Employee Satisfaction Surveys: Templates, Tools, and Tips

It’s scary to think about. Losing employees to attrition is expensive, and not knowing the reason can keep HR up at night.

High employee turnover could be symptomatic of many insidious issues with workplace culture and performance, but research points to an interesting lever that could improve this metric: employee satisfaction.

Research has shown that happy employees perform dramatically better than their dissatisfied counterparts, who are more likely to consider quitting. So, what can be done to keep employees satisfied and performing their best?

If your organization is struggling with high turnover, poor performance, or low engagement, you should conduct an employee satisfaction survey. In this article, we show you how to run one and provide a handy downloadable template.

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What is an employee satisfaction survey?

An employee satisfaction survey reveals workforce sentiment across key areas — including management effectiveness and workplace culture — helping organizations pinpoint improvement opportunities and build stronger employee experiences.

This data, gathered through paper or online surveys and in-person interviews, helps you uncover what's keeping your workers from feeling fully engaged. With that made clear, you can work to remove those obstacles.

Digital surveys are the most economical method: They are efficient to distribute and easy to analyze in real-time with AI-powered tools like Lattice. That means less room for error and tons of time saved on manually extracting actionable insights on spreadsheets. (Lattice helped Weave save 30 hours per engagement survey!)

This allows people teams to proactively work on solving emerging issues before they become problems and build on what's already working.

The Importance of Employee Satisfaction Surveys

As with needle-moving areas like employee engagement and company culture, employee satisfaction positively impacts the bottom line. 2020 research published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology concluded that job satisfaction predicted improvements in two key financial metrics — return on assets and return on equity — over four years.

Job performance and employee retention are also linked to employee satisfaction, and surveying for satisfaction levels is key to making changes that keep employees around and help them excel.

For instance, regular employee satisfaction surveys helped Lattice client AZA Finance maintain an average attrition rate of just 8%, according to Premo Ojokojo, the company’s chief people and operations officer. “These surveys allow us to continuously adjust our programs, ensuring they align with employees’ needs and keep our workforce engaged and motivated,” she said.

Employee Satisfaction Survey Template

A well-structured, scalable survey template lets you gather standardized employee insights efficiently across multiple teams and locations.

The following template includes employee satisfaction survey questions that can be used with a Likert scale. Likert-scale (or rating-scale) questions are statements that respondents evaluate on a symmetric five-point scale. A typical rating scale has options from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree," "not likely at all" to "extremely likely," or "poor" to "excellent."

To support this quantifiable data, Lattice Engagement allows respondents to add comments to provide context to their selection. As soon as you close your survey, Lattice AI promptly delivers analysis, employee feedback trends, and research-backed suggestions.

The template below offers sample Likert-scale questions across six categories impacting employee experience. Sections can be supplemented or pared down to accommodate organizational needs.

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Types of Employee Satisfaction Surveys

Employee satisfaction surveys come in many forms, each designed to capture aspects of the employee experience at different points in the employee journey. 

Each type serves a different purpose and offers a unique vantage point from which to understand the employee experience. 

Traditional Surveys

Held annually or biannually, traditional surveys take a deep dive into critical satisfaction drivers from leadership trust to compensation fairness, delivering high-level insights that drive strategic decisions. 

These include questions like:

• Are you happy working at [Company]?
• Would you recommend our company to friends and family? Why or why not?
• How likely are you to look for another job outside of the company?

Pulse Surveys

Pulse surveys are short questionnaires administered weekly or monthly to monitor tactical issues through quick feedback cycles. 

Pulse surveys are well-suited to observing how employees are responding to new initiatives and policy changes in real-time, allowing human resources teams to make agile decisions.

These are often closed-ended polls with statements like:

• The employee resource groups are providing me the social support I need to adjust to the company culture.
• The current performance review process accurately reflects my contributions to my team.

Exit Surveys

Research shows that employees are most willing to be candid while leaving the company, making exit surveys a prime source of truth about why talent leaves, and what they liked and disliked about their experience with a company.

Timing is everything. A 2024 report by Work Institute showed that employees are more honest about their reason for departure when an exit interview is conducted after they leave the organization — more so than on or before their last day of employment. 

Along with exit interviews, exit survey insights can help you shape more effective employee retention strategies. Include open-ended questions, such as: 

• What did you find to be the most rewarding part of your experience here?
• What did you find to be the most challenging part of your experience here?

Lattice Engagement users can design their own exit questionnaires or use Lattice’s premade exit survey template. 

Engagement Surveys

While satisfied employees are pleased with their roles and workplaces, engaged employees are more enthusiastic and emotionally committed to going above and beyond expectations. The result? Greater productivity and performance.

Gallup performed a meta-analysis of 736 research studies across 347 global organizations. They found that across companies, business units in the top half of employee engagement scores are more than twice as likely to succeed than those scoring in the bottom half.

Engagement surveys need to target deeper, less tangible drivers like motivation and commitment by including rating-scale questions such as:

• This company is invested in my career growth.
• I feel invested in our mission, vision, and values.

Following these up with multiple-choice questions offers more granular insights.

Company Culture Surveys

Company culture surveys assess the company’s cultural health and values.

HR professionals know company culture impacts employee engagement. To measure the degree of its impact, pulse and traditional surveys could include rating-scale questions like: 

• I am aware of the company’s values.
• I identify with our company’s purpose and believe it is valuable.

