70+ Wellbeing survey questions to help you assess mental, emotional, and physical wellness at work

Ever noticed how employees often answer “I’m fine” when you casually ask how they’re doing—but later you discover someone’s been quietly overwhelmed for months? That’s the tricky part about wellbeing at work: what’s on the surface rarely tells the full story.

One manager shared how their “always cheerful” team member was actually dealing with severe burnout, which was only revealed after an anonymous survey flagged red signals.

That moment changed how they thought about employee wellness and employee engagement forever. Wellbeing surveys help employees discover things about their own needs, preferences, and strengths, which might otherwise go unnoticed.

Workplace wellbeing isn’t just about free fruit in the pantry or gym memberships—it’s about really understanding mental, emotional, and physical needs.

And the smartest way to do that? Asking the right well-being survey questions that dig deeper, spark honesty, and guide meaningful improvements. Honest feedback is essential for uncovering the real issues and driving meaningful change.

Why workplace wellbeing surveys matter more than ever?

The past few years have redefined how employees experience work. Remote setups, shifting priorities, and constant change have blurred the line between professional and personal life.

That means stress, burnout, and disengagement can quietly build up if left unchecked. A simple wellbeing pulse check can bring those hidden realities to light before they affect performance or morale.

Wellbeing surveys matter now because they go beyond job satisfaction. They explore psychological safety, emotional resilience, and social belonging—areas often overlooked in traditional staff survey questions.

When employees feel safe sharing how they’re really doing, leaders can uncover not just challenges but also opportunities to support employee well-being, mental, physical, and financial health, and current wellness programs in ways that truly resonate.

Employee well-being and employee health are central to workplace engagement and productivity, making it essential for organizations to measure and improve these aspects through targeted surveys.

From a management perspective, these surveys aren’t just feedback forms—they’re early warning systems. They help HR and leadership teams spot trends, compare employee wellness survey results over time, and build policies that keep people supported, connected, and engaged.

In an era where talent retention is tougher than ever, the organizations that take well-being seriously will be the ones where employees feel heard, valued, and motivated to stay, contributing to the company’s success. When an organization cares about its employees, it not only improves morale but also drives the company's success.

What areas should a well-being survey actually cover?

When it comes to designing a wellbeing survey, it’s not just about asking how “happy” employees feel at work. A comprehensive wellbeing survey should address various aspects of the employee experience, including physical, mental, and social dimensions.

Before creating your survey, consider key factors such as inclusivity, anonymity, and timing to ensure you gather effective and honest feedback. Here are the core areas your survey should cover, with overall health as a holistic measure that encompasses all these dimensions:

• Mental and emotional health: Questions that explore stress levels, burnout, and overall psychological well-being help uncover if employees are struggling silently. These insights also point to whether the workplace promotes genuine psychological safety.
• Physical wellness: From daily energy levels to access to healthy habits, physical health directly impacts focus and productivity. Smart health and wellness survey questions can highlight gaps in support programs.
• Financial stability: Money worries often spill into work life. Asking about financial security gives employers a clearer sense of how benefits and policies can ease unnecessary stress.
• Social connections and inclusion: Belonging is core to social well-being. Questions about teamwork, inclusion, and workplace friendships, as well as the work environment, reveal whether people feel connected—or isolated.
• Work culture and engagement: Exploring perceptions of leadership, communication, and growth opportunities helps measure if the overall culture keeps employees engaged and motivated.

70+ Wellbeing survey questions to ask your team in 2025

Crafting the right wellbeing survey questions is what turns feedback into meaningful action. Employee wellness surveys differ from a traditional engagement survey, as they focus specifically on health and well-being rather than overall job satisfaction and organizational engagement.

While an engagement survey is typically conducted annually and provides a comprehensive assessment of employee engagement, employee wellness surveys are designed to regularly assess and improve employee well-being.

