27 Survey Questions To Ask Employees About Management

Employees are quite familiar with the concept of performance reviews, as well as 360 reviews, which gather feedback from both colleagues and managers. However, employees may feel a little nervous when it comes to answering questions about managerial performance. In fact, the performance review cycle is often overlooked as an important strategic element when it comes to leadership development for managers and talent retention.

But what makes a good manager? Both leaders and employees find themselves thinking about this question when it’s time to conduct reviews. When it comes to management, the following categories are all important considerations that employees must evaluate:

• Communication
• Leadership
• Performance management
• Conflict management
• Workload management
• Hiring and training
• Performance feedback
• Collaborative work

Below, we’ll carefully consider each topic and also outline 27 of the most powerful questions to ask employees about their manager’s performance.

Communication

According to Ohio State University, managers spend up to 80% of their time communicating during the workday. It’s a manager’s job to be curious, from communicating and interpreting internal information to asking the right questions to foster powerful working relationships between a direct hire and their manager. Consider communication as the compass for all parties to successfully navigate their roles and contributions to the team.

Effective communication should be a two-way street between the manager and employee. The following questions can be included in an employee survey to help assess the quality of open communication between the two roles.

How well does your manager communicate clearly and effectively?

From delegating tasks to soliciting input to providing feedback, how a manager makes use of internal communication greatly impacts an employee’s ability to do their job and how well the business serves its clients. One-on-one conversations are the best way to relay sensitive information and discuss nuanced topics that may require active listening and empathy, such as an employee review. Chat tools, like Slack, are a great way to collaborate, quickly link resources, and concisely delegate tasks or ask for help. Is the manager making the best use of these resources in a way that allows the employee to effectively do their job?

How well does your manager actively listen to your concerns and feedback?

It’s part of a manager’s job to regularly meet with their direct reports and ensure that they’re heard and understood. When a manager actively listens to the employee’s feedback, they’re fully present in the conversation and ensure they understand a situation from the employee’s perspective.

However, the manager should consider the employee’s concerns seriously and take action, whether communicating suggestions to leadership or implementing a new strategy. For example, an employee may make a process improvement suggestion to address a decline in their performance, or they may have an idea that a project could take for a key client account.

How well does your manager provide constructive feedback that helps you improve your performance?

How often does the employee receive feedback from their manager, and is it enough? Many employees receive feedback as a part of their annual review but wish for more day-to-day interaction with their manager.Not receiving regular constructive and actionable feedback to make improvements can create roadblocks in their role. Constructive feedback is neither overly positive nor negative, but it should be provided in an empathetic way that empowers the employee to take initiative.

Everyone takes feedback differently, and that’s important for a manager to consider. For example, a highly sensitive person (HSP) is often applauded for their thoughtfulness and conscientiousness but can take feedback that leans more “negative” as a form of rejection. Understandably, this doesn’t feel empowering, and there’s no room for conversation about actionable steps to take for improvement. If managers note this in advance, they can work with the employee in a more honest, trusting, and strategic way that also shows an employee that they are understood and valued by management.

How well does your manager communicate changes in goals or expectations clearly and in a timely manner?

Changes in goals and expectations that sneak up on employees or are mentioned in an offhand way can lead to oversight and unmet milestones. How can the employee meet a goal when the goalpost keeps changing locations? This situation can feel frustrating, almost as if the employee is being set up for failure, which is never the intention.

Clearly communicated changes in goals and expectations should leave room for conversation that helps an employee strategize. Can the worker identify moments when earlier notification would have improved productivity? These are key highlights for employees to share with management that empowers the team to do their best work.

Related: Best Practices for Communication With Your Virtual Team

Leadership

Leadership is one of the most important foundations for organizational success. The management team sets the tone and steers the ship when it comes to achieving the company’s mission. An effective leader outlines clear expectations, offers guidance, empowers employees, and builds the team. Employee feedback can help ensure that the management team is both clear and positive in their performance, so consider including the following in a leadership survey questionnaire for employees.

How well does your manager lead by example and set clear expectations?

Every company has specific values that align with the company mission and assist in achieving its objectives. Some of those values may include corporate buzzwords like “radical honesty,” but what does that mean? Does management exemplify these values and demonstrate them?

Each employee was carefully selected as a unique contributor to the team, and managers should set clear guidelines that coach and empower employees to come into their own, that don’t overwhelm or confuse them.

How well does your manager provide guidance and support when needed?

Availability means more than telling an employee “You’ve got this” or vaguely gesturing to a network of resources. Does it feel safe for the employee to approach their manager for support, for instance, when they need to prioritize tasks or take a personal day off? What if an employee needs additional coaching or just a few words of encouragement?

