Every company feels different, but putting these feelings into words isn’t always easy. It’s only when you break them down into components like values, shared beliefs, and practices, that you turn feelings into company culture. That culture is a combination of all the decisions leaders have made over the company’s lifetime, how people contribute to that company’s goals, and how teams react to crises and grow.
Turning values, feelings, and beliefs into data you can use to improve everyone’s sense of belonging, their productivity, and your culture as a whole sounds like a tall order. But culture surveys can help bring some order to the chaos. These surveys ask employees to describe your culture, share how they feel about it, and suggest areas of improvement.
Why are these surveys so valuable? According to Flex Index’s Flex Report Q2 2025, only one in three employees is expected to be in the office five days a week. Getting a read on company culture is already difficult enough with everyone in the office. When you’re working with people who are remote at least some of the time, that difficulty magnifies. Culture surveys give you clear, up-to-date data you can use to get a clear picture of your company culture and how to improve it.
Performance management tools like 15Five have built-in culture surveys, allowing you to automate, streamline, and schedule most of the work involved. In this guide, you’ll learn how you can use a tool like 15Five to plan, create, and deploy culture surveys and analyze the results.
Key takeaways:
- A culture survey is essential for understanding and improving your workplace environment.
- Culture surveys differ from engagement surveys.
- Using 15Five simplifies the process of designing and distributing effective company culture surveys.
- Effective culture surveys are built around clear goals and customized questions.
- The most useful surveys include both quantitative and open-ended questions.
What is a culture survey?
First, let’s define company culture.
Company culture includes a company’s beliefs, values, and norms. Anything from a belief in the importance of diversity to how a company treats lateness can contribute to its culture. Company culture is built over time, through intentional decisions made by leadership and the prioritization of actions and beliefs.
Culture surveys that offer insight into how employees experience company culture and reveal how closely that matches with what leadership intends. It may ask questions like “How clear is the organization’s mission to you?” or “Do leaders and managers act in accordance with the company’s values?”
Understanding how your employees see your culture—and if it’s actually reflected in their day-to-day—is essential, especially in times of change. A mismatch between how leaders and employees see company culture can cause problems, like backlash to a decision leaders thought would go over smoothly.
A culture survey is similar to, but distinct from, the employee engagement survey. The former measures sentiment around company culture. The latter measures employee engagement on an individual basis. Employee engagement describes how motivated and driven an employee is, which ties directly into how they feel about their employer.
Company culture can be an important element in employee engagement, but the two are measured separately.
Benefits of a company culture survey
A workplace culture survey gives you a clear idea of how employees see culture and if they feel it’s accurately reflected company-wide. With these insights, you can then work to create a culture that more closely aligns with what your employees value. This comes with significant benefits:
Improved alignment
Achieving alignment on company culture leads to a trickle-down effect that affects everything else an organization does. Culture should be the primary reference point from which processes are built and decisions are made. When employees have a clear idea of company culture that matches leadership’s intent, collaboration becomes far easier, communication is far smoother, and results throughout the organization are better.
Increased retention
About 25% of employees worldwide are either actively searching for a job or about to start looking, according to SHRM’s 2024 Global Culture Report. For employees who rate their company’s culture as “good” or “excellent,” that rate drops down to 15%. Culture surveys uncover how employees feel about your culture, giving you a path towards improving it and creating a better workplace.
Higher employee engagement
According to that same report from SHRM, 87% of engaged employees rate their company culture as good or excellent, compared to only 50% of disengaged employees. Engaged employees are aligned with a company’s mission and can draw a clear link between their day-to-day work and that mission. They’re motivated to take on extra tasks and take initiative to solve complex problems. It’s much harder to keep employees engaged when they aren’t clear on—or don’t align with—your company’s culture.
Better performance
Human beings aren’t machines, and their productivity isn’t a linear transformation of resources into finished products. They need to feel positively about the work they’re doing, feel like it has a purpose, and see its impact on the company as a whole. Culture surveys surface any obstacles to that, improving productivity.
Greater trust
Culture surveys allow leaders to transparently ask employees for feedback. When they take in that feedback and turn it into action that visibly improves culture, employees are more likely to trust those leaders in the future.
How to use 15Five to create an effective culture survey
While you could potentially use a form-builder tool to create your culture survey and log the responses in a spreadsheet, it’s far from the most efficient or effective solution. For most teams, a performance management tool is the best platform for managing these surveys.
