Employee Benefits Survey FAQs
1) Why should you regularly ask your employees about benefits?
It’s important to regularly ask your employees about their benefits because their needs can change over time. For example, an employee who’s single and in good health may not be as concerned about health insurance coverage as an employee who’s married and has children.
Regular conversations about health benefits help you align current benefit offerings with current employee needs. They also put your team members at ease, since they’ll come to expect these conversations, and that gives them a chance to share their thoughts more freely.
2) What are the four major types of employee benefits?
There are four major types of employee benefits: health insurance, retirement savings plans, paid time off, and life insurance. Most employees expect these benefits from their employer, and they have the biggest impact on employee satisfaction and retention.
When an organization doesn’t include these core benefits, employees may see it as equivalent to a pay cut. In contrast, employees often count nonstandard benefits — such as child care and work-from-home allowances — as perks.
3) How do you ask an employee about benefits?
The goal of asking employees about benefits is to better understand which benefits they value most and to improve your benefits program. Therefore, it’s important to be specific with your questions.
For example, you might ask your team members to rank a list of benefits — which ones they’d like to see, which they could live without — and ask them to rate the quality of the benefits you offer. You may also want to ask about any potential changes the employee would like to see you make to the benefits program. You can use an online survey tool like Jotform to ask these questions and collect feedback.
4) When is the best time to conduct an employee benefits survey?
There’s no one perfect time to conduct an employee benefits survey. However, it’s generally a good idea to survey employees annually or biannually to get a sense of which benefits they value most and whether they’re happy with the quality of the benefits you offer.
You may also want to survey employees when there are changes to the benefits program, such as when you provide a new health insurance plan. Timing your survey appropriately can help ensure that you get the most accurate information possible.
5) How do you structure an employee survey?
Structure your questions in a way that facilitates data collection and analysis. While you may find deeper insights from paragraph-style responses, participation rates will likely drop, and answers will be much more complicated to analyze.
Instead, use rating scales to keep employee responses uniform. For example, you might ask employees to rate their satisfaction with different aspects of the benefits program on a scale of 1–5. To get the best of both worlds, you may also give employees the option to provide comments, allowing them to expand on their answers and provide further insights.
6) How long should an employee survey be?
Before deciding on length, you need to figure out if this survey will set the baseline for employee sentiment or if it’s simply designed to get a momentary snapshot. If you don’t have any previous survey data, it’s a good idea to start with a more detailed survey.
Your employee survey should be long enough to collect the necessary information but not so long that it becomes excessive or burdensome for employees to complete. In general, 30-plus questions will help you set the baseline, and 10–15 questions can give you a quick snapshot of current employee sentiment.
