Team Building Surveys: 16 Post-Event Questions To Ask
So you’ve had (what you hope was) a great team-building event. Everyone showed up, they solved puzzles, they did fun challenges, they laughed together, and the sun set over a happy scene of employees bonding over shared experiences.
Or, worst-case scenario, your team-building event did not go as planned. Perhaps tempers flared, old rivalries surfaced, or Dave in accounting spent so much time complaining about the heat that no one could focus on the tasks at hand.
What do you do now? Will you relegate your event to the company history books? Get back to business as usual on Monday morning?
While it may be tempting to ask everyone to buckle down and get back to work right after the fun and games end, by doing so you’d be missing out on a crucial element of the team-building process.
What you do after the event is nearly as important as the event itself.
That’s because team-building events are, ideally, a means of accomplishing a goal or a set of goals. Perhaps you went into the event hoping to smooth over some intra-office conflicts, to help a group of new employees get to know the rest of the company employees, or allow your team to relax and have fun in a productive way after meeting a major business objective.
How will you know whether you accomplished your goals unless you measure the changes in attitudes, communication, and other aspects that occurred as a result of the event? In other words, if you don’t measure your results, you’ll have no idea whether the event was a waste of time, never to be spoken of again, or whether it was a resounding success and should become the new annual company tradition.
The good news is, figuring this out is a fairly simple process. In our experience, through years of hosting company team-building events, the best way to see how your employees felt about a particular event is to simply ask them.
Post-event team-building surveys allow you the opportunity to get firsthand perspectives from everyone in attendance. From there, you can decide which parts of the event were successful, identify any goals that may not have been met, and determine how to handle future events differently, if the current one didn’t fulfill your wildest dreams.
To get you started, here are some examples of team-building survey questions you can use to take your team’s temperature after an event.
FireFly Team Events not only hosts fun and accessible team-building events, we also question and debrief all attendees after the fact, so you don’t have to. Give us a shout, and we’ll handle the hard parts.
16 Example Team-Building Survey Questions You Could Ask Your Employees After A Work Event
We’ve sorted the questions into categories. As you build your post-event survey, try to incorporate a few questions from each section. That way, you’ll get a well-rounded picture of your event’s results and reduce the likelihood of missing something important.
The individual questions you choose under each section are actually less important, as long as you represent each section’s topics fairly. Feel free to use our examples here, or make up your own.
| Good science dictates that, when you measure results after an experiment, you have a control group to compare to your data from afterward. If you haven’t yet held your event, consider issuing some employee event survey questions beforehand that you can later use as a comparison. If you’ve already had the event, however, no need to fret—simply follow up with some of these (or your own) team-building feedback survey questions and carry on! |
1. Assess the event’s impact: What are attendees’ feelings about the experience?
These are not “rate your experience from 1 to 10” or “yes/no” questions. You’ll want to provide space for your employees to add detailed answers.
- What was a highlight from today’s event for you?
- Please share something you learned about yourself, your team, or the company today.
- How did you make or strengthen connections with coworkers today?
- What behaviors did you notice during the activity that you expect to show up in the workplace?
- What company cultural norms did you witness during the activity?
- What lessons, observations, or discussions can we take away from this activity to help us grow as a team?
2. Assess goal achievement: Did the event move the needle closer toward your goal?
Your goals may look different than these examples. Feel free to swap out questions in favor of ones that address other specific goals you had in mind.
- Please rate communication between members of the team in the workplace.
- Please rate communication between members of the team and the manager in the workplace.
- How likely are you to address a conflict directly with a team member?
- How likely are you to bring a conflict or problem to your manager?
- How comfortable are you expressing thoughts and ideas in a team meeting?
3. Assess the logistics of the event: Was it executed well?
These questions can help you determine what went well and what may be improved for future events.
- Did you have all the information that you needed to participate?
- Was the timing of the event reasonable?
- Did you have the appropriate food, snacks, water, etc.?
- Was there anything you felt was missing from the activity today?
- Would you recommend this activity to another company or department?
What else do you need to know about surveys for team-building?
It’s an interesting fact that simply asking people questions can give you top-of-the-line data illustrating how they feel about a specific topic. Facebook, for example, found that by asking their employees how long they intended to stay with the company, they were able to predict future turnover with twice the accuracy compared to their fancy AI predictive models. They also found that people who didn’t fill out the survey were most likely to jump ship within the next six months.
Additionally, being on the receiving end of meaningful questions can actually change how a person thinks and feels about the subject. It makes sense; when you take the time to ask about their feelings and opinions, they’ll understand you care about their experiences and feel more positively toward you and the company. Many companies use this strategy to great success, reducing turnover and boosting morale and productivity.
With this fascinating tidbit of human psychology in mind, it’s also important to strike a balance. If someone sees the fifth survey this month hit their inbox, your chances of extracting meaningful information plummet.
It’s best to keep your surveys short (no more than ten questions), easy to answer (make sure your survey page is formatted for mobile users, or make it accessible with a QR code), and pleasant. It can help to toss in the occasional silly question, if it fits with your company culture. It lightens the mood and makes sure everyone is paying attention.
If you work with FireFly Team Events, here’s how we handle post-event questionnaires.
If you’re assembling your own post-event surveys, the above example questions should point you in the right direction. You’ll get a better idea of how your employees felt about the experience and what they’d like to see in future events.
At Firefly Team Events, we like to take things a step further. Instead of sending out a survey, we take the time to debrief all attendees after every event. We ask structured questions to assess their thoughts and feelings surrounding the event, as well as some more objective measures of the event’s success.
Our goal is to draw meaning from an experience and determine exactly how it can be applied to what the team does in the workplace on a daily basis. That way, we can be sure we’re helping to move the needle toward fulfilling your goals and providing lasting, positive changes for your team.
Poke around our website to learn more, and let us know if you have any questions!
