Employee Wellness Survey Questions That Ask About Work, Not Health
A wellness survey reads the working conditions an employer can change: what the job demands, how much say people have, who helps, and whether change is explained. Sixteen questions, two worded answer scales, about five minutes, and not one question about anyone's own health.
- 16questions
- About 5 minto complete
- 6 standardsof working conditions
- 15 of 16from the HSE tool
The named wellbeing instruments, and the one this survey is built from
Every named measure in this field arrives with a licence, and most of those licences stop at a company that wants to put the items in front of its own people. What each one measures, and who may copy it.
| Instrument | What it measures | May a commercial template site reprint it? | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| HSE Management Standards Indicator Tool | Six working conditions in 35 items: demands, control, managerial support, peer support, relationships, role and change. No item asks the respondent about their own health.[1] | Yes, with one line of credit | Crown copyright under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial re-use outright.[2][3] |
| COPSOQ III | Psychosocial working conditions, in a short workplace version and longer research versions.[7] | Yes, but nothing you change may still be called COPSOQ | Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0, plus the network's own guidelines, and no fee for the questionnaire itself.[7] |
| WHO-5 Well-Being Index | Five statements about how the person has felt over the preceding two weeks.[4] | No | Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. The non-commercial term excludes a site like this one.[4] |
| WEMWBS, and its 7-item short form | Fourteen statements about a person's mental wellbeing, and seven in the short version.[5] | No | A licence has to be chosen and registered before use, and the non-commercial one does not permit sharing it publicly.[5] |
| This template | Fifteen of the HSE items, covering all six standards in one sitting, plus one open question of ours. | Yes, from anywhere, without asking us | Free to copy, edit and translate. Keep the HSE credit line with the items and nothing else is asked of you. |
The one you may send is also the one that asks about work. All 35 HSE items are about conditions: what the job demands, how much say people have, who helps, whether change is explained.[1] None of them asks how the person answering has been feeling, which is what makes it safe to hand to a whole team.
The near miss. The NIOSH Worker Well-Being Questionnaire is reproducible too, and no fee may be charged for it, but its five domains reach into health status and into home and community life.[6] That is the line this template does not cross, so it is cited and not copied.
Why any of this is worth measuring. WHO puts the cost of depression and anxiety at 12 billion working days a year and about a trillion US dollars in lost productivity, and it recommends employers respond with organizational changes that target working conditions and environments directly.[9]
All 16 questions are already loaded in the survey form builder. Open it, drop anything that does not fit your organization, and send what is left.
The 16 employee wellbeing survey questions, standard by standard
Fifteen items are the HSE tool word for word. The sixteenth is ours. Copy one standard, copy all 16, or open the template and skip the typing.
Role: whether the job is clear
Two items on whether someone can say what their job is. They open the survey because they are the easiest questions on it to answer and the cheapest thing on it to fix.
- I am clear what my duties and responsibilities areA low answer here makes every later answer harder to act on, because a workload rating given against an unsettled job description is a rating of a moving target.
- I understand how my work fits into the overall aim of the organisationThe wider of the two. Someone can know their duties exactly and still not know what any of it is for.
Demands: how much the job asks
Three items, all worded so that a high answer is a bad answer. HSE writes them that way, and the reading section says what to do about it before you average anything.
- I have unachievable deadlinesAbout the deadline, not the person. Someone answering Always is describing a plan, not their own pace.
- I have to neglect some tasks because I have too much to doThe item that separates a busy team from an overloaded one: work being dropped is a decision somebody is making alone.
- I am unable to take sufficient breaksA break is the one demand item a manager can change this week without changing the workload.
Control: how much say people have
The other half of pressure, and the reason it is asked next to demands rather than anywhere else on the page.
- I have a choice in deciding how I do my workMethod rather than volume. A team can be stretched and still answer Often here.
- I have a say in my own work speedPace. Read it against the three demands items: high demands with a low answer here is the pairing to act on first.
Support: the manager, and the people around you
Two items about the line manager and two about colleagues. The fourth sits on the agreement scale because that is the block HSE prints it in, and moving it would change the item.
- I can rely on my line manager to help me out with a work problemPractical help with a work problem, which is a different question from whether the manager is liked.
- I am given supportive feedback on the work I doFeedback that helps rather than feedback that arrives. The cheapest item here to move and the first to slip when a team is busy.
- If work gets difficult, my colleagues will help mePeer support at the moment it is needed. A low answer in a team that depends on handovers is a process gap.
