40+ Best Employee Retention Survey Questions to Ask

You invest a lot of time, effort, and resources in hiring the best talent for your company, so that they stay and grow with you for as long as possible. After all these efforts, you don’t want to see your star employees leaving one after the other, only to repeat the hiring and onboarding cycle.

So, how can you retain your best employees?

Ask them what they need to feel satisfied and committed to their work goals. By fulfilling realistic initiatives, you can avoid losing your most important assets.

Easier said than done!

This is where employee retention surveys and their insights help companies make informed decisions about valuable initiatives that actually contribute to long-term employee retention.

We've compiled a list of survey questions targeting several areas of employee retention to help you learn how to frame these questions to suit your employees.

What is an Employee Retention Survey?

Retention surveys comprise a well-structured list of questions designed to understand how a company is performing in meeting employee expectations. Employees enter a new job role in a company with a list of expectations based on what they have heard and their hiring experience.

Right from their onboarding, there can be several instances when employees feel their expectations don’t match with ground reality. A series of such instances can gradually lead employees to feel that they cannot stay for long, ultimately causing them to choose to leave the company.

Employee retention surveys help avoid such situations by gathering employees' feedback regularly. Such surveys serve as a channel for employees to express their concerns about how satisfied they are with the company and how it can improve their work experience to match their productivity.

Why Employee Retention Surveys Are Important?

Just as employee engagement surveys measure the factors required to keep employees happy and productive in the workplace, retention surveys are crucial for understanding the factors that may trigger employees to consider leaving their jobs.

The data insights from employee retention surveys help companies develop better policies and initiatives that make employees feel proud to work for the company. Furthermore, such surveys help address the root causes of employee turnover, thereby preventing similar situations in the future.

Retention surveys can be conducted at the team, group, or company-wide level to help identify employee concerns in various categories. Fine-tuning retention survey questions is a significant yet straightforward method for understanding and fulfilling employee expectations to retain them in the long term.

40+ Employee Retention Survey Questions

Listing out questions for retention surveys can be confusing because you may find a lot of questions overlapping with engagement survey questions, onboarding survey questions, and other common questions in pulse surveys.

While the questions may be similar, the intent for using these data and corresponding insights varies for each survey. In the case of retention surveys, the data is more carefully analyzed to detect patterns that can indicate gradual or sudden turnover, and how companies must develop effective retention strategies.

Questions for retention surveys typically fall into the following three categories, allowing employees to spend their time carefully recording their responses. In the following sections, we will explore the significance of questions under each category.

Yes/No Retention Survey Questions

These are simple binary questions where respondents agree or disagree with the questions asked. Such questions are easier to gather statistical insights.

1. Do you find your work fulfilling?
2. Do you get opportunities to learn and upskill when at work?
3. Are you happy with your current work schedule?
4. Are you happy working in this company?
5. Have you received recognition and appreciation for the work you do?
6. Is your manager supporting you when you face challenges at work?
7. Are you satisfied with your current team?
8. Has your team functioned smoothly in your absence?
9. Do you think all teams in the company have a similar attitude towards work?
10. Have you engaged with your team members apart from work?
11. Have your team members valued your feedback?
12. Are you able to spend time pursuing any hobby or recreational activity?
13. Has your recent performance appraisal affected your productivity?
14. Are your managers and leaders efficient in making decisions?

Scaled retention survey questions

These questions require employees to provide a score out of 10. Alternatively, employees rate the quality of any aspect using a 5-answer Likert scale, where the ratings range from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. Here we have questions under both these categories.

5-answer Likert scale Questions

15. This company offers flexible working policies to balance work and personal life.
16. I have been able to grow professionally while upskilling myself.
17. I am part of a diverse and inclusive team.
18. Our leaders stay connected with us through various channels.
19. My managers make themselves available to hear my concerns.
20. The company provides helpful benefits during personal emergencies.
21. My team makes up for my absence during sudden unplanned leaves.
22. Our company policies are formulated and revised based on the input and opinions of all employees.
23. The work here doesn't burn me out even during critical project phases.

