Add to Slack The hardest part of any survey is the blank page. Not the sending, not the dashboard, but the staring: which questions actually earn a place, in what order, on which scale. Most teams do not need a novel survey. They need the right one for the moment they are in, and most of those moments repeat.
Here is a tour of the surveys worth running, grouped by when they tend to come up. None of these are exotic. That is the point: the useful surveys are mostly the same handful, run at the right time, kept short.
When someone joins
Onboarding is the easiest feedback to collect and the easiest to skip. A new hire notices everything in their first weeks and remembers none of it by month three, so the window is short.
Three checkpoints cover most of it. A light new hire welcome in week one, less a survey than a way for the team to learn how someone likes to work. A 30-day check-in to catch gaps while they are still fixable. A 90-day check-in once the ramp is over, for the questions that only make sense after a quarter.
The 30-day one is worth doing properly, because it is the moment a quietly struggling hire is still recoverable. A version that works:
- How often have you met one-on-one with your manager so far? (Never / Once / Twice or more)
- Do you have a clear understanding of your role and what’s expected of you? (Yes, very clear / Mostly clear / Not yet)
- My team has made me feel welcome. (Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree)
- Do you have the information, tools, and resources you need to do your job? (Yes / Mostly / Not yet)
- Is there any specific training or support that would help you succeed? (free text)
- Are you facing any challenges we should know about? (free text)
Two scales to spot the pattern, two structured questions to locate it, two open prompts for the things you did not think to ask. That shape, a few scales closed out by an open question, shows up again and again below.
Then the survey nobody enjoys but everyone should run: the exit interview. Run it anonymously. People leaving are candid in a way people staying rarely are, and the value is in the pattern across many exits, not in any single one.
The weekly rhythm
The surveys a team runs most are the small recurring ones: an async standup that replaces the standing meeting, a weekly check-in on mood and blockers, a sprint retrospective gathered without booking a room.
The rule for all of these is restraint. Three or four questions, never twelve. A recurring survey lives or dies on whether answering it feels like work, and the habit that keeps it alive is telling the team what changed because of the last one. That is its own subject, and we wrote it up in recurring pulses that actually stick.
Feedback that points up
Most feedback flows downward. The surveys worth running are the ones that send it the other way: a manager evaluation where reports rate their manager, a skip-level check-in that lets leadership hear past the direct manager, a 360 that gathers peer feedback on one person.
These only work anonymous. The honest answer to “does your manager give you room to do your job” is not one most people will put their name on, and a tool that quietly attaches it anyway teaches the team not to answer next time. If you are deciding when to turn anonymity on, we go through the trade-offs in when to turn on anonymous responses.
Reading the room
Some surveys are not about a person or a project but about the mood of the whole team: a quarterly eNPS, a soft-touch wellness check, a DEI pulse, an always-open suggestion box.
The value in all of these is the trend, not the snapshot. A single eNPS score tells you almost nothing; the same score every quarter, drifting up or down, tells you a great deal. Run them on a schedule, keep the questions stable enough to compare, and watch the line rather than the number.
Where and how people work
If your team is hybrid, a small set of logistics surveys saves a surprising amount of Slack back-and-forth: a weekly office days check for desk and lunch planning, a one-off hybrid preferences survey to inform policy, an RTO sentiment pulse for teams in the middle of a return-to-office change.
These are mostly single-question or short, and they earn their place through aggregate value. A heatmap of who is in which day is worth more than any individual answer.
Company moments
Around the big set-pieces there is a survey for before and a survey for after. Before an all-hands, a town hall priorities poll or an anonymous AMA collection so the agenda reflects what people actually want covered. After it, an all-hands feedback survey while the session is fresh. For any event, a combined RSVP with dietary and t-shirt questions in one go.
The operational stuff
Finally, the surveys that keep the machinery honest: post-training feedback after a session, an IT support satisfaction check when a ticket closes, a SaaS license audit before a renewal to find the seats nobody uses. Unglamorous, easy to automate, and each one pays for itself the first time it catches something.
Start from a template, not a blank page
Almost every survey above is a known shape. You do not need to invent the questions, you need to start from a good version and adjust it to your team. That is what the template gallery is for: 34 ready-made surveys across these categories, each editable, each one click from sending in Slack. Open one when the moment comes up, change what does not fit, and send it. The blank page is the only part you can safely skip.