Employee feedback for the win

Human Resources is one of the hardest roles out there—and we’re not just saying that to make you feel special. The job of attracting, engaging, developing, and retaining talent is never done, and it’s vital to any organization: because without employees, there is no organization. 

If the ultimate goal is to build a workforce that is highly motivated, high-performing, and loyal, the first step to getting there is listening. If you listen to feedback throughout the employee lifecycle—from the candidate experience all the way to the exit interview—you significantly boost your chances of getting things right. That said, listening is not enough: based on what you hear, you’ll need to take stock and do something about it.

At SurveyMonkey, we believe the key to success is to ask, listen, and act. Every day 20 million questions are answered on our platform, and it turns out that many of them are HR-related. We are trusted by over 300K organizations globally who use our platform to measure, benchmark, and act on the opinions and feedback of their employees.

In this guide, we share the use cases for our platform that we’ve seen throughout the employee lifecycle. We’ve sprinkled in a few inspiring stories of how our own People Team is leveraging  feedback to craft a winning recruitment process, a fulfilling employee experience, and a strong culture. 

Whether you’re responsible for 10 employees or 10K, we hope you find some nuggets in here that help you get the most out of employee feedback and make a difference in your organization.

This guide will show you how to collect feedback at every stage of the employee lifecycle, uncover key insights, and act on what you’ve learned to build a world class workforce.

Collecting employee feedback takes time and intention, but we believe it’s vital for all companies. If you’re still on the fence, here are 5 stats that should push you over the edge. (Feel free to share them with your organization’s leadership team before you submit your next budget and headcount request.) 

37% of employed people said they had seriously considered quitting their jobs in the last 3 months¹ 

Over a quarter (27%) of employees rate morale at their company as poor or fair¹

29% of HR pros say that burnout is one of the top 2 reasons for employee turnover²  

Less than a third (33%) of HR pros say they are very successful at addressing employee turnover²

37% of employees would rate advancement opportunities at their company as poor or fair²

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The employee experience begins well before a worker steps in the door for their first day. In this section we’ll discuss how you can use employee feedback to: 

If you want your company to become a magnet for top talent, a powerful employer brand is key. Getting featured in high-profile “best places to work” lists can increase your candidate pool, but it’s not something that happens overnight. Becoming a highly desirable employer takes time, effort, and—you guessed it—listening. 

The first step typically involves determining the current state of your employer brand. This can be accomplished by a combination of asking your own employees for their opinions and looking at sites such as Glassdoor. What do people love about working at your company? Where are there opportunities for improvement? What keeps people working at other companies? What do they admire about other companies they would consider working for? 

As you make adjustments based on the feedback you gather, perform ongoing tests of your messaging to see if talented candidates are aware of your company’s mission, values, and perks.

Get feedback from new hires on their first day. What made them accept their offer? What specific words come to mind when they think of your culture? How about the culture of the team they’re joining? 

Involve your own employees in telling the story of what it’s like to work at your organization. Use a survey to identify those at the company who have interesting stories and are willing to share them. Include an open text field to capture more details of their experiences. 

What if you’re preaching benefits to an audience that doesn’t care? Survey your target talent pool to find out what matters to them and what they think of your company as a place to work. Target your ideal hires on a third-party platform (LinkedIn offers some great targeting options). Drop a SurveyMonkey link into a content module and get their feedback. You can also try SurveyMonkey Audience to reach your demographic.

Prime your recruitment engine by first understanding what makes your potential candidates tick. For instance, you can use surveys at recruitment events to learn about candidates, gaining deeper knowledge about them than you would by simply acquiring their contact information. Remember, your candidate’s time is precious, so each question should have a purpose. 

Here are five questions that can help you connect with target talent, and what you should learn by asking them.

Whether or not they’re hired, send every candidate a candidate experience or recruitment satisfaction survey after they’ve made it to a certain point in the interview process. 

Here are a few questions to ask: 

It’s worth emphasizing that all responses will be anonymous and will only be used in aggregate so that candidates feel more comfortable providing candid feedback. 