Overall well-being questions

1. How would you rate your overall sense of well-being at work?
2. Do you feel supported by your employer when it comes to your personal wellness?
3. How often do you feel energized and motivated throughout the workweek?
4. Do you feel your workload allows you to maintain a healthy balance in life?
5. How confident are you that the company cares about your holistic well-being?
6. How frequently do you experience stress related to work responsibilities?
7. Do you believe your current role supports your long-term well-being goals?
8. On a scale of 1–10, how satisfied are you with your general work-life wellness?

Work-life balance well-being questions

1. Do you feel you can disconnect from work during your personal time?
2. Are you able to take breaks or time off without guilt or pressure?
3. How manageable do you find your current workload?
4. Do you feel encouraged to use your vacation days fully?
5. How often does work spill into your personal or family life?
6. Do you believe your manager respects boundaries outside of working hours?
7. How easy is it for you to balance work with caregiving or family responsibilities?
8. Do you have enough flexibility in your schedule to manage personal commitments?

Physical health well-being questions

1. Do you feel your job supports your physical health needs?
2. How would you describe your current energy levels during the workday?
3. Are you able to take regular breaks for movement and stretching?
4. Do you feel encouraged to adopt healthy habits like exercise or proper sleep?
5. How well does your workplace support ergonomic needs?
6. Do you have access to any wellness programs or physical health resources?
7. Do you feel your job negatively impacts your physical health in any way?
8. How often do you experience fatigue or exhaustion at work?

Mental health well-being questions

1. Do you feel comfortable discussing mental health challenges with your manager?
2. How often do you feel stressed by your work responsibilities?
3. Do you feel your workplace supports psychological safety?
4. How effective are company resources in supporting psychological well-being?
5. Do you feel you can take a mental health day without judgment?
6. How often do you feel overwhelmed by work demands?
7. Do you feel you have enough resources to cope with stress at work?
8. How supported do you feel when sharing mental health concerns with HR?

Financial well-being questions

1. Do you feel your salary allows you to live comfortably?
2. Are you satisfied with the financial benefits the company provides?
3. Do financial worries ever interfere with your performance at work?
4. Do you feel the organization provides fair compensation compared to the industry?
5. How confident are you in your financial stability over the next year?
6. Do you feel the company offers enough resources for financial planning or literacy?
7. Does the company support your long-term financial security (e.g., retirement plans)?
8. Are there financial benefits you wish were offered to improve your well-being?

Social connections and inclusion questions

1. Do you feel connected to your team members on a daily basis?
2. How inclusive do you feel the company culture is?
3. Do you have someone at work you can confide in when needed?
4. How often do you feel isolated in your role?
5. Do you feel your contributions are valued by your peers?
6. Does the company encourage team-building or bonding activities?
7. Do you feel your identity and background are respected in the workplace?
8. How supported do you feel in building meaningful relationships at work?

Work culture and engagement questions

1. Do you feel inspired by the mission and vision of the company?
2. How much trust do you have in leadership to act in employees’ best interests?
3. Do you believe your feedback is taken seriously by management?
4. How satisfied are you with communication within the company?
5. Do you feel recognized and appreciated for your contributions?
6. Does the company promote a culture of fairness and respect?
7. Do you feel motivated to go above and beyond in your role?
8. How engaged do you feel with the company’s goals and objectives?

Employee benefits questions

1. How satisfied are you with the healthcare benefits provided?
2. Do you feel the benefits package supports your overall well-being?
3. Are you aware of all the wellness resources available to you?
4. Do you believe the benefits offered align with your personal needs?
5. How useful are the company’s wellness programs for employees?
6. Do you feel there are enough benefits related to mental and physical health?
7. How effective are employee perks in reducing stress or improving balance?
8. Are there benefits you’d like to see added to the wellness package?

Workplace climate well-being questions

1. Do you feel safe in your workplace environment?
2. How would you describe the overall atmosphere at work?
3. Do you feel the company takes employee concerns seriously?
4. How comfortable are you raising issues about workplace culture?
5. Do you feel workplace conflicts are handled fairly and promptly?
6. How much trust exists between employees and management?
7. Do you feel your workplace climate encourages collaboration and support?
8. How satisfied are you with transparency around company decisions?

