Employee Benefits Surveys: 18 Questions to Ask for Better Insights

The only way to truly understand if your employee benefits resonate with your team is to ask them directly.

Employee benefits surveys help you find out what your team values most, which benefits they actually use, and where gaps exist in your current offerings. Otherwise, you risk wasting your benefits budget on underutilized perks.

In this article, we’ll cover how to transform your benefits plan from guesswork into a data-driven strategic decision, including discussing how to prepare an employee benefits survey and the right questions to ask.

Let’s get to it.

What Are Employee Benefits Surveys?

Employee benefits surveys are your direct line for understanding what your team actually wants. They help you evaluate your team’s perception of the perks you offer, including what they like, don’t like, and what should be changed.

The goal of the survey is to gather insights on how to refine your employee benefits strategy to better align with members’ needs and support your business goals.

Why Employee Benefits Surveys Matter More Than Ever

So why should you care about employee benefits surveys? Here's what makes them worth your time:

• Data-Driven Decision-Making: Employee benefits surveys help you identify which perks have the most impact for your team, influencing how you allocate resources to optimize members’ well-being. 

• Identify Underutilized Benefits: Through surveys, you can tell which employee benefits your employees do not find necessary, allowing you to refine or replace the perks.

• Understanding Employees’ Changing Needs: Employee benefits surveys are an opportunity for members to share their needs and expectations. For example, your team may suggest flexible work schedules as an essential benefit to boost their work-life balance.

• Boosting Employee Engagement: Employee benefits surveys boost engagement in two significant ways. First, they show members that you value their input/feedback, which enhances their participation in the benefits programs. Second, they enable you to personalize the benefits to your employees’ needs, which drives utilization rates.

Types of Employee Benefits Surveys and When to Use Each

Next, let's discuss the various employee benefits surveys and how they can help you refine your benefits strategy to align with your team’s needs and drive real impact for your organization. 

You should conduct benefits surveys at different stages of your employees’ tenure to provide context on how they perceive your perks. 

Conduct the following employee benefits surveys over the next review cycle:

• Annual Surveys: These are comprehensive assessments that focus on how your team perceives the full range of employee benefits you offer. For instance, annual surveys help you gauge whether employees are aware of the available benefits and how to utilize them. Conduct annual benefits surveys just before the renewal period to evaluate which perks to keep or replace.

• Pulse Surveys: These are short, frequent surveys that help you check the ‘temperature’ of your workforce in relation to the offered employee benefits. The best time to use pulse surveys is after major benefits overhauls, such as switching health insurance providers or introducing a corporate health and wellness program. 

Tip: Combine the pulse surveys with our free wellness audit checklist to spot red flags in engagement, incentive design, and implementation effort. 

• Employee Engagement Surveys: These surveys help tie the employee benefits to specific outcomes related to your workforce’s well-being. For example, you can assess how the employee benefits impact your team’s morale and productivity. Another way to use employee engagement surveys is to monitor members’ perceptions of the fairness of available benefits, especially by demographics.

• Onboarding Surveys: Conduct surveys on new hires to capture their initial perception of your employee benefits. Early satisfaction indicates that your employee benefits are competitive, laying the foundation for the hires to form an emotional connection to the organization. On the other hand, unsatisfactory scores might indicate that the benefits might not have been communicated clearly during onboarding.

• Exit Surveys: Follow up with employees leaving your company to understand whether benefits influenced their decision to depart. Evaluate their satisfaction with the employee benefits during their tenure and collect feedback on how to improve your offerings.

Once you know which type of survey to run, the next step is crafting questions that deliver real insight.

Essential Employee Benefits Survey Questions by Category

Building a benefits survey is more than just including questions to measure employee engagement and participation. Each question must be strategic and deliberate to help you gather insights into improving your benefits package. 

In this section, we’ve compiled employee benefits survey questions to inspire you:

Wellness Programs

Find out what your employees feel about your wellness program, including how they support your team’s workplace wellness:

1. Are you aware of our wellness programs?
2. How often do you participate in our health and wellness programs?
3. What other wellness programs would you want us to include to improve your work-life balance?

Health Insurance

These survey questions help you assess your team’s perception of the health insurance perks, especially affordability and coverage level:

4. Are you satisfied with the health insurance benefits the company provides?
5. Has using your health insurance been convenient and straightforward?
6. Do you feel that your health insurance deductibles and co-pays are fair and affordable?