Some managers are more hands-off than others, but there should be a reasonable balance that allows employees to receive the guidance needed to excel while motivating them to take ownership of a task. “Failure” is only a step taken toward success, and a supportive manager is also an effective member of the team, not only a decision-maker.

How well does your manager recognize and acknowledge your contributions and achievements?

Recognition in the workplace at the individual level is important for career growth and professional improvement. Celebrating wins, no matter how large or small, helps employees build confidence in their abilities and grow their career. Recognition can look like invitations to a company dinner or retreat, but it can also be as simple as a handwritten thank-you note or as powerful as a bonus or recommendation for a promotion. Most importantly, recognition is specific and unique to each individual.

Good employers know that motivation is key to employee success—the Harvard Business Review notes that 63% of employees who are recognized are more likely to stay with their employer than quickly move on to another company.

How well does your manager promote a positive work environment and team or company culture?

Feeling good about coming into work every day matters when it comes to employee well-being and productivity. Does management build team morale effectively? How do employees experience their team’s culture? Good managers foster a positive and open team culture, whether that’s through the odd meme sent on Slack or open leadership team meetings. Open lines of communication, solid onboarding, continued training, and career development opportunities are a few good signs employees are looking for in this category.

Related: How to Be a More Adaptable Leader

Performance management

Performance management is a 360-degree circle, though it may not look like it at first. The employee’s part of that is following through on performing their job duties and making improvements to their performance as required. Leadership’s part in performance management entails providing clear expectations, coaching, and career development that align individual contribution with the company’s mission, goals, and values. Everyone has a part to play, so employee feedback is key to ensuring the circle of success is complete. Consider the following performance management survey questions to ask employees below.

How well does your manager provide clear expectations and goals?

Does the employee feel confident and competent when it comes to the job they were hired for, including the ins and outs of their job duties? Have the employee’s duties changed over time? An employee’s performance expectations should be clearly outlined as to how their assigned duties are to be executed, in realistic and attainable ways. The desired end goal should be clear to both the employee and manager. Any aspect that’s unclear, especially in how it is communicated to the employee, can lead to roadblocks.

Some managers urge employees to “Just ask questions.” However, expectations may be missing or so unclear that employers don’t even know what questions to ask—there’s no clear context for the employee to work from.

How well does your manager provide regular feedback and coaching to help you improve your performance?

A regular exchange of feedback between manager and employee not only helps improve performance but can also promote a professional bond where trust is established. Active listening and actionable guidance are the most important jobs of being a good manager. Regular feedback should not be conducted in a vacuum nor feel like a manager is going through the motions in one-on-one meetings and annual reviews. It also shouldn’t feel like an employee is being put on trial—constructive feedback and coaching should feel empowering.

How well does your manager provide opportunities for growth and development?

Opportunities for employee growth and development should be available for junior and senior level employees alike. An employee may not want to climb the corporate ladder as a leader, but instead, they may want to expand their skill set. Whatever their career goals are, the manager should play an active role in the employee’s growth by offering opportunities such as tuition reimbursement or time off to attend a professional conference. Other growth opportunities may be as simple as cross-training in a different department or helping the employee reprioritize tasks to take on an exciting proposal they previously pitched.

How well does your manager recognize and reward outstanding performance?

Employees who go above and beyond for their employer may risk burning out, especially when they’re not rewarded for their outstanding performance. A handwritten note of thanks is a wonderful keepsake to have on hand when feeling discouraged. However, words alone may not be enough to keep high-performing employees. A good manager recognizes and rewards outstanding performance by utilizing all the options available within the organization, such as opening opportunities for career development, giving more paid time off, offering stock options in the company, and raising pay and titles at the right time.

Related: 10 Tips for Motivating Your Employees

Conflict management

Workplace drama can quickly make company culture feel toxic and dramatically increase employee turnover. From power struggles to office gossip, how well management handles conflict directly impacts the team, its productivity, and employee well-being. Here are a few manager feedback survey examples that leadership can ask employees about.

How well does your manager effectively resolve conflicts among team members?

Conflicts among team members can quickly make a work environment unpleasant, and if left unchecked, toxic to the well-being of everyone involved. The manager should address small issues before they become bigger ones, affecting team morale and productivity. Effectively resolved conflicts are handled with empathy and with personalized solutions that treat all team members fairly.

How well does your manager listen to all sides before making a decision?

Is the case open and shut once an employee presents their concerns to their manager? Fairness involves reserving judgment and hearing all sides before coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Understanding the nuances allows management to gain a greater and deeper perspective of the issue at hand. If an employee feels unheard or unseen, they’ve already checked out and trust can be hard to rebuild.

