A sustainability survey that asks what people do, not what they think
Ask whether the environment matters and 85 percent say yes, which is the same answer everywhere and moves nothing.[1] The fourteen questions below ask about the things that differ from one workplace to the next.
- 14questions
- About 4 minto answer
- 5blocks you can cut
- 0licensed framework items
Fourteen sustainability survey questions, and what each one is for
Five blocks. Each one is a separate way this can go wrong, with its own fix, which is why they are worth keeping apart rather than averaging into a single score.
What this place actually does
Three items about things that either happened or did not. They open the survey because somebody who has never thought about the subject can still answer all three.
- This organization backs its environmental commitments with a budget.Money is the difference between a commitment and a statement. A low answer here with high answers below describes an organization that means it and has not funded it.
- I can name something this organization changed in the last year to reduce its environmental impact.Asked as recall rather than as approval. Somebody who cannot name one change has not seen one, whatever the intranet says, and that is a finding about visibility.
- Environmental impact is weighed when this organization decides what to buy.Purchasing is where most footprint sits, and it is the item most likely to split by department. Read it split by function before averaging it.
Whether anyone here can act
The three questions this subject skips: knowing what to do, being able to afford the time, and knowing where to raise it.
- I know what I am expected to do here to cut waste.Instruction, not attitude. If this scores low the fix is an email rather than a policy, which makes it the cheapest thing here to change.
- Doing the environmentally better thing here takes longer than the alternative.The one reverse-worded item, so agreement is the bad answer. It is worded as a cost in time because time is the cost people can actually report.
- I know who to tell when I see something wasteful here.A route, asked as something a person can do rather than something they feel. Without one, every answer to the two open questions arrives for the first time in this survey.
Specific things, not opinions
Two questions with no rating scale on them. The first is the closest a survey gets to a fact check; the second is a bounded recall about one week, because a longer window is a guess.
- Which of these has this organization done in the last twelve months, as far as you know?Read the spread rather than the total. If most people tick two of the seven and leadership believes all seven happened, that gap is a communication finding.
- In your last full week here, how often did you throw away something that could have been kept?One week, because self-reported environmental behaviour is a weak stand-in for the real thing: across 6,260 people in 15 studies it correlated with observed behaviour at r = .46.[3] A short window and a concrete object are what is left when a general habit question will not hold.
What to put first, and what gets claimed
Four items that turn the survey into a decision: one ranks the work, one tests the public story against the inside, and two ask whether anybody could repeat the targets.
- Which of these should this organization put first over the next year?The priority question a materiality assessment exists to answer, in one line. Nearly four fifths of both the G250 and the N100 groups run one.[2] The last option makes agreeing with the current plan a real answer.
- What this organization says publicly about the environment matches what I see from the inside.The item that costs the most to ignore, and the reason to run this internally before publishing anything. Ask it of employees, who see both sides.
- Does this organization publish a sustainability or environmental report?Four options rather than yes and no: "yes but I have not read it" and "I do not know" are different problems with different fixes.
- I could explain this organization's environmental targets to someone outside it.A target nobody can restate is not operating on anybody. Pair it with item 2: knowing the target and having seen a change come apart.
What they say unprompted
Two optional boxes at the end, so a person who stops before them has already given you everything countable.
- What is the most wasteful thing you see here?Asked about a specific thing rather than about the organization, so the answers arrive as objects somebody can go and look at.
- What would make it easier for you to do the environmentally better thing at work?Phrased as a barrier to remove rather than as a complaint. Read it beside item 5 and the pair will name the next thing to change.
What is deliberately missing. No question here is taken from a reporting framework. GRI, the SASB Standards, CDP and the B Impact Assessment are all copyright-reserved and all require permission or a licence before their content is reused,[4][5][6][7] and the academic scale people reach for instead is a journal article with no open licence on its items.[8] Name the framework you report under, link to it, and ask your own questions. All fourteen above are free to copy, edit and translate.
Add two fields the fourteen do not include: team or site, and how long somebody has been here. Items 3, 7 and 9 only mean anything split by one of those, so put them at the end as optional fields rather than opening with them.
Why the attitude question comes back at 85 percent every time
The largest published survey on this subject asks both kinds of question of the same people, which settles the argument without anybody having to run a pilot.
