Leadership & Management – personal experience

Sometimes your leaders and managers are fantastic at managing up but what your employees experience down the line can be different. Now that you’ve identified the core area of focus to be on leadership and management, this survey template includes questions which provide a deeper insight into how your employees think and feel towards it, helping to give you a greater focus on the areas to invest in.

Customizing your survey

This template is a little longer than the others as it differentiates between leaders and managers. If you’re more interested in perceptions of leadership vs perceptions of your managers, you can customize the survey to include only those questions that are relevant. 

Food for thought

• Depending on your company, it may be clear to your employees what you mean when you say ‘Leadership’ and what you mean when you say ‘Management’, other times it might need further clarification. Consider sending some communication before the survey to tell your employees why you’re running the survey, when to expect it, provide clarity around the terms ‘Leadership’ and ‘Management’ as well as what employees can expect next. This will provide better response rates as employees will feel more educated and involved in the process. 
• This survey template focuses on employees personal experience. The questions are worded in such a way that employees are describing how they feel within themselves, representing their own individual levels of engagement.
• This survey is quite distinct to the ‘Company Culture’ template on the same topic which is more focused on the employee’s wider views and their observation outside of their own experience within their working environment. These 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 experience employees have, use the Leadership & Management - Company Culture’ survey template. If you’re more interested in how your employees are feeling based on their personal experience, use this 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?

Leaders and managers have the greatest potential to influence the engagement of the broader employee group. Both leaders and managers are required to manifest a sense of trust, hope, stability, and compassion throughout their teams. Given the influence managers and leaders have over their teams, the results will be instrumental in driving positive change. It can be the case that some individuals will use this platform to vent about specific managers. Given the sensitivity of the data collected, it’s important to carefully consider how you will deliver the information to managers and/ or leaders. We recommend communicating with a focus on the positive changes that can be made and how you as the employer will support in this process.