With a little effort and a pinch of creativity, you can come up with a survey that focuses on workplace productivity, product development or other aspects important to your business, while letting the team have a little fun and maybe even learn more about their job.

Employee surveys are great for a number of reasons:

• It’s a fast and efficient way to find the answers to questions that are important to you and your business.
• Surveys can work better than one-to-one meetings, especially with employees who are introvert or shy.
• Acting on survey results can help you improve the mood in the office and even increase productivity.
• Surveys can be anonymous, granting you more honest answers to sensitive questions.
• By monitoring the mood of your staff, you can keep them happier and prevent them from quitting, e.g. surveys in Google help to keep the top 5% of employees from leaving and find ways for the bottom 5% to improve.
• Last but not least, surveys can be fun – for you AND the respondents! That is if you craft them smartly and use your imagination.

Here are some ideas to help you come up with a fun survey that will inspire your employees.

#1: Come up with informal survey questions

Any business owner or HR specialist might object that finding out your employees’ feedback is a serious task not to be taken lightly. However, you can be meaningful and still have a little fun!

One strategy is adding quirky questions to official surveys. This will not only lighten things up and keep your respondents’ attention but also help you get to know your colleagues.

Some examples of unconventional and funny questions that will make your employees think in a way they don’t usually think at work:

• If you could pick a superpower, what would you choose?

• Name one dead celebrity you would like to have dinner with!

• What’s the most naughty thing you did as a child?

• If you were an animal, what would you be?

• Imagine you could step in a teleport for a day and go to any place and time in history. Where and when would you travel to?

• What’s the coolest thing about your job?

• What is the best gift you ever received?

• What is the nerdiest thing you do in your free time?

Unusual survey questions or even complete surveys consisting of fun questions are more valuable than you might think.

First, you will learn more about your colleagues’ hobbies and interests.

Second, if you share the survey results, you can improve the mood in your office by helping people find common interests or activities.

Third, you can use these answers for team building events or birthday presents later on.

New hires at Google go through an orientation process designed to make them productive quickly

We at Mailigen conducted a short survey shortly before our last year’s Christmas party.

It had only one question: “Tell an interesting fact about yourself that no other colleague knows.”

During our Christmas party, we read these answers aloud one by one. When other colleagues guessed who was the “owner” of each answer, that person got a present.

#2: Make surveys a fun tradition

Best practice suggests to survey your staff every month or every two weeks. Pros – your employees will get used to giving their feedback and will feel their opinion is valued.

Cons – repetitive surveys can become annoying and produce routine answers.

So, instead of doing long surveys about everything, try slicing it up into several short polls about one or two topics.

Then send these out once or twice a month to “take the pulse” of your team on a regular basis.

This is also a good idea because it is easier to make smaller modifications, according to your survey results, as opposed to implementing major changes in your work environment.

#3: Personality surveys don’t have to be boring!

In fact, it’s easy to make them fun, because people like to assess themselves and are curious to find out their personality type.

If you’ve ever studied psychology or human resources, you might have heard of the Myers-Briggs (MBTI) test, one of the most widely known personality assessment tests.

MBTI test groups people in 16 archetypes, explaining how you perceive and understand the world around you.

Feedback from this kind of test can help you improve productivity, reduce possible conflicts in the workplace and even set up new teams of people whose characters complement each other.

The purpose of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) personality inventory is to make the theory of psychological types described by C. G. Jung understandable and useful in people’s lives

You can also get creative, preparing questions with reference to popular culture, for example, “What character are you from TV series Friends?”

Here’s a list of several fun personality tests that you can ask your employees to fill in. Later on, you can summarize the results and post them in your group forum or Slack channel.

#4: Use friendly and fun language

Remember – you are speaking to your co-workers, so don’t write the survey in a stiff and mechanical way! Instead, write like to a good friend and make your questions easy-to-read and appealing.

For example, instead of asking:

How would you describe your present job satisfaction level, on a scale of 1 to 10?

Try writing a simpler sentence:

On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you at work?

