What are the best questions to ask your colleagues?

The best questions to ask colleagues are questions that elicit an honest, concrete answer about what someone experiences, what gives them energy or drains it, and what could be improved. Think about questions covering employee happiness, collaboration, development, and management. The quality of the question determines the quality of the answer: open, specific questions generate insights that HR professionals and managers can act on immediately. In this article, we answer the most frequently asked questions about setting up an effective employee survey.

What kinds of questions produce actionable insights?

Questions that produce actionable insights focus on concrete experiences rather than abstract satisfaction. Don't ask "Are you satisfied with your work?" but instead ask "What gives you the most energy in your work right now?" The difference seems small, but the first yields a number and the second yields a story you can actually work with.

There are three types of questions that together deliver the most value in an employee survey:

• Experience questions: how does someone experience their daily work, collaboration, and environment?
• Driver questions: what are the factors that most strongly influence employee happiness or engagement?
• Improvement questions: what would concretely need to change to improve the experience?

The combination of a score, a driver, and an explanation in someone's own words gives managers exactly what they need: not just that something is going on, but what and why. That is the difference between a report that ends up in a drawer and insights that lead to action.

What are the best questions about employee experience and engagement?

The best questions about employee experience and engagement cover energy, purpose, collaboration, and growth. They are recognisable to the employee, concisely worded, and invite honest answers. The following questions are most widely valued in practice as useful and genuine.

Good employee experience questions for an employee survey include:

1. To what extent would you recommend our organisation as an employer to friends or acquaintances? (eNPS)
2. How much energy do you currently have for your work, on a scale of 1 to 10?
3. What gives you the most energy in your work right now?
4. What costs you the most energy right now?
5. Do you feel appreciated by your direct manager?
6. Do you have sufficient opportunities to develop yourself in your current role?
7. Do you know what is expected of you in your work?

The eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) provides a quick temperature check of overall willingness to recommend. The energy questions connect to engagement and vitality. The remaining questions touch on the factors that most strongly determine engagement in practice: recognition, clarity, and development.

How many questions should an employee survey contain?

An employee survey works best with ten to fifteen questions. That is enough to cover the most important themes without making the completion time so long that people drop off or give superficial answers. For pulse surveys — where you measure more frequently and briefly — three to seven questions per round is sufficient.

A long questionnaire gives the impression that a great deal of attention has gone into the survey, but the opposite is true: the longer the list, the lower the response rate and the more superficial the answers. Employees who drop out halfway through or click through quickly produce data you cannot trust.

A more effective approach is to choose a fixed core of five to seven questions that you always ask, supplemented by two or three rotating questions that connect to a current topic, such as a reorganisation, a new onboarding process, or a recent team initiative. This keeps the survey relevant and manageable, and allows you to track trends over time on the core questions.

Which questions should you avoid in an employee survey?

Avoid questions that are leading, double-barrelled, or so vague that employees do not know what you are actually asking. These kinds of employee satisfaction questions generate noise rather than insight, and undermine trust in the survey.

Concrete examples of questions you are better off not asking:

• Double-barrelled questions: "Are you satisfied with your work and your manager?" Two topics in one question, two possible answers, one input field.
• Leading questions: "Don't you think communication could be better?" You are already steering the answer in a particular direction.
• Overly abstract questions: "How do you experience the organisational culture?" Without context or clarification, no one knows exactly what you mean.
• Questions without a follow-up possibility: If you know that nothing will be done with an answer, do not ask the question. It raises expectations you cannot meet.

A good rule of thumb: if you yourself are unsure what the right answer is when reading a question, the question is not concrete enough. Rewrite it from the perspective of the employee's daily work experience.

How do you ensure that managers actually act on the answers?

Managers act on answers when they receive insights that are directly translatable to their own team, in a way that requires no statistical expertise. A report full of averages and bar charts rarely leads to action. A summary of "these are the three biggest energy boosters and energy drains in your team, with example quotes" does.

That requires a few concrete choices in how you set up your HR survey:

• Make team reports available at the level of the manager themselves, not only at the organisational level.
• Translate scores into priorities: what has the greatest impact on engagement and requires immediate attention?
• Close the survey with an open question, so employees can say in their own words what they mean.
• Build in a closed-loop process: after the survey comes a team conversation, then an action, then a check to see whether it helped.

Closed loop simply means that feedback does not stop at filling in a questionnaire, but that there is a demonstrable follow-up. Employees who see that their input leads to a change are more inclined to answer honestly next time. This is how you build a culture of continuously listening to employees rather than taking an annual snapshot.

How CYS Group helps you ask the right questions in your employee survey

Asking the right questions is one step. Ensuring that the answers actually lead to better experiences for employees is the step that most organisations find challenging. That is exactly where CYS Group helps.

With the cx.management platform and its own 3-question methodology, we set up employee surveys that work:

• A proven question set that measures energy, engagement, and drivers via the Employee Energy Pulse
• Team reports that managers can use immediately, without any statistical knowledge
• A driver model that automatically shows which factors have the greatest influence on employee experience
• Built-in closed-loop follow-up, so feedback never gets left behind
• GDPR-compliant and ISO 27001-certified, including for sensitive HR data

Whether you want to start with a first measurement or convert an existing employee survey into continuous listening: we are happy to think along with you. Get in touch and discover what the right questions can deliver for your organisation.

Make every experience count.