Facility survey questions for the people in your building
Fifteen questions a facilities or workplace manager can send to occupants today, with the state of the building kept apart from the service of the facilities desk, and published figures to read your scores against. Try it here first, then send your own.
- 15questions
- about 3 minto complete
- 1 to 5satisfaction scale
- No name askedand no floor, zone or shift field
A building and a service desk are two different scores
Every list of facility survey questions averages them into one number, and that number cannot tell you which half is broken.
Conditions are what the building does to the person in it. Temperature, air, light, noise, cleanliness, restrooms, somewhere to concentrate. Most of it is plant and fabric, most of it is slow, and in a leased building some is not yours at all.
Service is what happens after somebody reports a problem. How easy it was to report, whether the work was good, how long it took, whether anyone said anything meanwhile. That half is a route, a rota and a reply.
So the survey scores them separately and never adds them up. Questions 1 to 9 are the building, 10 to 14 the desk. A site can score badly on one and well on the other, and knowing which is the point of asking.
What it does not do is judge your contractors. Occupants see whether a place is clean; they cannot see whether the cleaning contract is good value. That belongs in a supplier survey template, with the contract in front of you.
The 15 facility survey questions
Every question, its answer format, and what a weak answer points at. Copy one block or all 15.
Overall, asked first
One item, and it is question one. Asking the specific items first would leave the general one measuring only what they left out, which is a documented contrast effect.[4]
- Taking everything together, how satisfied are you with this building as a place to do your work?The one number to carry forward unchanged. Reword anything else here; leave this alone or you lose the comparison between waves.
The building itself
The two things every occupant sees, whether or not they have ever reported anything.
- How satisfied are you with how clean the areas you use are kept?Cleanliness is one of the three highest-scoring categories in the largest published occupant database, at 71 per cent satisfied.[1] A low score here is unusual, and cheap to act on.
- How satisfied are you with the state of the restrooms when you use them?Separate from question 2: it has its own frequency, its own supplies and its own fix. Averaging it into "cleanliness" hides it.
Comfort where you sit
Four separate items, not one comfort question. Different senses, different plant behind them, and they score very differently.[1]
- How satisfied are you with the temperature where you normally work?Expect your worst or second-worst score. Read it against the reference points below before treating it as a failure of your building.[2]
- How satisfied are you with the air where you normally work?Apart from temperature, because a room can be the right temperature and still feel stale, and the two have different fixes.
- How satisfied are you with the lighting where you normally work?Amount of light is also one of the highest-scoring categories, at 74 per cent satisfied.[1] A low score points at a place, not a building.
- How satisfied are you with the noise level where you normally work?Noise draws 34 per cent dissatisfied and sound privacy 54 per cent, the worst measured.[1] Read question 8 beside it.
Space to work in
Two items about what the building lets somebody do, rather than about how it feels.
- When you need to concentrate, how easy is it to find somewhere here to do it?The item that turns a noise complaint into a decision. Low here with a low question 7 is a room problem you can solve with a room.
- How safe does this building feel to you while you are in it?A symptom finder, not a security audit. Answers about doors and lighting, or about drills and escape routes, are separate surveys.
The facilities desk
Five items about the service rather than the building, because this is the half a manager can change without a capital budget.
- In the last three months, how many times have you reported a facilities problem?The split that makes the next four readable. Somebody who reported four problems is answering a different question from somebody who reported none.
- How easy is it to report a facilities problem here?The cheapest of the fifteen to act on. A low score is a route and a reply, not a plant replacement.
- How satisfied are you with the way facilities problems get fixed?Everybody can answer this, including people who never reported anything: it asks what they believe about the service, not what happened to them.
- How satisfied are you with the time a facilities job takes to finish?Apart from question 12: a job done well after nine weeks and one botched the same afternoon are different failures.
- When you report something, how well are you kept informed about what is happening?Being told and being fixed are different. This item separates them, and it is the only one a message can move.
In your words
One box, optional, and last. That placement costs you something, and the cost is stated here rather than hidden.[4]
- What is the one thing about this building you would most like put right?Sort these by the answer to question 10 before counting them. Open answers name their writers without meaning to, so summarise the themes and repeat no sentence word for word.
Three swaps before you send. Change "this building" to the site name, cut question 3 if the people answering do not share restrooms with the public, and put a real month in the invitation. Do not add a floor, zone or shift field: they undo what the invitation promises, and there is a section below on why.
Reading the answers, against real numbers
Fifteen questions produce counts, not a score. Two mean nothing until you know what other buildings get.
