Introduction to benefit surveys

Whether it’s more holiday leave, flexible working hours or childcare benefits, to better retirement plans, medical insurance and funding for learning; for many individuals employee benefits are just as, or more important than the salary they receive.

With the value that staff place on employee benefits growing all the time and in some cases being the deciding factor in whether they join or stay with a company, rather than move elsewhere, it’s never been more important to know what your employees think about the compensation and benefits package you offer. It can also be extremely helpful to know how your benefits compare to those provided by others in your industry.

By distributing an employee benefit survey, you’ll have the ideal opportunity to measure how satisfied your own staff are with the package you offer, how it compares with others, what benefits your employees most like and what they would like you to provide more of in the future.

79% of workers would choose additional benefits to a pay raise - Glassdoor

Employee benefit surveys in the employment lifecycle

From the benefits that initially persuaded them to apply for a job with your organisation, to those that have strengthened their satisfaction and commitment to stay. The compensation package that your company offers can have a major impact throughout an employees’ lifecycle, from their initial recruitment and the early stages in their role, to how well they progress and how long they stay.

Whether it’s your generous leave entitlement or the offer of duvet days that attract job applicants, or healthcare and flexible working arrangements taken up by many of your long-term employees, different benefits are likely to appeal to different groups at varying stages of their employment journey.

Subsequently, the employee benefits survey is a valuable tool for gaining this insight, enabling you to see which benefits have the maximum impact at different lifecycle stages and which ones you need to improve or think about replacing.

To gain an even deeper understanding of your employees during their employment and to be able to strengthen the support you deliver for them, you may also want to consider running more niche surveys.

Areas to consider could include recruitment surveys, including questions exploring the extent to which advertised staff benefits influence individuals’ choice of role and employer, onboarding surveys to measure early stage satisfaction with their benefits and those offered upon completion of any probation period, and even employee exit surveys, to explore how compensation packages may be influencing decisions to leave.

Best practices for benefit surveys

Every survey that you’re looking to undertake requires careful planning if you’re to get the greatest value from running it and employee benefit surveys are no different. Here are some best practice considerations to think about.

1. Asking the right mix of questions

From their awareness and satisfaction with the benefits you offer and views on how well they compare with other companies, to which benefits they value the most and what they would like to see more of. If you’re to get the greatest volume of useful information back from your survey you need to ensure that you have a good balance of questions to cover off all the areas you’re looking to investigate.

2. Consider segmenting your results

The appeal of benefits not only varies according to how far individuals have progressed on their employee journey but can also differ according to different demographics such as their age, gender, marital status and other criteria. So, to help you to better understand this it can be useful to segment your results into different data cohorts.

3. Decide on how best to proceed with your feedback

Having gathered and analysed your employees’ feedback about their favourite benefits and what they would most like to see implemented, you need to decide on the best way of reporting these findings back to them. More importantly you also need to determine how you’re going to improve your benefits programme, so that it positively impacts the greatest number of your staff.

4. Repeat your survey

As is the case with other surveys, situations continue to change and evolve, so once you’ve ran your employee benefit survey, you need to repeat it again soon. With staff leaving and replacements coming in at frequent intervals, you need to ensure that the benefits package you have in place, best reflects the wants and needs of your current workforce.

69% of employees would choose one job over another if it offered better benefits - Employeebenefits.co.uk

Example employee benefit survey questions

The questions you ask will be pivotal to the success of your employee benefit survey and any additional value you’re able to deliver for your staff and business as a result.

So, to help you, we’ve outlined some employee benefit survey questions below to address some of the key areas you will be looking to investigate:

It can be useful to start off with some questions that can help you measure existing levels of awareness and understanding among your staff about the benefits you offer, as well as questions to assess how well you explained them from the offset. Such questions could include:

Would you say you have a clear understanding of the benefits packages offered by our organisation?

How clearly and effectively were our benefits explained to you when you joined our company?

You can then delve deeper to examine the overall satisfaction levels with your existing benefits and assess those that your employees favour the most. Suitable questions could include:

How satisfied are you overall with the benefits offered by our organization?

Which three benefits already offered by our organization are the most valuable to you?

To gain a better insight into what you need to do to improve your benefits going forward you may also consider asking questions to help you to assess how well your benefits compete with other organisations and what further benefits your employees would like you to introduce. Appropriate questions could include:

How well do you think our benefits compare with those offered by other organisations and why?

What three benefits that we currently don’t offer, would you most like to us introduce?

75% of employees are more likely to stay with their employer because of their employee benefits package - Willis Towers Watson

Employee benefit survey software

With the right employee survey software you’ll be able to effectively create surveys and reach out, collect, share and analyse your staff feedback, so you’re in the best possible position to deliver a benefits package that will maintain staff motivation and keep your employees engaged and productive.

With our survey software you’re easily able to achieve this thanks to our:

Simple to use survey tools

Our low code solutions, ready-made and customisable templates, extensive question library and advanced features, make it quick and easy to create and get your survey up and running.

Strong distribution and automation capabilities

From email and web to SMS, there’s many options to reach out to your employees, giving them flexibility to complete your survey in the way that best suits them. And with the availability of automation and other support capabilities, we’re able to help you issue surveys and collect feedback at every point of your employees’ lifecycle.

Powerful reporting and analysis tools

Thanks to advanced filtering and reporting tools and smart in-built dashboards featuring a wide range of charts and graphical formats, it’s simpler and much quicker to spot trends or correlations in any feedback that might be affecting different data cohorts.

Smart collaboration tools

Having built strong collaboration capabilities into our software, it’s easy for different departments and teams to quickly share, review, edit their findings. This ensures that every person in your organisation that needs visibility, gets it, helping you to develop a fairer and more effective benefits programme for all your employees.

Use our employee survey templates

With such a wide range of areas and questions to potentially cover, it’s always helpful to be able to draw on some survey examples to get you started. To help we’ve supplied a great selection of customisable employee survey templates for you to look at.