Remote/hybrid culture well-being questions

1. Do you feel equally included whether you work remotely or in-office?
2. How supported do you feel when working in a remote or hybrid setup?
3. Do you feel remote work has affected your social well-being positively or negatively?
4. How effective are communication tools for keeping you connected in hybrid work?
5. Do you feel your remote working setup supports productivity and health?
6. How well does the company promote connection in a hybrid environment?
7. Do you feel you have equal career opportunities regardless of work location?
8. How often do you experience feelings of isolation while working remotely?

Tips for creating your employee well-being survey strategy

Designing a survey is more than pulling together a few staff survey questions. To truly uncover insights, your approach needs to be structured, empathetic, and intentional. Here are some practical tips to shape a strategy that gets honest and useful responses.

• Start with clear objectives: Decide upfront what you want to learn—whether it’s stress levels, engagement, or psychological safety survey questions. Clear goals will help you frame better questions and avoid a vague wellness questionnaire for employees that lacks focus.
• Keep the survey short and relevant: A survey that drags on will lead to drop-offs. Instead, prioritize meaningful wellbeing survey questions for employees and make sure every item links back to your goals. Quality beats quantity here.
• Use a mix of question types: Combine rating scales, multiple-choice, and open-ended prompts. This helps balance structured employee wellness survey results with the richness of personal experiences.
• Make timing part of the strategy: Don’t wait for the annual review cycle. Send a quick wellbeing pulse check quarterly to track trends and address issues before they snowball into bigger problems.
• Incorporate follow up surveys: Use follow up surveys to track the impact of wellness initiatives over time, collect comparative data, and benchmark progress against industry standards.
• Communicate the purpose transparently: Employees are more likely to engage when they understand how the results will be used. Share how survey findings feed into HR policies, benefits, and overall workplace well-being improvements.

How to know if your employees are quietly struggling?

Sometimes the biggest red flags are the ones you can’t see. Employees who are quietly struggling don’t always show it in obvious ways like missing deadlines or calling out sick. Instead, it can appear as subtle changes—less participation in meetings, less enthusiasm in conversations, or withdrawing from social interactions.

These signs often slip through the cracks unless leaders are tuned in.

That’s why surveys play such an important role. Through carefully designed well-being survey questions for employees, you can uncover patterns that might not come up in day-to-day interactions.

A well-structured wellness questionnaire for employees gives them the space to be candid without fear of judgment, helping you detect early signs of burnout, stress, or disengagement, facilitated by open communication.

It’s also important to look beyond the survey results. For instance, sudden drops in productivity, more errors than usual, or even a shift in tone in written communication can point to deeper challenges.

When paired with employee wellness survey results and regular check-ins, these indicators help HR and managers create support systems that employees may not feel comfortable asking for directly. Proactive listening can make all the difference.

How to keep wellbeing surveys anonymous but still actionable (through third-party survey vendors)?

One of the biggest barriers to honest answers is fear of being identified. Employees won’t reveal their true mental, emotional, or financial struggles if they think responses can be traced back to them.

Many companies choose to work with third-party survey vendors to protect employee privacy and encourage participation. That’s where third-party survey vendors come in—helping you balance confidentiality with meaningful insights while respecting personal responsibilities.

• Use a trusted external partner: Vendors specialize in collecting staff survey questions and responses in a way that protects anonymity. Their role as a neutral party builds confidence among employees.
• Set clear anonymity thresholds: Ensure that reports only share aggregated employee wellness survey results, with a minimum number of responses before data is displayed. This prevents singling out individuals in small teams.
• Customize reporting categories: Ask your vendor to slice results by department, tenure, or role without compromising identity. That way, you still gain targeted insights without breaching trust.
• Communicate the process upfront: Tell employees exactly how their responses will be handled. Transparency about third-party safeguards reduces hesitation in answering sensitive psychological safety survey questions.
• Provide managers with action-ready summaries: Vendors can translate anonymous data into clear insights and recommendations, so leaders know what to improve without needing personal identifiers.
• Regularly audit the system: Check in with your vendor to ensure processes remain secure and compliant. Over time, this builds lasting trust, encouraging higher participation in every wellbeing pulse check.