This will sound less official and more sincere. Look at your questions and rewrite each of them more naturally.

Psychology tells us that our personality type has a big impact on our life

Pulse surveys are a great way to measure your team’s overall mood. However, they don’t have to be boring either!

Use your imagination and prepare more original answers than “strongly agree” or “strongly disagree,” make it more fun, and more specific.

For example, instead of writing:

Try offering more original answers:

You can also include a common context or a joke that all your employees recognize.

#5: Go for a colorful design

You can have the funniest questions, but they will still look dull in a gray survey design.

So make sure you add a touch of color or your company’s branding to your questionnaires.

This can be pure fun to play around, especially if the survey making tool you choose has a Drag’n’Drop survey builder.

Mailigen’s survey building tool lets you choose pre-designed templates or fully customize your questionnaires to match brand colors, fonts, and logo.

When the survey is ready, you can send it via email or embed its link anywhere on your website or social media – it will be responsive on all browsers and devices. You can also view detailed reports in a clear and handy way.

However, the design is not restricted to the survey itself. When sending the survey link via email or posting it in your internal communicator, make sure to add an image or a GIF to urge your employees take the survey.  

Also, you can set up a nice Thank you page for those who filled the survey.

#6: Use surveys for brainstorming

There are several ways how to use surveys for brainstorming. For example, you can write an open question asking your employees to give their first association with a new concept or image.

If you’re looking for more original ideas, keep the survey anonymous – this will reduce the fear of criticism and motivate your employees to be braver.

If you are having a live brainstorming session or a discussion about a particular topic, write down all the ideas that come up.

After that create an anonymous survey asking your employees to vote for their favorite idea or solution.

You can either ask for their written opinion or simply create a poll with several options to vote for. This way you will also show your team that you value their views and listen to their ideas.

If you work in a big company, it’s easier to create a different email segment for each team and send separate emails with adjusted surveys.

On the other hand, you can segment people depending on the survey results and use it for future initiatives.

#7: Distributing surveys can be fun too!

It’s not only about the survey’s content – its distribution can play an important role too.

If you send an email, include a funny GIF or a mysterious hint to make them want to fill it.

Let’s imagine that you are planning to introduce a new system in your workday or an innovation in your office.

Why not announce it through a survey and find out how your employees feel about it? This is a sample email inviting to take the “mystery survey”:

However, email is not the only distribution channel for surveys – use your imagination!

Send a mysterious SMS to all colleagues asking to enter a particular site. Stick a post-it with a survey link to their computer or desk. Or hang a poster asking to join a treasure hunt that starts at their desk.

If you’re feeling generous, announce a lottery for those who filled the survey.

For example, ask your staff to give a guess on how much production will be done in a week and the person that guesses closest to the actual amount will receive a reward (another time that it would be beneficial to know their likes and dislikes).

#8: Set up a “Happy and Sad Machine”

If you simply want to know how happy your employees are, test their mood with a “Happy and sad survey”.

Celpax has created a special device for this – employees simply press a green or red button as they leave at the end of the workday.

This machine compiles data about employee satisfaction each week, month, and year giving you a clear overview of the progress and ability to compare the mood in several offices.

You can also set it up in a way that you can see how your other colleagues feel only after you answer yourself.

People usually think of too many questions and slow feedback loops when discussing how to tap in to employee morale

You can also put up an improvised “Happy and Sad Machine” with just a bit of handicraft.

For example, two baskets or jars with red post-its for a Bad day and green post-its for a Good day)

Conclusion

As you write that awesome survey, always keep your goal in mind. Would you like to increase your team’s productivity?

Go for an exciting personality survey and adjust people’s responsibilities according to what they love to do best. Do you feel that the mood in the office could be better?

Set up a fun pulse survey and find out which areas you can improve. Brainstorm with your colleagues, use friendly language, be creative and grow together with your team!

Ieva Baranova is the Content Manager at Mailigen – email marketing software that also offers an online survey builder. Her passion is writing blog articles and other content that shows how exciting can digital marketing be.