth completing. Tag survey responses with Key Themes so themes that recur across surveys and catchups can be surfaced together. Use the insights as starting points for 1-1 conversations.
Then pick two or three concrete things to act on. Not everything. Trying to fix everything at once usually means fixing nothing. Be explicit: say what you heard, say what you are going to do about it, and say when you will follow up. That loop of listening, acting, and reporting back is what turns a survey from a one-off exercise into something that people believe in.
Manager Toolkit's surveys feature lets you build and send surveys to your team, collect responses in one place, and track themes over time. Conditional questions let you show follow-up questions only when a specific answer is given - for example, asking someone why they feel disengaged only if they said they do. When you run the same survey again in a few months, you can see whether things have improved and show your team the trajectory.
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