Three opinion items, two behaviour items, one sample of 26,319 people. In the 2025 Special Eurobarometer on climate change, run across all 27 EU Member States, 85 percent said climate change is a serious problem, 84 percent said it is caused by human activity, and 81 percent backed the goal of climate neutrality by 2050. In the same survey, 59 percent said they had taken climate action in the previous six months and 38 percent said they feel personally exposed to environmental and climate risks.[1]
The three opinion answers sit within four points of each other near the top of the scale. An item that returns 85 percent from a general population will return something close to it from your own people, and a number that cannot move is a number that cannot tell you where to start. The two items about what somebody did or felt are 22 and 47 points lower, and those are the ones with room in them.[1]
| What an attitude score tells you | What it cannot tell you |
|---|---|
| That the subject is not being resisted, worth knowing once | Whether anything was actually done, which is item 7 |
| A number you can put in a deck | What stops the person who wanted to act, which is items 4 to 6 |
| That people say the right thing when asked | Whether the public story matches the inside, which is item 10 |
Asking about behaviour instead does not fix it on its own. A meta-analysis of 19 measures of association from 15 studies, covering 6,260 individuals or households, put the correlation between self-reported and objectively measured environmental behaviour at r = .46, which its authors describe as conventionally large and functionally small: 79 percent of the variance is left unexplained.[3] A survey cannot audit anybody. What it can do is narrow the window and name the object, which is why question 8 asks about one week and one thing thrown away rather than about your habits in general.
The organizational half of this is already documented, and it is why questions 9 to 12 exist. KPMG's 2024 review of 5,800 companies, the largest 100 in each of 58 countries and jurisdictions plus the world's 250 largest by revenue, found nearly four fifths of both groups running a materiality assessment.[2] Reporting is now the normal condition rather than the exception, which moves the interesting question from whether you report to whether anyone inside the organization could repeat what you said.
How to read the answers, and what to change first
Fourteen questions is a short read. Taken in this order it ends in one decision instead of a page of charts.
Read block two before block one
Items 4 to 6 say whether anybody here is able to act. If they are low, nothing you do to items 1 to 3 will show up, because the constraint is instruction and time rather than intent. Fix the cheap one first: item 4 is answered with an email.
Put question 7 next to what leadership believes happened
Question 7 is a list of things that either occurred or did not. Where the answers are thin and the leadership account is thick, you have found a communication problem rather than a programme problem, and it costs nothing to fix. Where both are thin, that is the programme.
Act on question 9, then re-ask in ninety days
Question 9 says where your own people would start. Pick its top answer, pick one barrier named in question 14, and do both. Ninety days later, re-send this survey unedited: a wave-to-wave comparison only holds while the wording sits still.
When this is the wrong survey. If the question is what this place rewards and tolerates in general, that is the workplace culture survey and not this one. If the answers have to be read split by group, the diversity and inclusion survey carries the categories a published standard actually names. If sustainability is one priority among five and the real question is what the plan should be, start with the strategic planning survey template. If what you have is a rule you are obliged to meet rather than a choice you are making, the compliance survey questions ask whether people can follow it.
All fourteen are already built. Open them in the editor, change any wording and send them today, or start from an empty page and create a survey online free. The rest of the set is on the business survey templates by use case page.
Questions people ask about sustainability surveys
Can I reuse GRI, SASB, CDP or B Corp questions in my own survey?
No, not without a licence, and this page reproduces none of them. GRI requires prior written permission and treats unauthorized translation of the Standards as an infringement;[4] CDP requires prior written consent before its materials are used commercially;[5] the SASB Standards are the copyright of the IFRS Foundation, which licenses ongoing use inside a product;[6] B Lab reserves its site contents.[7] The academic option people reach for next, the New Ecological Paradigm scale, is a Wiley journal article with no open licence on its items.[8] Name a framework, link to it, and write your own questions: all fourteen above are yours to copy, edit and translate.
How many questions should a sustainability survey have?
Fourteen here, which takes about four minutes. The long lists on this subject are menus to choose from rather than instruments to send, and a menu of fifty leaves the choosing to you. If fourteen is more than you want, send one block: each of the five is a separate failure with its own fix, which is why they are worth keeping apart rather than averaging into a score.
Should I ask employees, customers or suppliers?
