Employee Benefits Surveys: 30+ Important Questions to Ask

Alex Cleary

Employee Feedback

Your employee benefits program keeps your workforce healthy and happy. Provide your employees with a personalized benefits program based on feedback from an employee benefits survey.

Your employee benefits program is an employee engagement staple that helps your employee stay healthy, maintain high morale, and value your organization.

But providing the perfect benefits program for your employees isn’t an easy task; after all, your employees are different people with unique needs.

Via an employee benefits survey and employee survey software, you can find out what your employees think about what benefits you provide, and what you can do to make them even better. Just like how external marketers use Mailchimp to learn what their customers want, you can use ContactMonkey’s internal email tool to send employee benefits survey to your entire organization.

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What is an Employee Benefits Survey?

An employee benefits survey is a brief questionnaire aimed at learning your employees’ opinions about your benefits program. These surveys can range in detail and number of questions, and can feature various questions about benefits, perks, wellness programs, health coverage, and more.

An employee benefits survey helps you learn about how your employees feel about your employee benefits program. Since benefits programs can cover so many different things, employee feedback is crucial for crafting a program that best suits your employees’ needs. Compared to shorter pulse survey questions, employee benefits survey questions tend to be longer and more detailed in order to gain in-depth feedback.

Why are employee benefits surveys important?

Employee benefits are too important to guess at what your employees want covered. Without employee input you can end up wasting money on programs your employees don’t use. All the while you’re not providing them with what they actually need.

An employee benefits survey can help you save money on your benefits programs and give your employees a program they’ll use and value. A well-developed, employee-informed benefits program can attract talent to your organization and retain your best employees. Employee feedback is a simple process that makes a big difference.

With ContactMonkey’s employee engagement software, you can easily collect employee feedback from your Outlook or Gmail inbox. Your employees can easily give their opinions from whatever device they’re on, and all of your survey data is visualized within ContactMonkey’s analytics dashboard.

Employee Benefits Survey Questions: What Should You Ask?

Have a clear goal for what you wish to learn from your benefits survey. Not only will pointed questions elicit better answers, but it will also help employees think more clearly about their responses.

Think about what kind of format best suits your questions. If you want to gain subjective employee feedback, then providing a space on your survey for written answers is a good idea. If you want to gain quantitative statistics about your employee benefits plan, then multiple choice questions are an effective route to take.

Gathering different types of employee feedback will give you a better idea of what your employees really want, which can help you create a better benefits plan tailored exactly to your employees’ needs.

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What topics are relevant to employee benefits surveys?

Along with varying what kind of staff survey questions you include, try varying your survey topics. Divide your questions into two separate categories: questions about specific benefits and questions about your benefits program in general.

Questions about benefits in general

General questions about your employee benefits can help you determine whether your employees are satisfied with what you provide them. These questions can also inform whether the need to update benefits according to employee needs.

Here are some example questions to get you started:

  • Is it easy for you to access [your company]’s benefits program? (Yes/No)
  • Do you agree with this statement: “I am satisfied with the benefits [your company] provides me.” (Yes/No)
  • Does a company’s benefits program influence your decision to work there? (Short answer)
  • On a scale of 0-5, do you feel [your company]’s employee benefits plan fulfills your needs?
  • Which benefits do you feel are the most important? (Short answer)

Use a combination of questions from each of these categories to develop a comprehensive employee benefits survey.

Questions about healthcare

These questions can focus around specific healthcare benefits that you offer to employees. Here are some sample healthcare benefits survey questions to consider:

  • Have you signed up for [your company]’s health insurance program? (Yes/No)
  • Are you satisfied with the level of health insurance provided by your employer? (Yes/No)
  • Using my health insurance has been straightforward: strongly disagree / disagree / neither agree nor disagree / agree / strongly agree
  • Do you feel confident that your healthcare insurance will meet your future needs? (Yes/No)

Questions about fitness and gym benefits

If you offer fitness benefits or gym reimbursements, you’ll want to know if they are meeting your employees’ needs. You’ll also need to find out how easy it is for employees to access these perks.

Here are a few example questions you can ask in your employee benefits survey:

  • Are you happy with [your company]’s new fitness plan? (Yes/No)
  • The company’s gym membership deal saves me money. (Yes/No)
  • Getting reimbursed for my gym payments is straightforward. (Yes/No)
  • My fitness benefits support my personal development goals. (Yes/No)

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Questions about retirement and savings

Retirement and long-term savings are one of the most valuable benefits that you can offer employees. This type of support helps employees feel confident about the future, which leads to less stress and more empowerment. Here are a few retirement savings survey questions to ask your employees:

  • The company’s contribution to my retirement funds is generous. (Yes/No)
  • Do you agree with this statement: “I am happy with my company’s employee retirement plan program.” (Yes/No)
  • I clearly understand how my retirement plan works and how I can access its benefits. (Yes/No)
  • If you could change one thing about [your company]’s retirement plan program, what would it be? (Short answer)

Questions about professional development and tuition

Professional development opportunities are a key driver of employee engagement. When employers are able to offer reimbursements for things such as training and course tuition, it empowers employees to achieve their goals. In turn, workers can develop skills that help them excel in their role at your company, and beyond.

Here are a few professional development sample questions you should ask in your benefits survey:

  • Do you feel that you have sufficient opportunities to grow professionally/personally while working at this company? (Yes/No)
  • My employer offers a generous professional development allowance. (Yes/No)
  • I feel that I can use my development allowance to learn a skill I wouldn’t have otherwise studied. (Yes/No)
  • I understand how to request a reimbursement for professional development training/tuition. (Yes/No)

Questions about parental leave

Offering the necessary time and financial support for employees to care for their infants and young children is non-negotiable. Ensuring that your parental leave program is able to meet your employees’ needs is a key part of supporting employee wellbeing and engagement.