Encourage employees to raise their concerns during the managerial review process. An effective manager ensures each side of the story is heard and that issues are resolved for employee satisfaction and safety.

How well does your manager provide a safe and respectful environment for team members to voice their opinions?

A sign of a healthy work culture is one where team members feel safe and welcome to express their concerns openly. An employee should feel comfortable approaching their manager with any personal or professional concerns that impact their role. If an employee is facing unwelcome advances from a client, for example, they should be able to approach their manager for a potential reassignment and escalation of the concern to leadership. The employee should also feel safe to bring up topics where they’d like to see more growth, such as disability accommodations and improved diversity and inclusion policies.

Related: 6 Conflict Resolution Tips to Resolve Issues Within Your Team

Workload management

Information overload can lead to an unmanageable workload for employees. At worst, this can look like complicated processes and unconsolidated resources that make doing tasks inefficient and inconvenient. At best, this looks like a manager effectively delegating tasks so that each employee has a manageable workload that is challenging without being overwhelming. Which scenario does leadership's responsibility in workload management fall under, or is it somewhere between?

How well does your manager ensure that team members have a manageable workload?

Estimating the work that goes into tasks and setting achievable deadlines is a team effort. Uneven distribution of work can lead to one employee being overwhelmed with work while another is searching for tasks to do, reducing employee engagement. Employee burnout is less of a risk when the scope of a project is broken down into a manageable and fair workload for all.

Does the employee feel burned out? A fair work-life balance is intrinsic to their well-being and ability to contribute. Does the employee feel safe speaking up when they may have overestimated their current capacity? Perhaps additional check-ins with their manager could help mitigate some of these concerns.

How well does your manager effectively delegate tasks to team members?

Delegating tasks helps get work done more efficiently and by those who are best at what they do. Sometimes, an employee may be asked to do work that’s a bit off the cuff or may fall outside their job description. While additional tasks should challenge the employee, they shouldn’t fall completely outside the scope of what the employee was hired to do. No one should feel like they’re working two jobs at once.

Is the manager identifying the right person for the task, or does an employee need more training to effectively manage their new workload? If multiple members on the team express concerns about their workload, management may not be effectively delegating tasks. The scope, expectations, processes, resources, and deadlines are all details that should be ironed out, which every employee should feel confident about navigating even if it takes them a little more time.

How well does your manager prioritize tasks effectively?

Unrealistic expectations of resources, including people, is a challenge that many organizations face. Sometimes, the complexity of a task is unpredictable until an employee is actually doing the thing. For an employee in this scenario, it can feel like a lack of competency on their part—now, add in the pressure of meeting high-stakes deadlines.

Can tasks be broken down into smaller parts, or does the employee feel like they’re jumping to point E when point C needs a little more planning? Maybe all that’s needed is a new process or a check-in about reprioritizing tasks, and employee feedback is intrinsic to setting that into motion.

When a manager shifts priorities on a frequent basis, it can lead to an overworked employee who may take a dip in the quality of their work personally—when the employee is just trying to do their best with what they’re given. All that’s needed, perhaps, is a closer look at the manager’s process. How is the manager making use of capacity planning, project  management, time management, and other tools to establish and communicate a clear path forward? Do their methods allow for effective reprioritization? Will the employee’s previous contributions, now abandoned, still have value in the eyes of management?

Related: How to Delegate

Hiring and training

It can take at least six months before a new hire feels comfortable in their role and working with their team. In that time, the employee is also an important resource for measuring the effectiveness of onboarding and the need for potential onboarding redesign. The following questions can help managers understand how employees experience their recruitment and onboarding, and it can also help leadership determine how well they’re leveraging different types of talent to build a unique team.

How well does your manager effectively identify and attract top talent?

Is the employee’s team a solid mix of new and experienced professionals? What incentives are offered, and were these incentives the right match for the employee ultimately? Attracting top talent can range from sourcing recent college graduates who interned with Fortune 500 companies to identifying professionals with decades of transferable experience. Talent doesn’t fit into a neat box, and the right fit for a company and a new hire is intrinsic. How well has the company done?

How well does your manager provide adequate onboarding and training for new employees?

Startups and established companies alike experience growth spurts, which can alter the processes involved in onboarding and training drastically. If the company is constantly changing its mission and lingo to fit into what’s trending, this may not be a sustainable strategy for hiring and retaining new employees.

Ideally, the company is actively involved in applying feedback received from new hires and senior employees to continually update and improve the onboarding process. That means updating resources to reflect current best practices. It also includes having a real person to contact when the automated technology setup for a new hire’s home office runs into a few hiccups because the “Getting Started” guide wasn’t as clear as it should have been.