Tips to encourage honest answers in sensitive wellbeing surveys

Getting employees to open up about their mental health, stress, or financial worries isn’t easy. If surveys feel risky or vague, responses will stay polite and surface-level. Here’s how you can create an environment where people feel safe to share openly.

1. Reassure anonymity: Clearly state that responses can’t be traced back to individuals. Pair this with third-party handling of wellbeing survey questions to ease fears around sensitive disclosures.
2. Use empathetic wording: The phrasing of health and wellness survey questions matters. Avoid clinical or judgment-heavy language, and instead use approachable, human-centric wording.
3. Keep it short and focused: Overly long surveys cause fatigue and rushed answers. Focus only on the most important wellbeing survey questions for employees to get honest, thoughtful input.
4. Share past actions taken: Employees will be more candid if they’ve seen their feedback lead to real change. Reference how previous employee wellness survey results shaped new initiatives.
5. Offer multiple response formats: Include open-text options alongside rating scales. This allows employees to express nuanced concerns that might not fit into a simple score, giving you a fuller view of social well-being and engagement.

How do HR teams use wellbeing data to improve policies?

HR teams sit at the crossroads of employee experience and organizational strategy, and well-being data gives them the clarity they need to act. Instead of guessing what employees might need, survey insights highlight trends in stress, burnout, or disengagement. These findings become the foundation for more targeted support policies.

For example, analyzing employee wellness survey results might reveal that work-life balance is a recurring concern. HR can then introduce flexible schedules, adjust workloads, or revisit leave policies. Similarly, when psychological safety survey questions point to gaps in trust or communication, it signals a need for leadership training or more transparent feedback systems. Each data point becomes a roadmap for actionable change.

The real value comes when HR closes the loop—communicating back to employees what was learned and how policies are evolving. By showing that well-being survey questions for employees drive real improvements, HR builds credibility and trust.

Over time, this cycle of listening and acting not only improves overall well-being but also strengthens engagement, retention, and the overall workplace climate. but also strengthens engagement, retention, and the overall workplace climate.

Using AI and sentiment analysis to decode wellbeing survey responses

AI is changing how organizations make sense of wellbeing feedback. Instead of manually combing through hundreds of open-text answers, sentiment analysis tools scan responses for tone, keywords, and recurring themes. This means HR teams can move from raw comments to meaningful insights in a fraction of the time.

For example, AI can detect if employees consistently use negative phrasing when answering wellbeing survey questions for employees, even if they don’t directly say “I’m unhappy,” possibly hinting at negative thoughts.

It highlights patterns in wellness questionnaire for employees' responses—like rising mentions of “burnout” or “overload”—that might otherwise go unnoticed. These signals help leaders identify trends and intervene before issues escalate.

The power of AI lies in its ability to blend scale with nuance. It doesn’t just categorize answers; it uncovers the emotions behind them.

Combined with structured employee wellness survey results, sentiment analysis offers a clearer view of both psychological well-being and social well-being. When HR pairs these insights with human judgment, the result is smarter, faster decisions that directly shape policies, benefits, and workplace culture.

Why CultureMonkey is your go-to tool for smarter wellbeing surveys?

Running a survey is easy—running one that sparks honesty and drives action is the real challenge. That’s where CultureMonkey steps in. It’s built to turn wellbeing survey questions into actionable insights that actually improve employee experience.

• Ready-to-use survey templates: CultureMonkey comes with curated health and wellness survey questions and psychological safety survey questions, saving HR teams hours of guesswork.
• Pulse checks made simple: Send quick wellbeing pulse checks to track changing moods without overwhelming employees. Frequent feedback means no blind spots between annual surveys.
• AI-driven sentiment analysis: The platform automatically decodes tone and emotion in open-ended feedback, giving HR a richer context beyond scores and charts.
• Actionable reports for leaders: Instead of raw data dumps, CultureMonkey delivers clear employee wellness survey results that managers can turn into policy updates.
• Support for hybrid and global teams: Built to capture input across geographies, it ensures both in-office and remote voices are equally heard in staff survey questions.
• End-to-end anonymity: By guaranteeing privacy, CultureMonkey encourages candid responses, helping employees feel safe to answer even the most sensitive wellness questionnaire for employees.

