4 examples of feedback questions to ask in your employee check-ins

At intelliHR, we passionately believe helping you capture great feedback, respond to it, and easily gain insights, is central to how we add value to your organization. At the core of this is asking the right feedback questions.

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We recommend a light and regular feedback process, that not only reduces the manager’s burden, but actually delivers regular human interactions across all levels of your teams. Not only the questions you ask during regular feedback, but also how you extract value from the responses, is critical to getting the maximum results.

There are a plethora of different feedback questions you could be asking your people if you use a continuous feedback cycle, but today we’re focusing on the absolute essentials that we believe every business should be asking in regular employee check-ins.

These are the actual questions we include in our own check-ins at intelliHR and recommend as a starting point for all of our customers!

Employee feedback questions:

  1. Rate your happiness in your role

  2. How are you progressing?

  3. Share your achievements

  4. How can we help you?

Examples of feedback questions to ask in employee check-ins

1. Rate your happiness in your role

Why ask it If you have a system in place with employee satisfaction or happiness analytics, asking this feedback question during employee check-ins allows you to aggregate data on employee happiness across the business and get an insight into how people are feeling at work. You can also then identify changes in trends and identify teams which may require additional support or congratulations.

Employee Happiness and sentiment analysis is an ideal indicator of the health of company culture. Find out more about sentiment analysis and HR software at intelliHR. How to ask it This feedback question should be accompanied by a 1-10 rating scale where your people can rate how they’re feeling at work (1 being the worst, 10 being the best).

The benefit of allowing people to choose from a set of numbers is that it’s simpler to get a measurable and absolute answer about their engagement. We also support this with the option for team members to provide some additional context to their engagement rating though a free text field below. This is important as it helps the manager understand and prepare for the catch up so they are responding appropriately. By responding appropriately, managers can build trust, and this doesn’t just mean just agreeing with the feedback. This will often involve spending some time discussing how their role contributes to strategy and why it has to be the way it is. This transparency helps the team member understand their alignment to the organizational goals and mission, ultimately driving an improved organizational culture.

2. How are you progressing?

Why ask it This survey question gives people an opportunity to leave more detailed feedback about how they feel they are growing at work and may reveal if people are feeling behind or wanting more out of their role.

This is also an opportunity to uncover roadblocks that may be inhibiting staff from reaching their goals. A key responsibility for managers is help to remove roadblocks. Sometimes the employee has to do it themselves, but often it is about coaching the team member about how they can approach things to work around these challenges, and this is often best achieved through taking a collaborative approach.

How to ask it This feedback question should be offered with a free text field for staff to enter their own qualitative answers. This gives them the flexibility to talk about anything they need to. This provides the manager with a great basis to approach the coaching point.

To get the best quality responses, you may like to include some prompt text like “Are you satisfied with your growth? Is there anything blocking you from achieving your goals?” or similar.

3. Share your achievements

Why ask it This feedback question provides staff with an opportunity to mention something they’re proud of accomplishing at work, and could help managers pick up on cause for recognition that may otherwise go unnoticed. It also neatly creates a reward by being able to demonstrate regular outcomes which can be shared. This progressive outcome focus helps build discipline and momentum toward better goals progress.

On top of this, the question prompts your people to reflect on how they’ve been performing and think about if they are satisfied with that or if they perhaps need some coaching or additional resources to improve.

achievements listed in employee check in - intelliHR

View an aggregated list of responses to feedback questions over time in intelliHR’s performance summary reports.

How to ask it This should include a free text field for employees to enter as many achievements as they would like. Summarising this in a performance summary report covering a specific time period will help team members and leaders recognise each individual’s performance over time, which is very valuable manager support for team review and coaching opportunities.

Some staff may be hesitant to be seen as bragging or feel they haven’t achieved anything significant enough to mention. Let them know this can be something as simple as “I’ve been pushing myself to contribute in meetings more” or “I’ve made the time to do some professional development and it’s really helped me improve the quality of my work.”

4. How can we help you?

Why to ask it This is one of the most critical questions of all to be asking in regular employee check-ins. It’s broad and for good reason, because there could be a whole range of reasons someone might need to be able to do their best work.

Often we see this being used as an area where team members can ask for manager guidance or training to resolve a skills gap that is preventing them from moving forward. Being able to support team members with training to help them to more effectively progress toward their goals develops a strong linkage between learning and performance outcomes. Given the value of this we recommend using this question to inform your training needs analysis.

It could be as simple as upgrading or expanding their resources, like finding someone more desk space or a second monitor. It might be that an employee is experiencing a conflict with a colleague but doesn’t know how to handle the situation. It may be that your top performer is feeling unfulfilled and wants to take on more responsibility.

How to ask it This question should also come with a free text field for people to mention anything that they need support in.

To get great quality answers, you could also include some prompt text here like

  • Do you need any extra equipment?

  • Are there any areas you’d like extra coaching?

  • What we can we do to help you do your best work?

It’s important for staff to know they are welcome to ask for anything they need and this won’t be looked upon negatively. Suggesting some possible areas for assistance helps to alleviate that concern and get more honest answers.

Wondering how you could implement questions like these in your continuous feedback process and let your people respond online wherever they are? We’d love to show you how our customers are doing it with a free demo.

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