Employee Benefits – Survey Template

Job perks in your company.

How to find out which job benefits are most important to employees?

Benefit satisfaction

Are you tired of all this “job perk spam” your HR email address gets each day? Job perks have become a must have for any company that wants to be competitive and attract the best employees. Are you absolutely sure that the benefits your employees get are exactly what they want? Or maybe you are wasting some money each time you pay an invoice for gym membership or unlimited e-book subscription?

There is only one way to find out – make an employee benefits survey!

When to consider a benefit satisfaction survey?

• When you want to know if your employees are happy with their benefits package
• When you want to design a new package which will be tailored to their needs
• When you want to make sure that a job perk budget is well spent

Basic job perks survey questions you should ask your employees:

• Are you satisfied with your employer’s job perks? (this question can also check if employee knows about them)
• What kind of benefits would you like to get?

What else could be important for your employee job perks feedback?

• Are employees open to co-finance their job perks
• Would they rather have benefits and perks than a salary increase?
• If they believe that their company’s benefit plan is better or worse than that of the competition?
• Which kind of perks would be the most interesting for them (this question is especially useful when benefit plan is in design phase),
• Do they know the value of non-financial benefits in total compensation package? (Research shows that 74% of employees are not informed about the financial value of their benefits.)

It is also important to ask employees open-ended survey questions, which can provide additional opinion not included in the survey (e.g. employee could be happy abouthaving access to a gym, but not happy that they need to cover 50% of the gym membership cost. Without an open-ended question, this problem could remain undiagnosed.

How to create an employee benefits survey? Tips&Tricks

Survey question types – open-ended or multiple choice/matrix table?

Open questions require employees to invent perks they wish to have. It is a risky business as some employees don’t really know what they could possibly expect. Multiple choice questions limit employees answers. For this type of questions, it is important to consider including an “other” category as there may be other ideas your employees have.

Don’t offer perks which your company would not provide

By asking employees’ opinion about perks, you signal that this particular perk could be included in compensation package. In order not to disappoint employees, don’t include perks which the company board is most likely to refuse.

Anticipating future steps

Before collecting data prepare for its analysis. How do you want to use the data? What kind of hypothesis are you creating?

For example, if in the company’s employees have different marital/family status, it may be important to collect data for each group individually, to find the best perks to suits each group.

Anonymous vs. open Benefit Survey?

Which way will be better to collect survey responses? Typically, anonymous surveys are more likely to be filled in by employees, however making this particular type of survey disclose may not be a bad idea. Revealing names of the respondents to the data administrator, HR department can:

• Precisely react to responses of each employee to tailor their job perks to their personal needs
• Increase probability of filling in entire survey (employee knows that it will be visible if they gave up the survey
• Eliminate the need for adding respondent’s details. The pool can be shorter.

How often should Employee Benefits survey be conducted?

• Once a year – a month or two before benefit budget planning for the next year. Good strategy if the benefit budget needs to be planned ahead or when employee retention is low.
• Every two years in employee life cycle – to revise their job perks needs.

Employee Benefits Survey data – next steps to take

First, it is important to present the results and conclusions – it shows that you value your employees’ feedback. It can be done by publishing an article on the intranet or during a meeting. Second, take action to address issues and concerns.

Employee Benefits Survey can also be used as an employer branding tool. By creating a press release about the survey and its results, you can share knowledge about available compensation packages and job perks and underline that your company actually listens to its employees.

tomHRM Surveys contains a ready-to-deploy Employee Benefits Survey Template. You will also find it in our free tomHRM demo. Try it now!

*According to Geralt Bradley, giving financial values to non-cashable benefits is dangerous and can hide the true nature and value of each benefit (Benefit Realisation Management, chapter 27, Gerald Bradley).