Start with the two that always look bad. A manager who reads a low temperature score as a failure of their own building will spend a budget on the wrong thing. The largest published database of occupant surveys, 93,662 responses across 897 buildings, puts sound privacy at 54 per cent dissatisfied, temperature at 39 per cent and noise level at 34 per cent, and puts cleanliness at 71 per cent satisfied and amount of light at 74 per cent.[1]
On temperature the gap is starker. Across 351 office buildings and 52,980 occupants, 43 per cent were thermally dissatisfied. Comfort standards ask a building to satisfy 80 per cent of the people in it; only 2 per cent of those buildings managed it on the strict reading of the scale, 8 per cent counting neutral answers as satisfied, and 33 per cent on the most generous reading the standard allows.[2] That is the bar to read your result against.
| What a category is doing | What the published picture looks like | What that means for your result |
|---|---|---|
| Temperature low | 39 per cent dissatisfied across 897 buildings; 43 per cent across a separate 351.[1][2] | Normal. Worth tracking, not worth a capital case alone. See where the low answers cluster before you touch the plant. |
| Noise and sound privacy low | The worst two categories measured: 34 and 54 per cent dissatisfied.[1] | Read question 8 beside it. If nobody can find anywhere to concentrate, the answer is a room, not a quieter floor. |
| Cleanliness low | One of the three best categories elsewhere, at 71 per cent satisfied.[1] | Unusual, and the cheapest thing here to fix. Take it first. |
| Lighting low | Also one of the best elsewhere, at 74 per cent satisfied.[1] | Look for a place before you look at the building. Question 15 will tell you where. |
Then read the service half in pairs. Question 12 against question 13 separates work that is poor from work that is late, and question 14 says which of the two people noticed. Fixing that scores well beside telling that scores badly is a message problem, and a message is the only thing here that moves in a week.
One answer can mean the survey found something else. If question 15 fills with drills, alarms and where to go, that is the fire safety survey questions instead.
One number the law settles for you. In Great Britain there is no legal maximum working temperature, and the suggested indoor minimum is 16 degrees Celsius, or 13 where much of the work involves rigorous physical effort.[3] A floor, not a comfort target, but it tells you when a complaint has stopped being a preference.
What this survey cannot hide, and the field it refuses
The person answering works in the building you run and will be back tomorrow. That decides how the form is built.
What the template does. No name, no email address, no login, and nothing on the form that joins an answer to a person. One optional location field, the building, and only if you have more than one.
What it does not do. Whoever owns the survey can open every response. A written answer can identify its author. On a site of thirty people, thirty replies are readable by anybody who works there. No setting fixes that, so it goes in the invitation instead of being promised away.
Which is why there is no floor field and no shift field. A floor plus a shift plus a complaint about the temperature is a name, and the people answering work that out faster than facilities teams do. Collect the building, report totals, route single faults with a work order. For how few replies is too few to report, the sample size guidance for a single building gives the arithmetic.
This is a survey about a workplace, not a home. If the person answering rents the place they live in from the person asking, the questions are repairs, rent and renewal, and the tenant satisfaction survey is written for that. An office or retail tenant asking about cleaning, air and shared space belongs here.
Before you send it to occupants
Three things to settle, and the note to put in front of people.
Send it once or twice a year, at the same point each year. This measures a general view of a place, not one visit. A note sent the day after a job closes measures that job, which is worth knowing and is a different instrument: the after-service survey is built for it.
Say what happens next, with a date. The invitation below names who reads the replies, says there is no name field, and commits in writing to reporting totals. A manager who promises that and then circulates a per-floor breakdown has taught the building what the next survey is worth.
Decide now which two things you will fix. Fifteen questions will hand you more than two, and question 15 more still. All 15 are already built in the free online survey builder, so the only editing left is the site name and the dates.
The open box is last, and that costs you something. People are more likely to raise the topics the closed questions just put in front of them, so a box at the end collects comments about temperature, noise and cleaning.[4] It is last anyway, because a blank box in front of a three-minute survey stops people finishing. For unprimed complaints, move it to question 2 and accept broader answers that are harder to sort.
What to put in front of occupants before question one
Before you start This is a survey about this building and about the facilities desk: how clean it is kept, how it feels to sit in, whether you can find somewhere to concentrate, and what happens when you report a problem. We are asking because [ORGANISATION] sets next year's maintenance budget in [MONTH], and we would rather spend it on what people here raise. We do not ask for your name, your email, your floor, your zone or your shift, and nothing on the form ties an answer to a person. [NAME] reads the replies. There are [NUMBER] people in this survey, so we will report totals only. Fifteen questions, about three minutes. The survey shuts on [DATE]. By [DATE] you will get a short note back listing the two things we are fixing first.
