Open & Honest Communication – company culture

A fundamental need that all employees have is to be able to trust their manager and the company they work for. Trust is core to having open and honest communication which we know to be a necessary element in building a highly engaged workforce. This survey template is targeted on understanding employees perception of open and honest communication in your company culture and is ideal for providing initial areas of focus or to check in with employees following some targeted action in this area.

Customizing your survey

With all of our templates, we’ve designed them to give you clarity around specific areas of engagement or employee experience. Having said that, we also respect that you might want to change things up, which is fine. We encourage you to amend the questions to reflect your company's tone of voice but keep the core of the questions the same.

Food for thought

This survey template focuses on asking employees about their views on the wider company culture and observations outside of their own personal experience. The questions are worded in such a way that employees are describing what they see around them and how they believe ‘things get done around here’.

• Surveying on the wider culture is quite different to asking about personal engagement which is more focused on the employee’s feelings specific to them rather than what they observe around them. The wider views someone has based on what they observe are less likely to change from day to day. Employee engagement, from personal experience, however, is likely to fluctuate depending on what’s happening at your company and how it directly impacts individual employees.
• If you’re more interested in shifting the culture and experiences employees have, use this template. If you’re more interested in how your employees are feeling based on their personal experience, use the ‘Mission, Purpose and Values - Personal Experience’ survey template.
• When setting up your survey, you can choose to make the survey anonymous or open. The benefit of anonymized data is people can feel more comfortable sharing their honest opinion and it’s probable that you’ll see higher take up. However, it means we’re only able to provide you with overall data which is not personally identifiable. If you want anonymity but also want to identify trends in certain groups, we suggest sending the survey as ‘Anonymous’ but adding in relevant questions about location, department etc to the template to get a more detailed breakdown around the results. It is best to add these questions as a drop down list and to make the questions optional as an identifiable group with less than 4 members cannot be classed as anonymous. Keep in mind – if you ask too many identifying questions, you might make it possible to identify individuals. Only ask the questions you really need to!

What to do with the results?

Like with any data, regardless of how many times you slice and dice it, the real value is in the open and honest discussion around the data and what can be done to improve. Action planning sessions are the best way to allow that open and honest discussion to take place. When facilitating any action planning session, make sure that you keep the group focused on what is within their control to change. Too often teams get hung up on external factors to their team because it’s easier than taking responsibility for what’s going on within the team.