Conclusion

Wellbeing surveys aren’t just another HR checkbox—they’re a chance to truly listen and respond to what employees need. The right questions uncover hidden stressors, highlight opportunities to improve, and foster a culture where people feel safe and supported. When those insights are turned into action, the impact goes beyond individual health—it strengthens engagement, trust, and long-term retention.

If you’re ready to move beyond generic wellness questionnaires and start gathering feedback that sparks real change, CultureMonkey can help. With expert-designed wellbeing survey questions, pulse checks, and AI-powered sentiment analysis, it makes understanding your team easier than ever. Start using CultureMonkey today to transform employee wellness data into policies and practices that actually improve lives at work.

Summary

Well-being survey questions give leaders deeper insights into mental, physical, financial, and social well-being, helping them act before challenges escalate.

Covering areas like work-life balance, psychological safety, and benefits ensures your wellness questionnaire for employees captures the full picture.

Frequent well-being pulse checks and thoughtful staff survey questions make feedback more honest and actionable.

Clear employee wellness survey results guide HR teams in shaping policies, boosting engagement, and improving workplace culture.

Tools like CultureMonkey simplify the process with ready templates, AI-driven insights, and anonymous reporting for smarter surveys.

FAQs

1. How do you create a survey for mental health at work?

Craft mental health surveys using clear, empathetic language and focus on psychological well-being. Include psychological safety survey questions about stress, burnout, and emotional support. Keep it short, non-judgmental, and relevant. A structured wellness questionnaire for employees ensures people feel safe sharing openly, helping HR gather meaningful insights and create policies that genuinely support staff well-being at work.

2. Should well-being surveys be anonymous?

Yes, well-being surveys must be anonymous to encourage openness and honesty. Employees share candid feedback only when they know it can’t be traced back. Using third-party platforms like CultureMonkey ensures staff survey questions remain confidential, while well-being survey questions produce employee wellness survey results that HR can act on. , while still producing employee wellness survey results that HR can act on. Protecting anonymity builds trust, drives participation, and makes survey responses more actionable overall.

3. How often should we run wellbeing checks?

Annual surveys aren’t enough to catch evolving challenges. Running a wellbeing pulse check quarterly—or monthly in fast-changing environments—keeps employee wellness data current. Regular surveys help HR spot burnout, stress, or disengagement trends early. Consistency builds trust, showing staff their feedback is valued, while employee wellness survey results provide actionable insights that guide ongoing workplace improvements and better organizational support.

4. Can I ask about stress and burnout in a workplace survey?

Yes, stress and burnout should always be included in well-being survey questions for employees. Directly asking about workload, fatigue, and emotional strain helps HR uncover hidden issues. Including these in a wellness questionnaire for employees highlights pain points early, turning staff survey questions into meaningful data. Honest insights then guide employee wellness survey results toward impactful support strategies.

5. What tools can I use to send and analyze well-being surveys?

Tools like CultureMonkey simplify survey design, distribution, and analysis. They provide staff survey questions, wellbeing pulse checks, and AI-driven sentiment analysis that decode emotions behind answers, including those related to physical activity. Reports turn employee wellness survey results into clear insights, especially in a hybrid model, making it easier for HR to act. With anonymous reporting and customizable templates, CultureMonkey ensures well-being survey questions lead to genuine organizational improvements.

6. What’s the best time to send a wellbeing pulse check?

The best time is midweek—Tuesdays through Thursdays—when employees are focused but not overloaded. Mondays often feel too rushed, while Fridays may bring lower engagement. Sending well-being pulse checks consistently, such as quarterly, helps track trends effectively. Combined with staff survey questions, this rhythm ensures employee wellness survey results are timely, actionable, and valuable for improving overall workplace well-being.