- My colleagues are willing to listen to my work-related problemsWillingness to listen, which is the part of peer support that carries a team through a bad month.
Relationships: friction, and whether it gets handled
One item on each scale, both worded backwards. The full tool also asks about bullying and personal harassment directly; those two items are not in this short form, and the note below the bank says why.
- There is friction or anger between colleaguesHow often, not who. An answer above Sometimes is a question for whoever runs the team, not a name to chase.
- Relationships at work are strainedThe settled state rather than the incident. Agreement here alongside a low friction count is a team that has stopped talking.
Change: whether people can see it coming
Both change items sit on the agreement scale in the HSE tool, which is why this survey ships two scales. A wellbeing survey built on the frequency block alone drops this standard entirely.
- Staff are always consulted about change at workConsultation before the decision. Disagreement here is about the sequence, not the decision itself.
- When changes are made at work, I am clear how they will work out in practiceWhat the change means for the person answering. A restructure can be announced well and still land here as a Neutral.
One open question, written for this template
The only item here that is not HSE's, and the only one that can be skipped. It asks about how the work is set up, never about the person answering it.
- If one thing about how the work is organized changed next month, what would you pick?The line that explains the six numbers. Optional on purpose, because a required box gets one-word answers.
Where the items come from, and what travels with them. Fifteen of the sixteen are the Health and Safety Executive's Management Standards Indicator Tool, on its own two scales: Never, Seldom, Sometimes, Often and Always for the first eleven, then Strongly disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree and Strongly agree for the last four.[1] The tool is Crown copyright and free to copy under the Open Government Licence,[2][3] which asks one thing in return. That credit line rides with the copy button and should stay on your survey: contains public sector information published by the Health and Safety Executive and licensed under the Open Government Licence. The full 35-item tool also asks about bullying and personal harassment outright. Those two items are not in this short form, because a fifteen-item read is the wrong place to raise them; if you need them, send all 35.[1]
Nothing here asks about anyone's health, and nothing should. A survey that asks about sleep, mood, medication or money collects health information the employer then has to hold and protect, and names nothing the employer can change. Put the routes people already have into the invite instead, so anyone struggling has somewhere to go that is not a form: your employee assistance program, occupational health, and their own doctor. WHO's 2022 guidelines on mental health at work make nine recommendations; not one is to screen workers, and the two strong ones are to train managers to support their workers and to make reasonable accommodations at work.[8]
If your organization says welfare rather than wellness, and the question is what it provides rather than how the work is set up, the employee welfare questionnaire is worded for that instead. If the subject is how people feel about the job itself, the job satisfaction survey questions cover it.
Sending it: one link, one invite, one reporting group
Decide the reporting group before you send. Pick the smallest group you are willing to report on, put that number in the invite, and hold to it when someone asks for a smaller cut afterwards. Whoever owns the survey can open the answers as rows, so give it to someone outside the teams being reported on.
One link for the whole population. A separate copy per manager produces six sets of answers nobody can compare, at a completion rate that depends on which manager chased. Send one link, remind once, close it inside a week.
Put a date on the reply. The sixteenth question asks people to name one change, so the invite below commits to a date for saying what came back and what is changing.
If the answers point at what people can get rather than at the work, that is a separate question, and asking people to choose between benefits needs the benefits survey template.
Reading the answers when five of the fifteen are worded backwards
Score every item 1 to 5, turn the negatively worded ones the right way up, then average by standard rather than over the whole survey.[1]
Which five, and why it matters. The three demands items and the two relationship items are written so that a high answer is a bad answer. HSE scores those five in reverse, 5 down to 1 instead of 1 up to 5.[1] Skip that step and demands comes out as the healthiest thing in your survey, which is the arithmetic error this page exists to stop.
Six standards, six numbers. Average the items inside each standard, per team, and rank the six. A single wellbeing score averages a demands item against a change item and hides both.
Then read the bottom, not the top. Take the two lowest standards for each team and pick the one item inside them that the team's own manager could move this quarter. That is the change to name in the follow-up, and the thing your second run has to show.
| Management standard | Items here | Example mean, 1 to 5 | What a low number is pointing at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demands | 3, all scored in reverse | 2.4 | The amount of work, and whether there is room to stop |
| Change | 2, both on the agreement scale | 2.7 | Notice, consultation, and what a change means in practice |
| Control | 2 | 3.1 | How much say people have over pace and method |
| Relationships | 2, both scored in reverse | 3.9 | Friction, and whether anyone handles it |
| Role | 2 | 4.1 | Whether people can say what their job is and what it is for |
| Support | 4, two about the manager and two about colleagues | 4.2 | Who someone turns to when the work goes wrong |
What that example says. Those six means are made up for the illustration, and the ranking is the part to read. This team knows its job and is well supported, and it is being asked for more than it can deliver during a change it did not see coming. Averaged flat, the whole survey is 3.4 and says none of that.