A similar survey should also be sent to hiring managers so that you can collect feedback from key stakeholders in the process and make sure your recruiting team is meeting the needs of the business. Ask your hiring managers things like: 

Our research finds that 45% of HR pros consider recruiting and retention as a top priority, just below their number one choice of employee performance management (also at 45%).

“We use our candidate experience survey to understand the experience we are creating for our candidates, even when they don’t get a job. These are also valuable for ensuring that we're organized. 

For example, our interview panels initially asked people repetitive questions. Based on survey feedback, we’ve structured our interview so that different panelists cover different topics. This also keeps our interviews much more objective than subjective—focusing on the work scenarios, job experience and values alignment instead of more traditional ‘culture-fit’ questions—which is important from a diversity and inclusion perspective.” 

Becky Cantieri
Chief People Officer, SurveyMonkey

Surveys are often used to get feedback at scale, but they can also be used to make the candidate experience incredibly personalized.  

One of our hiring managers came up with a four-question survey for a candidate she was trying to close. It included multiple-choice questions on “Which of our several target industries would you be most excited about marketing to?” (hint: the role we’re offering is broad and interesting) and “What would you prefer the format of your first 1:1 with our CEO to be?” with possible answers including breakfast, lunch, coffee and walking meeting (another hint: you’ll have C-suite access when you work here). The candidate not only completed the survey, he accepted the offer. (And in case you’re wondering, he chose lunch for his first 1:1 with the CEO.) 

Helping new recruits find their feet is critical to getting them up to speed—and eventually turning them into the rock stars your company needs. In this section we’ll share tips on: 

The more quickly you can onboard employees, the more quickly they become productive—and the more quickly you achieve that most favored metric, ROI (Return On Investment). Yes, teaching new hires about your company’s culture and values is important—but so is helping them get to work as soon as possible. 

Speed, however, is only one part of the equation. You need to  make sure your onboarding programs are effective, so you can set employees up for success.

“We use employee NPS® to measure people’s reactions to their first day. It’s one of the highest-rated things we do: we always hear that it meets or exceeds everyone’s expectations.“

Once onboarding has ended, ask new employees what they thought of the process. Here are some ideas for sample questions you should include: 

Are the lessons from onboarding sticking? Use quizzes to ensure employees understand company values, protocols, and anything else you deem important. SurveyMonkey’s platform lets you create quizzes for just about anything, and they can be taken on any device. Scoring  is automatic, making assessments simple and fast.

Pro tip: you can choose to show results to the quiz taker so they know what they got right and what they didn’t.

Check in early and often with your new hires. Consider following up at chosen intervals (e.g. 30, 60, and/or 90 days) to see if they still feel the onboarding process adequately prepared them for their job. This lets you quickly and easily identify if new employees need additional help, and plug any holes in the hiring process. 

Some questions to consider asking: 

In order to build a high-performing workforce, you need to hire and onboard high-quality talent. In addition to surveying new hires on their experience within the first 90 days, it’s important to gather feedback from hiring managers on how their new hires are progressing. Ask questions that help you assess the quality of your recruiting decisions and highlight any blind spots in your process. Some examples:

Employees tend to be more satisfied with their careers when they have opportunities for professional growth—so offering those opportunities helps keep workers happy, motivated, and on board. In this chapter we’ll cover:

In our study, job candidates chose career advancement opportunities as the second most important factor when considering a new job (44%), right under compensation and benefits (53%).

Learn what people at your company think about the career development options that you offer. Are they satisfied with the level of  job training and education? Do they feel like their skills and expertise are being put to use? Do they see a chance to grow themselves professionally? Use a career development survey and find out. 

You can also use quizzes to assess the effectiveness of your learning and development programs. See how much material is being absorbed by employees, and analyze the data to see if specific topics require more attention. Apply these techniques to company-wide trainings and initiatives. 

Hear how SurveyMonkey used surveys to solve some of its own development-related challenges. 

“We do a number of different surveys for cohorts as well as individuals to measure the impact of our development programs for the year. 

One good example of this was with regards to manager training. We asked leaders across the company what we could do to help them be more effective in their roles. A lot of people said they had new managers, and told us what we needed to help them with. 

So we created two separate curriculums: manager onboarding (aka 'Management 101') as well as a more advanced curriculum for how to create high-performing teams. 