30-60-90 Surveys

30-60-90 day surveys are designed to check in with new hires at intervals during their first three months on the job — after 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days. The first three months are a key milestone in the employee lifecycle that sets the tone for the rest of their tenure.

These surveys assess how well new employees are acclimating to the company and whether the onboarding process is setting them up for success. With these surveys, for example, Lattice customer Cahill Contractors learned that 92% of new hires found their onboarding program enjoyable and valuable.

But, if the surveys show dissatisfaction with onboarding, that honest feedback can help you refine your approach to new hire training and integration.

Download our 30-60-90 onboarding survey template.

Change Management Surveys

Volatile times are tough for employee morale, and they call for careful attention and dialogue with staff members. During major disruptions — whether it's a large-scale retrenchment or new policy rollouts — change management surveys help people teams devise better strategies and encourage employee buy-in, according to change management research published in Organizational Dynamics in 2022.

Change management surveys include Likert-scale questions like:

• My organization communicates upcoming changes clearly.
• I understand how this change positively aligns with and supports the company’s goals

Download Lattice and livingHR’s change management survey template for more examples of questions to use.

Key Elements of an Effective Employee Satisfaction Survey

Effective employee satisfaction surveys provide thorough, accurate, and actionable data. To this end, the survey must:

1. Be anonymous and confidential. Honest responses yield more accurate results. Provide employees with a safe space to freely express themselves without fearing repercussions. Lattice’s robust features provide stringent anonymity with identity protection.
2. Be balanced, with a mix of quantitative and qualitative question types. “Any survey should have open-ended questions in it to capture the context and nuance of how they feel and how satisfied they are,” said Dr. Aaron Bazin, independent consultant and author of The Vision Advantage. “By capturing qualitative data, you capture context.” 
3. Be consistent. Implement a systematic cadence that allows you to track changes over time and account for seasonal variations. This is different for different companies. The Weave HR team sends out three surveys a year, while Ojokojo’s team sends out several more. “Our approach includes annual happiness surveys, monthly pulse surveys, and tailored surveys after significant changes or events,” she said. 

How to Implement an Employee Satisfaction Survey

From strategic set-up to post-survey action, here are the steps to running an employee engagement survey.

Step 1: Decide on your area of focus.

What are your most pressing employee satisfaction problems? Talk to your managers about issues that frequently crop up with their direct reports, and what they perceive about existing employee engagement initiatives. 

Use this information to form hypotheses about areas where employee satisfaction could be improved, and create a questionnaire accordingly.

Step 2: Design your survey.

To get the most reliable and helpful results, a regularly administered questionnaire must:

1. Broadly address several employee satisfaction drivers like management effectiveness, job satisfaction, and professional development opportunities.
2. Maintain objectivity by avoiding leading questions. Try to focus questions on observable behaviors rather than subjective feelings.
3. Be succinct. Aside from annual engagement surveys, keep the length under 20 questions — survey fatigue can kill response rates. 

Create your questionnaire using questions from our premade templates or design your own.

Step 3: Send out your survey.

Your results are only as good as your sample size and quality. We recommend aiming for a completion rate of over 90%. This is achievable. How? “Keep participation easy, transparent, and worthwhile for each team member,” Ojokojo advised.

She offered three tips:

1. Share actionable outcomes. “[We share] relevant results from our monthly pulse surveys to show employees that their input is regularly evaluated and applied.”
2. Send out time-sensitive announcements and reminders. “We remind employees throughout the survey period, both through official channels and team leaders, to encourage full participation.”
3. Demonstrate your commitment to acting on survey feedback. “By providing data-driven updates on changes made or new initiatives introduced, we show that feedback is essential in shaping our organizational strategy and day-to-day improvements.”

To uncover your response rate, take a look at your Lattice Adoption Dashboard.

Analyzing and Acting on Survey Results

With a tool like Lattice, gathering valuable insights from survey results is shockingly easy. Data analysis is almost instantaneous, and creating beautiful data visualizations and charts is a breeze.

While the analytics dashboards and charts are useful visuals, they should be followed with actions. “Formal surveys are important, but more important is what the leader does after the results are in,” said Dr. Bazin. 

He advised scheduling conversations in groups after the survey. “An employee satisfaction survey should always be followed up with face-to-face communication and socialization of the results. This sends the message that the leader cares about what they have to say.”

Need to share results with your workforce and leadership? Pull from our engagement survey slide deck template. 

Best Practices for Continuous Improvement

Listening to your people isn’t a one-time exercise. You should send out questionnaires regularly to collect continuous feedback, keep two-way communication open, and track employee sentiment as it changes in response to new initiatives, shifts in the business climate, and seasonal variations.

To this end, survey often and act fast. 

2023 report The People Factor: How Investing in Employees Pays Off found that companies that follow through on employee-centric commitments consistently create more long-term value. Building upon those findings, the researchers made the following recommendations:

1. Analyze how different organizational initiatives impact performance across time periods.
2. Incorporate employee satisfaction levels into regular board and senior management reports. 
3. Communicate corporate investment goals to all employees, encourage their input, and award bonuses based on their suggestions.

Stop losing your best performers to employee dissatisfaction.

Satisfaction is foundational to critical predictors of organizational success such as employee engagement and retention. 

Evaluating the drivers of employee satisfaction is a great first step toward nurturing a positive and productive work environment. Templated surveys can reap mountains of valuable insights from global, remote, and hybrid teams. 

Download and implement your own employee satisfaction survey template today. Better still, save your people weeks’ worth of time and energy by introducing Lattice. Sign up for a product demo now.