What the six numbers cannot tell you. They describe conditions, not people. No arrangement of these answers identifies who is struggling, and the survey is not built to; that is what the routes in the invite are for.
Then keep it short between rounds. A sixteen-question instrument twice a year sits badly with a monthly rhythm, so run this one for the detail and keep a short pulse survey in the gaps.
Employee wellness survey FAQ
Is an employee wellness survey the same thing as an employee wellbeing survey?
Nothing about the survey changes. Wellness is the word usually written in the United States and wellbeing the one usually written in the United Kingdom, and a staff wellness survey, a corporate wellness survey and an employee wellbeing survey all name the same measurement here: a read on the working conditions around a job, rather than a read on the people doing it.
Can we use the WHO-5 or the Warwick-Edinburgh scale instead?
Not from this page. The WHO-5 is released under a Creative Commons non-commercial licence, which rules out a commercial site reprinting it.[4] WEMWBS needs a licence chosen and registered first, and its non-commercial licence does not permit sharing it publicly.[5] Both also ask a person how they have been feeling, which is a different measurement from the one above.
Should we ask about mental health, or use the PHQ-9 or GAD-7?
No, and the licence is not the reason: both are free to reproduce. They are depression and anxiety screeners, and the organisations that run them say plainly that a screening result is not a diagnosis and belongs with a clinician.[10] An employer that collects one has a score it cannot act on. Ask about the work, and put the support routes people already have in the invite.
Is 16 questions enough, or do we need all 35?
Sixteen is enough to rank the six standards against each other and decide what to change first. It is not enough to set your results beside HSE's own analysis of the full tool, and it leaves out the bullying and harassment items. For either of those, send all 35.[1]
How often should we send it?
Twice a year at most for the full set. The HSE instructions ask people to answer for their last six months, so two runs a year is the shortest gap that recall period supports.[1] Between runs, a much shorter recurring survey is the better instrument.
Methods and sources
What this template is based on
Fifteen of the sixteen questions are the HSE Management Standards Indicator Tool, reproduced word for word, British spelling included.[1] The six standards are HSE's. The choice of fifteen from thirty-five, the grouping, the reading rule and the open question are ours. The rule that the survey asks about work and never about the person follows WHO's 2022 guidelines on mental health at work, whose nine recommendations do not include screening workers.[8]
Question licensing
The HSE items are Crown copyright, reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial re-use and asks for one credit line: contains public sector information published by the Health and Safety Executive and licensed under the Open Government Licence.[2][3] No HSE logo or branding appears here, which the licence excludes. The WHO-5,[4] WEMWBS[5] and COPSOQ III[7] are named and not reproduced, and neither is any clinical screener. Everything else on this page is free to copy and edit.
Limits and disclosure
Fifteen items are not the 35-item tool, so these results are your own baseline and not something to set beside anyone else's figures.[1] The six standards describe working conditions and nothing else: this survey cannot tell you how any individual is. The means in the reading table are invented for the example.
SuperSurvey sells the editor this template opens in. The questions belong to the HSE and are free wherever you send them from.
References
- Health and Safety Executive. HSE Management Standards Indicator Tool (35 items, two 5-point scales, six-month recall). hse.gov.uk (PDF)
- Health and Safety Executive. Management Standards: tools and templates, "free for you to use or share with your colleagues". hse.gov.uk
- The National Archives. Open Government Licence for public sector information, version 3.0. nationalarchives.gov.uk
- World Health Organization. The World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5), WHO/UCN/MSD/MHE/2024.1. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. who.int
- Warwick Innovations, University of Warwick. WEMWBS licences and pricing. warwick.ac.uk
- National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. NIOSH Worker Well-Being Questionnaire (WellBQ). cdc.gov
- COPSOQ International Network. Licence, guidelines and questionnaire. copsoq-network.org
- World Health Organization. WHO guidelines on mental health at work, 2022, Recommendations. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- World Health Organization. Mental health at work, fact sheet. who.int
- Mental Health America. About our mental health tests. screening.mhanational.org
Send the wellness survey this week
Sixteen questions, two worded scales, about five minutes. Open it in the editor, set the reporting group, and send one link.
Use this template