The big takeaway here is that, to be successful in development, you need to meet people where they are.” 

Becky Cantieri
Chief People Officer, SurveyMonkey

Regular performance reviews—of individuals, teams, and managers—not only ensure that your workforce is firing on all cylinders, they’re critical to the growth and retention of your employees. 

At SurveyMonkey, we’ve adopted the growth mindset: we believe that everyone can learn and grow, and that learning and growing is key to people’s happiness and success. (This is in opposition to the fixed mindset, which holds that everyone’s ability is innate and does not  change much, if at all, with development). 

Here we’ll talk more about how performance assessments can help with development by: 

HR pros we surveyed think that AI will have the most impact on Performance measurement (39%), followed by Learning and development (36%) and Hiring/workforce planning (35%).

Ongoing feedback is key to guiding employee development. One popular (and effective) method for gathering it is a 360 degree review, also known as a “multi-source assessment,” which solicits feedback on an employee’s performance from their supervisors, co-workers, peers, and subordinates. 

Besides the rank-and-file, management also needs feedback to keep improving. Ask for employees’ opinions about management’s approachability, communication, trustworthiness, performance, and more with a management performance survey.  

It’s especially important to emphasize confidentiality in 360 degree feedback surveys, so that your employees and leaders get the helpful input they need in order to continue growing and bringing their best selves to work. It can be incredibly motivating for employees to hear positive feedback from their teams in this manner as well.

You can also survey your leaders on the key capabilities of their teams or departments. Obtain their assessments of their team or department’s skill levels and professionalism, collaboration and communication among members, how they share responsibility, how well they work with clients, and more. 

Sharing this data—and acting on it—has the potential to strengthen cross-functional relationships, improve collaboration, and increase efficiency. (This information could also be used to build a business case for additional resources, or influence company priorities.

Here at SurveyMonkey, we love trying new things that can help our employees grow. Our latest initiative? It’s based on employee feedback, of course! We’ve replaced our annual performance review with quarterly conversations to reflect on an employee’s Growth, Impact, and Goals (aka GIG). 

By having more frequent conversations and shifting the focus toward a growth mindset, we’re aiming to trade fear, anxiety, and frustration—emotions often associated with an annual review—for transparent, timely feedback and clear goals that are future-focused.  

Many businesses offer employee scholarships to foster professional development or grants to engage your team in the innovation process, or to promote diversity and inclusion. Collecting and reviewing applications is important to making the process fair and transparent, and conducting post-award reviews provides for program accountability. 

As important as your programs are, you’re also an incredibly busy HR professional. Collecting and handling all those applications while keeping everyone on track is a lot of work.  

For this, we recommend checking out SurveyMonkey Apply: an online application management solution that will save you time and effort while helping to engage your team with programs that enable professional growth, foster a culture of innovation, and build your employer brand. With a seamless experience for your applicants, and automated workflows, staying on top of the process while selecting your best applications is a breeze.

You’ve gone to all the trouble of recruiting, onboarding, and developing the workforce of your dreams. Now you’ve got to make sure they stick around. This section covers:

Building a workplace culture that prioritizes belonging and inclusion is the best way to attract and retain diverse and talented people, create a sustainable, high-performing workforce, and—most  importantly—make employees feel supported. If the idea of measuring inclusion feels daunting, our new inclusion and belonging survey template can help you understand what you’re doing well and where there’s room for growth. 

According to our research, almost half (48%) of HR pros say that DEI has had a large impact on hiring top candidates. This is even higher at companies where HR plays a leading role—55% of HR pros say DEI has had a large impact on hiring.

We created our DEI template in partnership with Paradigm, an organization that takes a data-driven approach to designing diversity and inclusion strategies for some of the world’s most innovative companies.

Here are five of our favorites from the template. Each of these ask  the respondent, “How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement?”: 

“You can’t change what you don’t measure. While a growing number of organizations have committed to analyzing and addressing diversity, there’s a common misconception that inclusion can’t be measured. It can. By measuring key factors like objectivity, voice, and belonging, organizations can get a clear sense of opportunities to build a more inclusive culture.”

