20 Employee Survey Questions to Help Define Your Company Values

When your employees align and understand your core values, they’re more likely to feel supported and engaged. Here are 20 employee engagement survey questions to help you understand what your employees think about your company's core values.

With the ever-changing workplace, it's no surprise that employees and job seekers are placing more importance on mission and company values in today's work environment. To be successful at recruiting and attracting top talent, every business must have a defined set of authentic core values.

In a recent Cooleaf webinar on bringing core values to life, Tanya Fish, Strategy Advisor at ITA Group, said it best: “Your core values can’t just be something you post on a piece of paper or on your website. They need to be something that you help people to understand.”

But how do you help your team members understand your core values? And how do you measure if the people within your company resonate with your core values?

The easiest way to find out whether employees are aligned with your core values is by sending recurring employee engagement surveys, listening to employee feedback, and creating an action plan.

By sending thoughtful surveys to your people, you’ll be able to find out if your core values are defined and in the voice of your employees.

Why are core values important?

According to research done by Hays, 47% of employees opt to leave their jobs because of company culture. Core values are the backbone that helps support your company's culture.

When your company's values don't resonate with employees, employees feel frustrated or disconnected.

On the other hand, when your employees align and understand your core values, they're more likely to feel supported to stay, increasing retention rates and engagement, which impacts business outcomes. Core values need to be lived out and felt throughout the organization to ensure alignment and overall job satisfaction.

Core values are also an essential tool in creating an employee experience that's positive, supportive, and motivating.

With Cooleaf, you can create core value challenges to regularly encourage employees to reflect on core values and highlight core value examples.

See if Cooleaf is the right fit for your team

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Why you need to regularly re-examine your core values

Core values often change over time as companies grow and evolve. Or at least they should. As your core values shift and grow, you want to ensure that your teams remain in alignment with them.

By regularly re-examining and re-affirming your team’s core values, you keep your employees engaged and help them understand how to embody those characteristics in their teamwork and individual responsibilities.

Here are 20 questions to add to your next employee engagement survey to help you gauge if your company values are still relevant today and if any necessary changes should be made to them.

1. What initially drew you to our organization?

2. What makes you want to stay at our organization?

While it's important to understand what attracts talent to your organization, it's equally important to pinpoint why people stay. Is it the people, the culture, or maybe the perks? Finding out will help you determine what's retaining your top talent – and give you valuable insights into what motivates your people.

3. What's the superpower of our company?

4. On a scale of 1-5, how well does this company authentically demonstrate its core values?

5. What do you think is missing from your company's core values?

Whenever you examine your employee experience, it's important to investigate factors that might be holding your people back. By allowing your employees to offer constructive feedback on what’s missing, you'll learn what your team needs to focus on in the future. Is it an emphasis on learning and innovation? Maybe you can offer career development opportunities. Is it a lack of work-life balance? Maybe you need to look into employee well-being initiatives.

By keeping this question open-ended, you'll also be able to see what words and phrases employees use when speaking openly about your culture.

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Culture survey questions

You can measure success by multiple metrics. For instance, making record profits and ensuring your employees love coming to work are not mutually exclusive goals. For a qualitative view of success that goes beyond the balance sheet and refocuses on your culture, ask your employees:

6. What does success mean in our organization?

This is a great question that ties back to the employee’s individual contribution. According to a recent Harvard Business Review study, 89% leaders agree that a sense of purpose is important when it comes to productivity and employee morale. Understanding how your people view success can help you develop core values and initiatives to nurture it.

7. What is the definition of awesome here?

Whether it's your laser focus on customer happiness or super speed when resolving tech issues, see how your team understands success. Gather feedback about how employees interpret not just wins but good work within their departments or unique roles. This question helps you see what's important to respondents.

8. How do you think our company celebrates employee success?

Employee culture

Building and managing a strong organizational culture helps a company achieve its business goals. A healthy, strong culture can lead to higher productivity, sales, and a competitive market presence. Happy employees are 12% more productive, and highly engaged workplaces see a 10% increase in customer ratings with a 20% increase in sales.

These statistics are supported by the fact that companies with more engaged workers grew revenue 2.5 times as much as companies with less involved workers over a period of seven years. About 90% of employees within a winning company culture are confident in their company’s leadership team.

9. On a scale of 1-10, how fulfilled are you? Why?

This question will help you discover how your employees feel at work and what motivates your people. Are they strongly aligned with your mission? Or are they just there for the paycheck? We spend so much time at work and instilling that sense of purpose starts with understanding your people and how you can make your core values shine.

10. Which activities bring you satisfaction regardless of monetary rewards or recognition?

11. What was the last idea/opinion you shared in your team meeting or with a stakeholder and how was it received?

This question will give you an idea of employee morale and show you how your team members are embracing core values as they work together.