Here are some parental leave question examples you can include in your benefits survey:

  • On a scale of 0-5 stars, how happy are you with [your company]’s parental leave program? (Star rating)
  • My manager supports me in ensuring that I balance my time between work and child care responsibilities. (Yes/No)
  • My company provides a parental leave program that is suited to my needs. (Yes/No)
  • I clearly understand my rights when it comes to parental leave. (Yes/No)

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Questions about stock options

Stock options inspire employees to personally invest in your company’s success. They also encourage staff to see a long-term path with the company. For all these reasons, it’s important to ensure employees clearly understand what their stock options plan involves and how they’ll be able to access the benefits.

Here are a few stock option questions to ask in your next employee benefits survey:

  • How would you rate your understanding of our Employee Stock Purchase Plan? Excellent/good/moderate/I need more information
  • Do you know how to enroll in the Employee Stock Purchase Plan? (Yes/No)
  • I value being offered equity in my company. (Yes/No)
  • I understand when/how I will be able to access my stock options earnings. (Yes/No)

Questions about childcare

Employees must be able to come to work without feelings of guilt or concern related to their family responsibilities. Since childcare can be a major stressor for parents, offering suitable childcare benefits is a requirement for employee engagement and productivity.

Here are a few employee benefits survey questions relating to childcare that you need to be asking:

  • Being able to access childcare benefits through work is important for me. (Yes/No)
  • Has childcare been a source of stress in the past month? (Yes/Somewhat/No)
  • My company supports the lifestyle that I want to lead as a working parent. (Yes/No)
  • In the past month, how frequently have you worked less effectively because you were concerned by an issue relating to childcare: Never/seldom/once or twice/frequently/most of the time
  • The childcare support from my employer helps make it easier to do my job. (Yes/No)

How to Create an Employee Benefits Survey

In addition to selecting varied questions to gather detailed responses, think about the reusability of your survey. Structure your questions so that they can be asked repeatedly, so you can analyze your responses to see if you’ve made progress.

Try conducting a survey before and after you make changes to your benefits program to see if it had the desired effect on your employees.

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Maximize responses

Ultimately, your employee benefits survey is only as effective as the information it gathers. Your number one priority should be getting as many employees to complete your survey as possible. Fortunately, there are several strategies you can use to maximize your response rate.

Keep your survey brief. If your employees are faced with countless questions, they won’t be as likely to answer thoughtfully, or at all!

Make sure your employees can easily access your survey. This can be particularly tricky with so many organizations adopting remote work. Use a centralized system like employee email or company intranet to share your survey.

Do you have a workforce who mainly use their phones to access emails? You can send mobile-friendly employee benefits surveys to your employees using ContactMonkey’s responsive email templates. Your employees can easily fill out your survey without having to be at a computer, which will dramatically increase your response rates.

Is your survey only relevant to a portion of your workforce? Use custom email lists to target employees with surveys that pertain to them. This will help increase email engagement reduce clutter in your employees’ inboxes. Use ContactMonkey’s List Management feature to create custom email lists—without needing IT—that integrate with your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) like Workday and ADP, as well as Azure Active Directory, so they’ll update automatically.

Create an engaging employee benefits survey with ContactMonkey

Using ContactMonkey’s email template builder, you can quickly and easily send employee benefits surveys to your entire organization. These surveys are mobile-friendly, trackable, and template-based so you reuse them in the future. ContactMonkey also offers a library of full of employee survey templates you’re free to customize.

Simply use the drag-and-drop controls to build your employee survey. Create a survey that matches your company branding and choose from numerous employee feedback options like emoji reactions, yes/no, true/false, star ratings, and more:

Screenshot of employee survey options within ContactMonkey's email template builder.

After you’ve created your survey, you can easily schedule it to send at a future date and time to increase how many people see it. You can also customize the subject line and body text of your survey to personalize it according to the employee.

Not sure what questions to include in your survey? Try using ContactMonkey’s OpenAI ChatGPT integration to generate survey questions based on prompts you provide. Simply describe what you’d like to learn with your survey and edit the suggested questions for your audience.

Track email analytics on your survey to see how many employees opened it and clicked on it. You can also sort your responses by department, location, or title of employee using the segmented email stats feature:

Screenshot of segmented email stats within ContactMonkey's campaign overview dashboard.

Does your company have internal or external regulations around email privacy? Not a problem: ContactMonkey’s anonymous individual tracking allows you to gather email metrics while maintaining your employees’ privacy.

Employee benefits survey example

Need some design inspiration? We built this example employee feedback survey in ContactMonkey’s pulse survey tool:

Screenshot of employee surveys embedded in an email newsletter within ContactMonkey's email template builder.

Make sure you ask clear questions and keep the layout simple. Remember, your employees’ responses are the most important thing about your survey; put all your focus on getting those answers!

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Provide The Best Employee Benefits Program To Your Employees

An employee benefits survey helps you fine-tune benefits program in two primary ways:

  • You better understand what really matters to your employees, deepening their connection and satisfaction with your company.
  • You can help save money on your employee benefits program by focusing on what your employees want, and removing what they don’t use.

Your employee benefits survey can be used over time to gauge the success of your benefits program. Look at your survey results in conjunction with turnover numbers and other employee engagement indicators to get a comprehensive picture of your employee engagement landscape.

After all, the goal of an employee benefits plan is to appeal to your employees; what better way to find out what they like than asking them themselves?

Create and send your first employee benefits survey today by booking a free demo, where you can see how ContactMonkey can boost employee engagement at your business: 

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