Employees, if you are asking these fourteen. Items 1, 3, 7 and 10 need somebody who can see the inside of the organization as well as the outside, and item 10 in particular is the one that only an employee can answer honestly. Customers get a different instrument about your products and your claims, which is closer to a brand perception survey. Suppliers get a third, and how satisfied they are with working with you is a separate read on the supplier survey template.
Is this a materiality assessment?
Question 9 is the question a materiality assessment asks, and the rest of this survey is not one. A materiality assessment ranks sustainability topics by how much they matter to a defined set of stakeholders and to the business, usually across several groups and with a documented method behind the ranking; nearly four fifths of the G250 and N100 company groups now run one.[2] Use question 9 to see where your own people would start, then run the full exercise against whichever standard you report under.
Do people answer sustainability questions honestly?
They answer attitude questions agreeably and behaviour questions approximately, which is why the balance of this survey is what it is and why nothing here asks you to treat a self-report as a measurement.[3] Put one line at the top saying who will read the answers, and if a manager will, say so.
Methods and sources
What this template is based on
The split between opinion items and behaviour items comes from the 2025 Special Eurobarometer on climate change, which asks both of the same 26,319 people across the 27 EU Member States,[1] and from a meta-analysis of the gap between self-reported and observed environmental behaviour.[3] The reporting and materiality questions come from KPMG's 2024 review of 5,800 companies across 58 countries and jurisdictions.[2]
Question licensing
Nothing here is borrowed. Every reporting framework named on this page reserves its content: GRI,[4] CDP,[5] the SASB Standards,[6] and B Lab.[7] The New Ecological Paradigm scale is a Wiley journal article with no open licence on its items.[8] The Eurobarometer figures are quoted from European Commission pages, whose content is CC BY 4.0 with attribution.[1] All fourteen questions above are yours to copy, edit and translate.
Limits and disclosure
The Eurobarometer figures describe the general public across the European Union rather than employees of one organization, and they are here to show the shape of the answers, not as a benchmark to score against.[1] The self-report meta-analysis reports significant heterogeneity, so the size of the gap varies by study.[3] The KPMG review covers large companies only.[2] No figure on this page comes from SuperSurvey.
SuperSurvey makes the editor this template opens in. The fourteen questions are free to copy, edit and translate with or without it.
References
- European Commission. Special Eurobarometer on climate change, 2025, and the Commission's Citizen support for climate action pages. 26,319 respondents across all 27 EU Member States. climate.ec.europa.eu. Content owned by the EU is licensed CC BY 4.0 under the Commission's legal notice, which permits commercial reuse and adaptation with attribution and an indication of changes.
- KPMG. The move to mandatory reporting: KPMG Survey of Sustainability Reporting 2024, November 2024. 5,800 companies across 58 countries, territories and jurisdictions: the largest 100 companies in each of them (the N100) plus the world's 250 largest by revenue on the 2023 Fortune 500 (the G250), from more than 180,000 items of data. kpmg.com
- Kormos, C. and Gifford, R. "The validity of self-report measures of proenvironmental behavior: A meta-analytic review." Journal of Environmental Psychology 40, 2014, 359-371. 19 measures of association drawn from 15 studies covering 6,260 individuals or households. sciencedirect.com
- Global Reporting Initiative. Copyright and trademark policy: "GRI trademarks and copyrighted materials including the GRI logo can only be used after obtaining prior written permission from GRI", and "Unauthorized translations of the GRI Standards are in violation of GRI's copyright and may incur civil and/or criminal penalties." globalreporting.org
- CDP. Terms and conditions: "You must not, without our prior written consent, use any part of the: (i) materials/content; or (ii) Data on our site ... for commercial purposes without obtaining a license." cdp.net
- IFRS Foundation. Intellectual property, and the SASB Standards pages: the SASB Standards are the copyright of the IFRS Foundation, and "If you are looking to use the Foundation's material on an ongoing basis within a product or service, you will need to be licensed to do so via a licence agreement." ifrs.org
- B Lab. Terms of use for bcorporation.net, which reserve the site and its contents under copyright and permit export of your own reports only for personal or intra-company use. bcorporation.net
- Dunlap, R. E., Van Liere, K. D., Mertig, A. G. and Jones, R. E. "Measuring endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm: A revised NEP scale." Journal of Social Issues 56(3), 2000, 425-442. Published by Wiley; bibliographic record confirmed from Crossref. No open licence is offered for the fifteen items.
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Fourteen questions, about four minutes, free to copy or open in the editor.
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