Top 10 employee survey questions and best practices to help you further improve your work environment

How do you ensure that top talent is making a beeline for your organization? What can attract them to your company in the first place?

The answer to these questions could be more or less the same - “a great work culture”.

To draw an analogy, work culture is like that one flower that always attracts more bees than others because of its unique, different-tasting nectar.

It is the quality of your work environment that can help you attract and retain top talent.

Your competitors could match your pay scale and could have the same employee policies, but no matter how hard they try, they cannot possibly replicate your company culture or work environment.

So, what is so special about having a positive work environment, and how can it impact your employee engagement? Let’s see.

A positive work environment is nothing but a cumulative of healthy working conditions that provides an employee safe space - physically and mentally, to grow as an individual in terms of their career and at the same time lets them contribute to the company’s growth.

For you to truly understand what change in your work environment can create a positive impact on your employee engagement, it is essential to evaluate, plan and execute certain methods to measure and improve your employee experience.

We can easily judge how a good work environment impacts the employee engagement of an organization by analyzing certain things:

• Employee productivity - A positive working environment is organized, calm, and has fewer distractions which lets employees be more productive in the workplace.
• Open and honest feedback - The clarity and coordination between employees in a healthy workplace are significant because the communication between the employees and the management in the form of top-down and bottom-up feedback is seamless.
• Great work-life balance - A healthy work environment enables your employees to maintain a good balance between their personal and work life, which further contributes to the employee’s job satisfaction.
• Career growth opportunities - A positive work environment has a growth mindset amongst employees where every employee is encouraged and supported by their management, leaders, and co-workers to learn new skills and grow up the ladder.

A potential candidate would not prefer to come in or stay longer in a work environment that doesn’t value feedback, recognition, and growth.

So, let us see what it takes to create a healthy work environment.

How to create a healthy work environment?

If you see from an employee’s perspective, attractive packages, perks, and benefits have become more commonplace amongst organizations.

This has made employees keen on identifying and researching more about the work culture of the organization they are aspiring to join using tools like Glassdoor and other job review portals, to ensure they fit in well there.

Ebbing away are the days where employers had a lot of options to choose from top talent without caring much about their organization’s culture.

Ultimately, your work culture i.e. your employer brand is what becomes your biggest crowd-puller when it comes to attracting top talent.

With that said, how do you create a healthy work environment to attract and retain top talent?

Here are some of the main aspects that we believe will make your work environment healthy:

• Providing a good workspace: As an employer, you need to ensure that you provide a safe, neat, and tidy workspace with all basic amenities, work equipment that makes your employees feel comfortable and improve their productivity. Even when your employee works remotely, it is essential that you support/provide them with their basic work equipment needs, so that their work does not get impacted.
• Promoting employee wellness: It is essential that you promote employee wellness in your workplace and not glorify the employees that spend extra hours in the office than needed by recognizing them. Plan and execute wellness initiatives for your employees to make sure they remain physically and mentally fit.
• Frequent employee recognition: Employee recognition plays a crucial role in creating a great workplace environment. Recognizing and rewarding employees promptly for their good deeds can go a long way in improving workplace culture. Even a simple pat on the back and a spot award by your co-worker or a manager can add great motivation to an employees’ work and will improve their productivity.
• Bringing clarity in communication: Establishing good clarity in communication within the teams and with the management could solve a lot of problems when it comes to establishing a healthy work environment. As a leader, you must appreciate differences of opinion within the team, as that is what brings innovation to the table. At the same time, honest, anonymous feedback should be encouraged within the organization, as that is what will enable you to form a good work environment.
• Having a strong team camaraderie: People working in silos and just meeting once in a while to discuss strategy and get going are not technically team members. With the remote work environment, it’s tough to bring people together and make them do teamwork as leaders. That is why it is essential that the team bonds with each other regularly so that they can create a supportive work environment for one another that thrives on empathy and humility.

Employee work environment survey questions

A leader who aspires to build an excellent work culture would always want to improve her employee's work experience by optimizing the work environment for them regularly. But how do you measure something like work culture?

Thanks to the advent of cloud computing, it is possible now (up to some extent) if you use an employee feedback platform like CultureMonkey.

But, for you to build an excellent work environment for your employees, you need to listen to them regularly, strategize an action plan to fulfill their needs, and will have to repeat this process diligently.

Because what gets measured is what gets managed.

Here are some survey questions on the work environment that we think will add value to you in gauging what needs to be improved or sustained in your work environment strategy for your employees:

1. Do you think people from all backgrounds are treated fairly at our company?
2. Do you agree working here, you feel that you can live a physically healthy lifestyle?
3. Do you think your co-workers are supportive of you when you are having a bad day at work?
4. Do you feel you need more flexibility in your working arrangements?
5. Do you feel we have strict policies against workplace discrimination?
6. Do you believe that management provides an equal career development opportunity for all?
7. Do you think you are provided with the necessary equipment/tools/training to do your work successfully?
8. Do you feel that your physical working conditions can be further improved?
9. Do you believe that you are comfortable and productive in your current work environment?
10. What are the key factors you think should be considered to create a good work environment for you?