“On a scale of 1-10” Questions

24. How would you rate the company’s internal communications?
25. How much has the organization recognized you for your work?
26. How efficiently has your feedback been taken into consideration?
27. How will you rate your team’s working atmosphere?
28. How do you rate your manager’s leadership skills?
29. Rate the usefulness of the benefits offered along with your pay package.
30. Rate the ability to reach out to management team members and rectify any queries and concerns.
31. How would you rate the access to the latest tools and technology provided by the company to ease your work?

Open-ended Retention Survey Questions

A few questions under this category may be included to probe further what employees feel in their words, providing more insights into an area of concern.

32. When was the time you felt proud to work in this company?
33. What is it that our competitors possess that we do not?
34. How would you describe your working experience here to a new hire?
35. Mention some of the concerns that you represented, which your leaders could resolve and initiate.
36. How does your current work role challenge your skill sets?
37. Where do you see yourself professionally in the next 5 years?
38. What do you think about the company’s work culture?
39. Are there any reasons outside of work that are currently affecting your productivity?
40. How satisfied were you with your previous performance appraisal?
41. How did you handle any conflicts or miscommunications within your team?
42. What makes you stay long-term at this company?
43. What would make you consider leaving this company?

Benefits of Conducting an Employee Retention Survey

Retention surveys aim to gain accurate data and analytics to provide insights on the following areas to help companies:

1. Employee satisfaction levels: Retention surveys gather scores or opinions on the level to which employees wish to stay in the company, and collect metrics on overall satisfaction levels across teams, divisions, and the company.
2. Identify retention drivers: Surveys help collect the reasons that compel employees to consider leaving their job or switching companies, such as low pay packages, poor leadership, a bad company culture, a heavy workload, and more.
3. Track improvement over time: Retention surveys help track and measure how companies are performing to meet employee expectations across different periods. Turnover rate, engagement scores, PTO rates, and other metrics can be measured to show employee involvement and their willingness to stay in the company.
4. Encourage continuous feedback and transparency: Like any other survey, employee retention surveys are a channel for employees to share their feedback from time to time on concerns that affect their prolonged stay in the company. The company’s actions to gather employee feedback help establish transparency and foster trust within the organization.

How to Create an Effective Employee Retention Survey

A crucial part of retention surveys, apart from the right questions, involves crafting them in a structured manner for the target employees and timing them so as not to be monotonous and overlapping with other employee feedback surveys.

Follow these steps to create concise retention surveys that your employees will actually complete.

1. Define Your Goal

Retention surveys can cover two or more topics that concern employees.

For instance, if your survey is aimed at a specific team, your questions can focus more on team dynamics, relationships with managers, workload balancing, inclusivity within the team, engagement levels among team members, and similar aspects.

Data from such surveys helps accurately identify vulnerable employees who are not satisfied with their team and are considering switching, often because they are stuck in the wrong team.

Similarly, if your survey is aimed at addressing all employees of the company, you must include questions on company policies, satisfaction with top management decisions, feedback channels, culture, and transparency. Such factors help determine teams or divisions where all or most employees exhibit dissatisfaction.

Therefore, ensure that your survey questions align with the right goals and the company’s objectives from the retention survey.

2. Choose the Right Survey Format

We saw different categories of questions in our list of retention survey questions earlier. Let us understand the significance of each category and how surveys must consist of a good blend of all question categories.

• Scaled questions: Rating on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10 empowers employees to provide a satisfaction score on different parameters. Scores on leadership quality, feedback processing, transparency, engagement initiatives, and other areas provide accurate data on employee satisfaction levels.
• Yes/No questions: Binary choice questions with a yes or no option are highly effective to get clarity on different topics. Such formats are perfect for straightforward questions on retention, like “Will you switch companies anytime soon?”
• Open-ended questions: Like any other survey, retention surveys must include a set of open-ended questions to gather qualitative insights. Such questions can often be used as follow-ups to yes/no questions to gather more analysis on why employees chose a particular option.

Along with a good mix of questions in the above formats across different categories, it is essential to keep them concise without overwhelming employees. A set of 25-35 focused questions is considered ideal for periodic employee retention surveys.