Facility survey FAQ
What questions should be in a facility survey?
Six things: an overall rating, cleanliness and restrooms, comfort where people sit (temperature, air, light, noise), somewhere to concentrate, how safe the place feels, and how the facilities desk handles what gets reported. Fifteen items covers all six, with one open box last.
Why separate building conditions from the facilities service?
Because they have different owners and different costs. Temperature and air are plant and fabric, and in a leased building often the owner's. Reporting, fixing and being kept informed are your desk, and can change this quarter. One averaged facilities score tells you nothing about which half is broken.
Is a low temperature score a sign my building is badly run?
Not on its own. Read it against what other buildings get. Across 351 office buildings and 52,980 occupants, 43 per cent were thermally dissatisfied, and only 2 per cent of buildings met the 80-per-cent-satisfied criterion comfort standards prescribe.[2] Temperature is also the second-worst category in the largest published occupant database, at 39 per cent dissatisfied.[1] Compare yourself with that, not with 5 out of 5.
How many questions should a facility survey have, and how long should it take?
Fifteen, about three minutes. Lists of thirty and fifty facilities questions are menus rather than surveys anybody sends, and the longest states no completion time at all.
Can a facility survey be anonymous?
Partly, and the honest answer matters. This template asks for no name, no email, no floor, no zone and no shift, and nothing ties a reply to a person. But whoever owns the survey can open every response, a written answer can identify its author, and on a site of thirty people one reply is readable by anybody who works there. Report totals only.
Should I collect the floor or zone so I can find the problem?
No. A floor and a shift together name a person, and occupants work that out faster than facilities teams do. Collect the building if you have more than one, and nothing finer. A single fault is a work order, not a survey.
How often should I send it?
Once or twice a year, at the same point each year so the answers compare. Keep it apart from any note you send after one job closes: that measures the job, and mixing the two gives a number that means neither.
Why is there no 0 to 10 recommendation question?
Because nobody chooses the building they work in. A recommendation score measures a choice somebody could make again, and an occupant cannot. Question 1 asks the same thing in the only form honest here.
Methods and sources
What this template is based on
One overall item, eight on the condition and comfort of the building, five on the facilities desk, and one open box. The overall item comes first because asking specific questions before a general one leaves the general one measuring what they left out.[4] Conditions and service are scored separately and never summed: different owners, different costs. Temperature, air, light and noise are four items rather than one comfort question, because they score very differently from each other in the published occupant data.[1] There is no 0 to 10 recommendation item: nobody chooses the building they work in.
Question licensing
The CBE Occupant Survey is provided through membership rather than published for reuse, so it is named and linked and no item from it is reproduced or adapted; its results are a separate, openly licensed publication and are quoted with attribution.[1] ASHRAE Standard 55 is a copyrighted standard sold by ASHRAE, so no wording from it appears here; what is used is a published analysis of its 80 per cent criterion.[2] The Leesman index and the benchmarking instruments of IFMA and IWFM are commercial products under no reproduction licence: none is reproduced and no figure from any is quoted. The workplace temperature page carries an Open Government Licence v3.0 grant in its own footer, so its two figures are reprinted with attribution.[3]
Limits and disclosure
Both occupant datasets are drawn mainly from North American office buildings whose owners chose to run a survey, so they are a large picture rather than a random sample, and a warehouse, school or plant will not match them.[1][2] Both used a seven-point satisfaction scale; this template uses five points, so the percentages set a direction and are not a number to subtract from your own.[2] The temperature figures are Great Britain only and are a legal floor, not a comfort standard.[3] The survey carries no score. It produces counts, and there is nothing to add up.
SuperSurvey builds the editor this template opens in. Nothing on this page depends on using it.
References
- Graham, L. T., Parkinson, T. and Schiavon, S. Lessons learned from 20 years of CBE's occupant surveys. Buildings and Cities, 2(1), 2021, pp. 166-184. journal-buildingscities.org (CC BY 4.0)
- Karmann, C., Schiavon, S. and Arens, E. Percentage of commercial buildings showing at least 80% occupant satisfied with their thermal comfort. Proceedings of Windsor Conference 2018. escholarship.org (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
- Health and Safety Executive. Temperature in the workplace: what the law says. hse.gov.uk (Open Government Licence v3.0)
- Pew Research Center. Writing Survey Questions. pewresearch.org
Send the facility survey, and report it as totals
Fifteen questions, about three minutes, and a building score kept apart from a service score.
Use this template