Joelle Emerson
CEO, Paradigm

Recruiting and retaining diverse and talented people isn’t just the right thing to do: it makes good business sense. Next time you need to make a case for a DEI-related initiative, try using some of these numbers: 

If you’re wondering why you should measure employee engagement, the answer is simple: when employees are engaged with their work, they’re more fulfilled and more motivated. An engaged employee that feels aligned with your organization’s goals not only performs better, they help attract top talent and stay longer. 

What keeps employees engaged may be less obvious than you think. In a recent study, SurveyMonkey found that the most important factor in U.S. workers’ overall happiness at work is feeling their work is meaningful. This ranked even higher than being paid well

The first step to building an engaged workforce is asking for regular feedback across the employee lifecycle and taking action to create a better workplace. But, employee engagement goes beyond the individual experience. The job of engaging your employees requires continuous investment in programs that improve culture, provide meaningful feedback, offer opportunities for learning, and instill a feeling of belonging. 

It’s easy to use surveys to dip your toe in the waters of employee engagement. However, simply measuring employee engagement isn’t enough to foster an engaged workforce. You’ve got to assess the results, uncover areas for improvement, and implement engagement strategies to meet them—while being transparent and communicating all of the above to the entire company. That’s where the real work begins. Here are a few steps to get you started. 

If you try to change everything at once, you probably won’t be very effective. Maybe you’re interested in measuring and improving a few factors of employee engagement that are emerging as hot buttons. For example, you could be primarily interested in taking a closer look  at how work-life balance is impacting your employees. How many hours are people really working? Are they distracted by their need to be at home or are they more productive in the office? You can tap into these sentiments by using a Work-Life Balance survey template or create your own survey that taps into the unique aspects of your work environment. 

But if you’re really focused on using surveys to develop employee engagement strategies, this might not be the best approach. When you hone  in on a specific topic from the beginning, you may miss out on other areas for improvement. 

What if career development opportunities—not work-life balance—are a bigger factor for  employee engagement in your workforce? If you’re trying to develop an overarching employee engagement strategy, you may want to start with a more comprehensive employee engagement survey first and focus on specific parts second.

Once you’ve run your survey and found what areas need improvement, it’s time to prioritize. Your first reaction might be to try to address every single area that received a less-than-perfect score. Resist the temptation to do this. You’ll likely lead to stretching your managers and resources too far, leading to mediocre results. 

Instead, try to identify a few key drivers of your employee engagement and focus solely on those. Prioritizing only a few can be tough. To help narrow it down, ask yourself two questions: 

1. “Where can I use my resources so that they’re likely to have the largest impact on employee engagement?” Look for the places where your survey results are furthest from where you’d like them to be, while also paying close attention to results that are most important to your culture (actual or aspirational). 

2. “Which actions will be most efficient?” Think about which areas will be addressed most effectively—perhaps by using existing resources or expertise.

Whichever action you choose, it’s important that you communicate your plan to your employees, making sure they understand how and when you’ll carry it out. As we mentioned earlier, transparency is crucial: show your progress along the way and share the results. 

How can you tell if your plan is having a positive effect? By sending an employee engagement survey, of course! The key to continue improving your employee engagement is to measure it consistently and frequently.  

In a highly competitive labor market, compensation packages are a big factor in attracting and retaining talent. In a recent SurveyMonkey study², 54% of HR pros ranked compensation and benefits as an area companies needed to invest in their employees.

Benefits might have gotten even more important since COVID. According to a Forbes report, 40% of employers believe workers leave their job to find employment that offers better benefits, and one in 10 workers say they would take a pay cut to have access to better benefits. 

Companies can use an employee benefits survey to check in with employees about the benefits and perks they receive. Not only will it help you design benefits and perks that they truly want—it will also help you to understand employee stressors.

Your research here might also uncover some surprises. Compensation and benefits have to meet an employee’s expectations, but our research found it wasn’t always the #1 thing. You may be surprised what it was at SurveyMonkey: 

“It was the food,” says Becky Cantieri with a laugh. “Years ago, we asked non-remote employees if they wanted an additional $2500 a year, or breakfast and lunch. They chose food by a landslide.”

She goes on: “The dining hall is about community and accessibility. We find this helps foster conversations between people who may not regularly interact with each other, helping to bridge the knowledge gap across departments and titles.” 