3. Choose the Right Timing

Employees participate in various surveys to provide their feedback, such as different types of engagement surveys, which companies conduct periodically. Similarly, retention surveys can be conducted at various intervals to gauge employees’ satisfaction with working in the company.

Annual retention surveys are comprehensive surveys conducted once a year to gauge employees' feelings throughout the entire work year. This survey can cover a vast range of topics, including participation in company initiatives, work culture, rewards programs, team engagement, and many more.

A shorter or concise version of such surveys can be conducted quarterly to identify areas of concern precisely. Pulse retention surveys can be conducted at shorter frequencies with a short number of questions on concerning topics.

Retention surveys are a more proactive approach that companies use to determine what will motivate employees to stay. In contrast, stay interviews are often conducted after an employee shares their decision to leave a company. Therefore, retention surveys and stay interviews are distinct and serve different purposes.

The ideal times for conducting retention surveys are post-completion of a project phase, after performance reviews, or after a team has undergone leadership or organizational restructuring changes.

4. Ensure Anonymity and Trust

While anonymity can be a choice in feedback surveys, for topics like retention, employees prefer anonymity to give honest feedback. Employees may feel that if they share their areas of concern, it could prompt them to leave, potentially harming their stay in the company.

For these reasons, employee retention surveys should provide employees with the option to record their responses anonymously. Anonymous responses are well-suited for surveys that include questions about company-wide initiatives, relationships with leaders, opinions on leaders’ decisions, and similar topics.

Retention surveys are designed to foster a smooth, long-term relationship between the company and its employees, and this must be clearly communicated to employees before they participate in the survey. Sharing the purpose of retention surveys with employees ensures that they do not skip them or provide responses just for the sake of it.

Additionally, companies should make it a habit to share survey results with all participants after deriving insights and presenting them to company leaders. Trust increases when leaders themselves share the survey results with employees and discuss how things can be improved to meet employee expectations.

How to Use Your Employee Retention Survey Data?

The data you fetch from retention surveys is gold information to help your company identify areas of attention and improvement for retaining your employees. Here are some of the inferences that you can analyze from your employee’s feedback:

• Tracking trends over time: Data such as average employee stay duration, turnover rates, retention rates, and how they change over time and market conditions help you foresee and predict future scenarios.
• Estimate areas of improvement: Survey results pave the way to improve concerning areas, such as transparent communication, valuing employee feedback, refining company policies, giving flexible work provisions, and many others.
• Empower leaders and managers: Survey results help HR professionals and top company leaders empower other managers and company leaders to be proactive about employee concerns and resolve them at the grassroots level.
• Create a roadmap for retention initiatives: Insights from retention surveys help companies prioritize the areas of attention to achieve smooth employee retention. Leaders and HR professionals can create a timeline for implementing a new set of initiatives and the deadlines for achieving the desired retention rates.

There are several retention software platforms that can help you create and implement retention strategies that best suit your company’s current retention challenges.

Revaluate180 Can Help You Improve Employee Retention

Conducting and interpreting employee retention survey results is a challenging task that requires professional expertise, as these insights form the basis for creating robust retention initiatives and preventing future turnover. Modern AI solutions offer reliable support by delivering data-driven insights that enable accurate analysis and actionable retention strategies.

Revaluate180 is a data-driven consulting service that uses predictive analytics to transform data into actionable insights. These insights provide essential information, including identification of turnover risks, team-level sentiment analysis, employee engagement levels, and productivity trends throughout an employee’s lifecycle.

Our data-powered model links retention survey data and maps them with leadership, culture, and performance insights in the company’s current workplace landscape. We also provide custom retention strategies through the Maximize, Develop & Retain process. This aims to hire the right person for the right job and ensure they grow consistently in professional and personal aspects.

Our insights help businesses act on data, and not just collect it.

Final Thoughts

Hiring the right employees and retaining them for the long term is definitely possible. All it requires is extra vigilance and a systematic approach by the company in every stage of an employee’s lifecycle.

Employee retention surveys conducted at various stages of an employee’s tenure with the company are an effective way to gauge their satisfaction with working for the organization. Asking the right mix of questions is more crucial for pinpointing areas of concern that act as retention barriers.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you need assistance in crafting your retention surveys or require help gathering insights.