Paid Time Off

According to a recent survey, over 60% of employees rated PTO as extremely important. However, nearly half of employees eligible for PTO don’t exhaust their hours, highlighting the need to understand the reason for the underutilization. Some questions to explore include:

7. How would you rate your understanding of our PTO policies?
8. How often are you able to take PTO when you need to?
9. Do you feel supported by the team when returning to work after a long period of PTO?

Retirement Planning

Evaluate how well your employees understand the offered retirement benefits, especially how to contribute to their 401(k) plans. Ask the following questions:

10. At what age would you like to retire?
11. Do you feel your retirement plan will sustain you long term?
12. Do you feel our contribution to your retirement plan is fair?

Benefits Satisfaction

Include several questions in the survey to assess your team’s satisfaction and perception of the offered benefits:

13. Are there any employee benefits that we don’t offer, but you would like us to consider in the future?
14. Do you feel the employee benefits were communicated effectively during your onboarding?
15. On a scale of 1-10, how well do you feel that the offered employee benefits meet your needs?

Benefits Utilization

Lastly, assess employee benefits participation rates to gain insights into how to refine your offerings and boost engagement. Some questions to consider include:

16. How often do you use your employee benefits?
17. List the top three most important benefits to you.
18. Do you feel our benefits packages are competitive compared to other companies in the industry/of the same size? Why or why not?

How to Design Your Employee Benefits Survey

The section above should give you an idea of the right questions to ask in your employee benefits survey to measure impact and effectiveness. However, you cannot just lump the questions into a questionnaire and send a survey link to your employees. 

Here’s how to build a survey your team will actually want to take:

1. Have Clear Objectives: Start by outlining what you want to learn from the employee benefits survey to keep the questionnaire focused and collect only the data you need. Suitable goals include measuring employees’ satisfaction with specific benefits, identifying areas for improvement, and assessing how well your perks support retention and engagement.
2. Choose a Format: Decide whether to use online surveys or focus groups, considering the pros and cons of each format. For example, online surveys are easy to conduct and analyze the collected data, while focus groups yield richer qualitative data that provide context for management.
3. Identify Core Pillars: Organize your employee benefits survey around core categories such as health insurance, retirement plans, paid leave, and wellness programs.
4. Draft the Questions or Pick a Validated Scale: Write clear, unbiased questions for each of the categories you outlined in step 3. Also, incorporate validated scales, such as the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), to strengthen the reliability of your findings.
5. Pilot Test the Survey: Test the benefits survey with a small group to identify confusing questions, technical issues, or potential biases. Use the feedback from the pilot test to refine the benefits survey before finally rolling it out.

Got your survey results? Great. It’s time to address the identified gaps. For example, the survey results could indicate a mismatch between your corporate wellness programs and employee wellness needs. This warrants partnering with a wellness broker to help you redesign your wellness strategy.

At SoHookd, we have nearly 10 years of experience partnering with wellness brokers and companies to customize and launch wellness benefits within 2 weeks. Our wellness program packages are procurement-friendly, with no contracts or PEPM fees. Additionally, employees can access the wellness benefits on multiple devices, which helps drive employee engagement for your team.

Schedule a call to discover how our wellness product packages can help you provide more effective benefits to your employees.

Key Metrics to Measure in Employee Benefits Surveys

So what should you actually measure? An employee benefits survey gives you the "why" behind the numbers you're already seeing in your employee benefits administration software. 

The following metrics should help you assess the effectiveness of your employee benefits package:

• Employee Satisfaction: This metric measures the level of satisfaction your team has with the available employee benefits, specifically their variety, quality, and accessibility. High satisfaction levels mean you're hitting the mark on what people actually want and need.

• Employee Net Promoter Score: eNPS evaluates how likely your employees are to recommend your company as a great employer/place to work. High scores mean people are genuinely happy and wouldn’t mind their friends or family members joining them.

• Benefits Utilization: This tracks how many employees are actually using the available benefits. While there is no specific utilization rate to aim for, the rule of thumb is that essential benefits like health insurance should have almost a 100% enrollment rate for eligible employees.

• Health and Wellness Metrics: Keep tabs on health indicators like sick days, stress levels, and workplace injuries. A positive change is usually a sign that your benefits are actually supporting people's wellbeing, both physically and mentally.

• Productivity Metrics: Ask employees directly: Are benefits like flexible schedules or PTO helping you avoid burnout and get more done? When the majority of your employees answer “yes,” it means that your benefits support members’ work-life balance and mental health.