That’s where 15Five comes in.
15Five is a performance management tool that allows managers and leaders to handle everything from employee engagement surveys to performance reviews and upskilling employees through e-learning. It’s a one-stop shop for gathering, analyzing, and acting on data about employee engagement, performance, and more. That makes it a natural tool for your culture surveys.
Let’s break down how you can run your own company culture survey and how 15Five can help.
Step 1: Define the survey goals
Before you start, you need a goal for your survey. Are you trying to establish a baseline? Diagnosing a specific culture problem? Or are you responding to a big change, like rapid growth or an acquisition?
Clearly name your goal and tie it to broader business objectives, like improving employee retention, supporting DEI, or evaluating leadership effectiveness.
Step 2: Choose the right questions
There’s a wide variety of questions you can ask, but here are some things to keep in mind:
- Use mixed formats: Not all company culture survey questions should be multiple-choice. Use scales, yes/no answers, and open-ended prompts.
- Cover multiple areas: Questions should cover leadership, communication, DEI, accountability, innovation, and purpose.
- Use built-in templates in 15Five Engage: With 15Five, you don’t have to start from scratch. Use proven templates to get your survey done faster.
Step 3: Build your culture survey in 15Five
15Five Engage allows you to build your own custom culture survey or start from a template, as well as using audience segmentation to target individual surveys to the entire organization or specific teams.
When building your survey, try to limit yourself to 10-15 questions. This strikes a balance between being thorough and not overwhelming employees with a long survey. Make sure employees can answer the survey anonymously, and time yourself taking the survey so it takes no longer than 10 minutes.
Step 4: Launch and communicate the survey
To get as many participants for your survey as possible, you need to launch it across multiple communication channels. Share it in internal emails, Slack or Teams messages, or even mention it in important meetings.
In your messaging, make sure to:
- Emphasize anonymity.
- Highlight the impact of past survey results.
- Reinforce leadership’s commitment to listening.
Try to avoid sending out culture surveys around holidays, quarter-ends, or other high-stress periods.
Step 5: Analyze the results using 15Five’s tools
15Five’s Manager Products give managers and leaders dynamic dashboards for centralizing, analyzing, and acting on the data you get from your culture surveys. With these tools, you can:
- Segment data by department, role, and tenure.
- Identify trends in low-trust areas or inconsistent values alignment.
- Use visualizations and models like heatmaps, NPS summaries, and sentiment analysis.
- Connect data to KPIs like retention, engagement, and absenteeism.
Step 6: Act on your findings
When you run your first company culture survey, you’ll end up with a ton of data. But just having that data isn’t enough. You need an action plan. Start by prioritizing the key issues that come up multiple times in your data. Stick to two to three focus areas; any more than that and your efforts will be too scattered.
Once you’ve picked the areas you want to improve, make a detailed plan of the actions you’ll take to improve them and share a summary with your employees. They need to know that you’re taking action and that this action matches the outcomes of the survey.
Remember that culture surveys aren’t a one-and-done process; they need to happen regularly to track changes over time.
Best practices for running a workplace culture survey
The basic process of running a culture survey is simple: plan your survey, share it with employees, and act on the data you get from it. But there are common pitfalls that can make your surveys less effective. Here are some best practices to avoid them.
Find the right frequency
The perfect frequency for culture surveys will vary for each organization, but you should start with quarterly or bi-annual surveys. You can then adjust your cadence from there, depending on the results of your first few surveys.
Keep it short
Survey fatigue is real. If your surveys take longer than 10 minutes to complete, you’ll see participation start to decrease, and the answers you get won’t be as complete. Be aggressively selective in your questions.
Follow-through
You should be spending more time and energy on your action plan following a culture survey than the survey itself. Make your actions visible, impactful, and based on data.
Center surveys in a broader culture strategy
Company culture should be built into everything you do, and culture surveys should contribute to that. Use the data from culture surveys to inform onboardings, training sessions, and other aspects of day-to-day operations that need to reflect company culture.
Survey says…
A successful culture survey reveals the truth of how employees feel about your organization’s identity—and whether it matches with leadership’s intent. Getting these surveys right can be a challenge, which is why you need to use the proper tools. 15Five gives you everything you need to build effective culture surveys and turn the insights from them into impactful action.
Want to see what 15Five can do for your company culture? Explore 15Five Engage or see what’s possible with Manager Products.