Team culture

When team members cooperate, share experiences and knowledge, support, and care for one another, good team culture is born. People are excited to collaborate and do extraordinary things at work when they believe that the company’s core values reinforce this sentiment.

12. Describe your team in three characteristics.

This open-ended question will allow you to see if your company’s mission or core values are truly embodied by employees. You can group characteristics to get a sense of how people are feeling overall. Reflect on whether these characteristics align with your core values today? Or does this show an opportunity for change?

13. How does your team manage goals and responsibilities?

14. What are three things you like and dislike about teamwork inside the organization?

Conflicts and failures culture

A culture of failure is a set of shared values, goals, and practices that encourages learning through experimentation. Instead of fearing or punishing failures, a company that believes in failure-as-an-option (FaaO) recognizes that failure and team conflict is part of the learning process. Instead teams can view it as an unsuccessful experiment that provides valuable feedback that can be used to achieve success. Failure and conflict resolution must have a place in your core values in order to reinforce that your organization cares about opportunities to grow and learn as a team.

15. How are failures addressed by your team and organization as a whole?

This is such an important question that can help you truly see how your people are feeling. Everything’s always positive when goals are met or wins are insight. Yet truly understanding your team is seeing how they respond when times are tough and stress is high. How are core values interpreted here? Are they ignored? Or are they a guide through down seasons?

16. What is the decision-making process when there’s a disagreement?

‍Company culture

Culture is the set of behaviors and practices that evolve from the values and mission of the company. It reflects the way the leaders and employees act even when no one is watching. When leaders and employees act in alignment with core values, it is a reliable indicator of a good culture.

17. How do you think our culture differs from other company’s work cultures?

18. Would you recommend working for our company to another person? Why?

This is such a great question, especially for an eNPS survey. Happier team members will recommend friends, past coworkers, and quality talent to join your team if they're engaged in your team culture. They're also more likely to want to include their circle into their team if they enjoy where they work.

19. How would you describe our workplace culture to people outside the company?

This question will help you measure the effectiveness of your current company's core values. Are your people embodying your core values? Did they mention them? Consider keeping this an open-ended question to get honest feedback.

And most importantly...

Feedback isn’t a comfortable thing to give or receive, especially when it’s unsolicited. That’s why the most valuable feedback is the kind you ask for. It can reveal what you’re currently doing well as an organization and which behaviors you can work on to improve. Asking this question can also serve as a model and encourage your people to feel comfortable asking for their own feedback.

20. What should we do better?

Use an open-ended question here to gather suggestions from your people on the ground. It creates a discussion and engages your employees, so they're invested in your team's success.

How to use these questions to define your values

People want to work for companies with strong, clearly defined values, especially in today's macro-environment of workplace changes and stressors.

If you don't have defined core values, it's hard for employees to understand what they mean and resonate with them. It also makes it hard for new employees when they’re onboarding to fit in with the corporate culture or understand why things get done a certain way.

Use these questions in your next pulse survey with a goal to:

• Re-examine or better define your core values
• Make necessary changes within the organizational culture to improve connection and alignment to values and mission
• Engage your employees
• Better workplace culture
• Improve employee satisfaction

In an ideal world, most of us want more from our jobs than just a paycheck. We want things like work satisfaction, a connection to our coworkers and the opportunity to make a difference.

How do we engage teams authentically?

For many companies, it comes down to core values.

Core values aren’t just words on a paper. They give your employees a reason for what they do—and your customers a reason to cheer for you. They’re a guide on how to stay aligned on goals and how to conduct business.

Today, 80% of the Fortune 100 tout their values publicly, and companies with a high sense of purpose outperform others by 400%.

Feeling aligned with a company’s values, mission and philosophy is one of the top reasons employees love where they work, and the primary reason that consumers feel they have a relationship with brands. Companies keep these top of mind as a guide on how to conduct business, how to make decisions, and how to show up at work.

Showing your people how your leadership and others use core values in their everyday is a great way to reinforce their meaning. That can be through public recognitions tied back to certain actions that tie back to a value. It can also be through employee engagement programming centered on one core value each quarter. It can also be with small reminders at the top of a meeting about why your business decided to go with XYZ.

If you want to make sure that your company is on the right track, it's important to know how your employees feel about your core values, meaning you have to ask the right questions. And the only way to truly know is to ask them directly. When you re-define them, it's important to use a tool like Cooleaf to get feedback from your team so that they have a voice in what those values should look like moving forward.

Downloadable Huddle Guide

Download our Huddle Guide PDF by filling out the form below. You'll get a printable huddle guide resource to assist in discussions around the organization’s mission, vision, and values with your teams.

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If you want to make sure that your company is on the right track, it's important to know how your employees feel about your core values. When you re-assess or re-definethem, it's important to use a tool like Cooleaf to get feedback from your team so that they have a voice in what those values should look like moving forward.

If you're ready to take action on employee engagement and employee recognition with data-driven insights, book a Cooleaf Demo today!

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