Employees today are well aware of the need to acquire new skills to get ahead at their company and keep pace with the market. Training is an invaluable tool to develop employees and increase their value.

55% of HR pros rank training as the most important area for companies to invest in employees—the #1 response² 

However, employees have high expectations about the time they spend on training and development. They expect to come away with new learnings, and have little patience for check-the-box coursework, and instead expect to actually learn something practical and applicable from training requirements.

So, even after you’ve done the heavy lifting of designing a good training program, there are a lot of questions you need answered. Are people engaged with the content? Is the material being absorbed and applied by employees ? What topics should you focus on next? 

To successfully develop your employees, you need to ask for feedback regularly and meet people where they are. From pre-training surveys to post-training quizzes, feedback helps you measure the effectiveness of your sessions and identify areas for improvement. 

Here are a few ways you can use surveys to improve your training initiatives:

Even good things must end. At some point, every employee’s tenure with your company comes to a close. Here, we’ll go into how exit surveys can be used to glean insights to strengthen your workplace’s culture.

With every milestone comes an opportunity: and in that regard, the end of an employee’s time with your company can be just as important as the beginning. 

When an employee leaves your company, it’s important to find out why. Done right, exit surveys help you build a more attractive and fruitful culture so employees stay longer and feel more engaged. 

Set up time to give departing employees our expert-certified employee exit survey and find out what you’re doing right—and where you might need to make some improvements. The template  includes questions ranging from management effectiveness to overall workplace satisfaction. 

As you gather feedback, make sure you package key insights so they can be shared with sensitivity among the appropriate audiences. Be on the lookout for any emerging patterns that signal the need for a deeper dive, either on a functional or company level.

The last few years have created a lot of churn in the workforce. From pandemic-driven hiring and growth, to a near recession, and more recently widespread layoffs, HR teams are dealing with employee burnout. This can lead to higher rates of employee attrition and turnover.

Even with the best intentions, companies might be collecting the right feedback, but doing it at the wrong time. Waiting to ask employees for their thoughts during a review or exit interview is too little too late to put feedback into action.

Stay interviews have gained popularity as a way to improve employee retention and engagement. With stay interviews, employees have the opportunity to share what they value about their job, their company, and what they think can be improved.

The goal of a stay interview is for HR to gain an understanding of what motivates and engages employees and to improve retention. With the right format and questions, you can get candid, actionable feedback to understand how the company is doing, and where you can improve.

A stay interview survey collects this feedback before in-person meetings, and can give employees a sense of safety compared to asking the same questions face to face. A pre-interview survey can also help managers and HR teams prepare for a more constructive in-person conversation with an employee.

Even if you’re somewhat familiar with the process, writing, sending, and analyzing surveys can seem like a daunting task. So we spoke with the best and the brightest—our very own survey research team—to gather practical takeaways that get you up to speed fast. Their combined 95 years of research experience yielded powerful insights on:

One of the great things about surveys is that just about anyone can write one. However, a well-crafted survey that yields actionable feedback makes the difference between reliable and potentially misleading data. When drafting a survey consider these things: 

Properly setting up your survey and communicating to employees in a clear manner will impact the response rate and quality of your data. So follow these practices: 

Analyzing your data is the payoff for all your hard work and should yield valuable insights about your workplace. Sharing this information with the appropriate members of your organization helps to empower your team with data to shape their decision-making. Some tips to keep in mind: 

Have you written a bad survey that didn’t provide the insights you needed? You’re not alone! Here are a few of the most common survey mistakes:  

SurveyMonkey has the features you need to build a happier, more productive workforce. From attracting and retaining top talent, to onboarding new hires, and building high-performing teams, using surveys on a regular basis can help you boost happiness and productivity across your organization.

Here are a few features that are especially useful for HR:

We’ve designed a suite of templates specifically for the needs of employees and HR professionals. See our HR templates.

¹ Source: SurveyMonkey, “CNBC | SurveyMonkey Workforce Survey”, May 23, 2023. N= 8,874 U.S. workers

² Source: SurveyMonkey study of 269 US HR professionals in September 2023

Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.