How well does your manager provide opportunities for ongoing learning and professional development?

Continuous learning allows employees to gain new skills and grow their knowledge—with the added boost of employee engagement. Managers should coach employees regarding available opportunities to expand their skill sets rather than lightly mention that they should “always be learning” as an expectation. Do employees have freedom to shadow senior employees or schedule informational interviews? Can employees take advantage of stipends or other sponsorship for leadership courses or industry conferences?

Related: Remote Onboarding Process Beginner's Guide and Checklist

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Performance feedback

Where performance management keeps an employee updated about their progress, performance feedback objectively appraises how well one conducts their work. Think of performance feedback as more of an individualized conversation vs. a focus on processes. A solid manager should be regularly communicating with an employee and providing performance feedback.

How well does your manager provide regular feedback on your performance?

Is the manager providing the employee with specific and regular feedback on their performance? If an employee’s productivity metrics have increased by a certain percentage, that’s wonderful feedback, but even better feedback is a conversation involving the effectiveness of the strategies the employee took to get there. Did the manager give the employee excellent advice or encourage them to find a positive solution? Does the employee have access to their manager outside of one-on-ones?

How well does your manager provide constructive criticism when needed?

Constructive criticism involves discussing what works well and what is revealing itself to be a roadblock to an employee’s success in their duties or in completing a task. Some managers are more hands-off while others may be more hands-on—the employee should feel safe communicating the level of feedback they need to do their best. If faced with a roadblock and an immediate deadline, can the employee go to their manager for coaching that empowers them to find an actionable workaround together?

How well does your manager recognize and reward good performance?

When it comes to performance, does the employee receive recognition and the opportunity to be rewarded outside of their annual review? This can look like a note in a shared Google doc or a mention in a team roundup to senior leadership that praises the employee pointing out a potential issue and critical insight. It can also involve encouraging a stressed employee to take a half day off when they’ve been working overtime to meet a deadline.

Related: Empathy in Leadership: Key Traits of Effective Leaders

Collaborative work

Collaborative work can take many forms on teams in different departments, from using cloud-based collaboration tools to discussing work challenges on communication channels. Trust, respect, and dedication are essential to team building when doing collaborative work, and management is responsible for cultivating the right environment and keeping an eye on the target.

How well does your manager encourage collaboration and teamwork among team members?

Outside of Monday morning meetings, do employees have a sense of what each team member or team does? Each employee should be able to understand how their role impacts another’s and the organization as a whole. How often an employee goes to other team members for insight or assistance speaks volumes about their confidence in collaborating. If this isn’t the case, there may be room for improvement for management in this area.

How well does your manager promote a culture of trust and respect among team members?

Decisive and inclusive leaders lead with core values in practice, not just on paper. Empathy and transparency are important in both policy and practice. One key way that this is demonstrated is by making employees part of decision-making processes and allowing for ownership opportunities, whether that’s by pitching new ideas or encouraging teams to cross-collaborate.

How well does your manager support cross-functional collaboration among different teams?

Knowledge is power, but without cross-functional collaboration, much-needed information and context can be lost across the divide. That can also lead to a divide in team morale. For example, a regularly scheduled brainstorming session with another associate on a different team can lead to insights that streamline processes that affect both teams and employee productivity.

Related: The Top 17 Collaboration Tools for 2023

The Day-To-Day Employee Experience As A Metric For Leadership Development

When considering open-ended questions for employees about their manager’s performance, both parties can feel an understandable degree of pressure. Every employee wants to offer valuable feedback about their experience as a new hire and as an experienced professional on the team. They also want to provide their manager with feedback that will deepen their professional bond and enrich best business practices. The day-to-day employee experience is a relevant yet subtle metric that impacts company culture and business success.

Performance reviews are outdated to some because these insights seem to be glossed over, and talent eventually moves on when they feel no longer valued. Managerial evaluations are often overlooked when it comes to leadership development as related to talent development and employee retention. It’s easy to wax poetic about what makes a good manager.  

However, a deeper dig into what makes communication, leadership, performance management, conflict management, workload management, hiring and training, performance feedback, and collaborative work effective powerfully impacts everyone involved. As a result, management has both a qualitative overview of how leadership is performing company-wide and insight into the impact of day-to-day manager-employee relationships—it presents an opportunity for leaders to truly come into their own as they actively observe their evolving impact.

And it all starts with a conversation—with simple but insightful questions to ask employees about their manager’s performance. Reinvest this knowledge into improving the quality of leadership on your team, and it will reflect brightly in the talent you’ve acquired.

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