Best Practices for Conducting Employee Benefits Surveys

Our step-by-step guide and suggested benefits survey questions should help you collect the data you need to measure the effectiveness of your benefits package. 

However, we still have some more tricks up our sleeves to help you make the process seamless and increase participation rates:

• Offer Incentives: Provide wellness gifts for employees to motivate your team and overcome reasons people don't participate in surveys, such as procrastination. 

Download our free ebook to learn how psychology-backed incentives can drive participation for your team.

• Guarantee Anonymity: Assure your employees that the benefits survey is anonymous to encourage honest feedback. Additionally, uphold utmost confidentiality to earn your team’s trust.

• Keep the Questionnaire Lean: Limit the survey to the most essential questions to encourage employees to complete the questionnaire. The rule of thumb is to ask 5-15 questions so that employees can complete it within 10 minutes.

• Act on the Feedback: Close the loop by using the proposed improvements to refine the employee benefits package. This shows employees that their feedback matters, encouraging them to participate in future benefits surveys.

• Use Various Question Formats: Ask closed questions when you need straightforward answers, such as the ease of accessing employee benefits, where members can rate on a 1-5 scale. In contrast, use open-ended questions to encourage employees to provide context, such as when asking about the challenges they encounter when trying to access the benefits.

• Leverage Technology: Use online tools to enable employees to complete the surveys on their devices, such as mobile phones, and at their convenience. This increases the completion rates as opposed to limiting the survey to work computers.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid in Benefits Surveys

You could apply all the proven tactics highlighted above, but then make a misstep that hurts the reliability of the benefits survey results or discourages members from completing the questionnaire. 

Watch out for the following mistakes when conducting your next employee benefits survey:

• Leading Questions: Avoid biased questions that appear to nudge employees towards certain answers, as this skews the results instead of providing an accurate picture of the status of your benefits package. Instead, keep the questions neutral to allow employees to answer objectively.

• Lack of Anonymity: Don’t be tempted to use third-party tools to track which employees submitted which answers. This could tarnish your employer’s reputation to the extent that top talent exits your company. 

• Wrong Timing: Avoid conducting benefits surveys during peak seasons when employees are likely to face heavy workloads, as this may result in low completion rates. Instead, schedule the surveys during less hectic periods where members can spare time to complete the questionnaires without feeling overwhelmed.

• Complex Questionnaires: Lengthy surveys of up to 30 questions or more often discourage employees from participating. Additionally, some members may abandon the surveys midway. Limit the benefits survey to only a few questions (five to 15) to encourage employees to complete the questionnaire. Also, keep the questions simple and clear so they are easy to understand for employees at different levels.

• Failing to Follow Up: When employees complete benefits surveys, they expect that you will act on the feedback they provide. As such, overlooking survey results shows members that you do not value their feedback, which causes them to disengage.

Let’s wind up this guide by answering common questions about employee benefits surveys in the section below.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are answers to additional questions you might have about employee benefits surveys:

How Often Should Employee Benefits Surveys Be Conducted?

There’s no specific timeline for how often to conduct employee benefits surveys. Some companies conduct surveys quarterly, while others do it annually. 

However, we recommend combining pulse and annual surveys to get a clear picture of your team’s perception of the employee benefits.

Are Incentives Important for Survey Completion?

Yes. Incentives are important for survey completion, as they help members overcome psychological barriers to participation, such as procrastination. 

Additionally, they encourage respondents to complete all survey questions, thereby reducing abandonment rates.

What is a Good Participation Rate for Benefits Surveys?

Usually, it’s almost unlikely to get 100% participation due to both controllable and uncontrollable causes. 

For example, employees on PTO may be unavailable to participate in the survey. However, a good participation rate for benefits surveys is considered anything above 80%.

Conclusion

A well-designed employee benefits survey helps you bridge the gap between what you think your team wants and what they actually need. Asking the right questions helps gather insight into members’ benefits preferences, allowing you to identify perks that drive the most impact for your team.

When you turn employee feedback into action, you don’t just improve benefits — you build a culture of care. And that’s where SoHookd can help.

SoHookd has over a decade of experience partnering with organizations to address wellness gaps in their employee benefits packages. Our customizable program design enables us to fast-track implementation, allowing you to launch the wellness perks within two weeks. We also help you build your own program, which enables you to tailor the wellness benefits to each employee's individual needs and preferences. 

Additionally, we won't tie you into contracts or require you to pay PEPM or minimum fees, making our wellness product packages budget-friendly, even for small businesses.

Book a personalized call for a live demo of our wellness benefits packages.