Describe the culture you want to understand, the employee groups you need to hear from, and the decisions you plan to make. Makeform turns that brief into a focused company culture survey with scaled statements, open comments, optional segmentation, and a clear path from responses to action.
Route culture survey responses to Google Sheets, Slack, and Zapier.
Sample prompts for the builder
Choose a starting point, adapt the language to your organization, or send the prompt into the Makeform builder. Each structure is an example you can edit before publishing.
Audience
Employees across departments, locations, and tenure groups
Format
Anonymous survey with five-point scales and comments
Prompt size
479 chars
Example survey structure
Anonymous survey with five-point scales and comments
Leaders model the values they communicate
I can raise concerns without fear of negative consequences
Teams share information and work well across boundaries
Which part of our culture should we preserve?
Optional employee group questions
Suggested analysis tags
Values alignment
Trust and voice
Action priorities
Ask about observable experiences, not whether employees simply agree that the culture is good. Specific statements reveal where values and daily behavior diverge.
Step 1
Define
decisions, dimensions, audience, and anonymity
Step 2
Ask
neutral scales plus focused open comments
Step 3
Analyze
themes and safe employee-group comparisons
Step 4
Act
owners, next steps, and a follow-up pulse
Measure lived culture
Culture is visible in everyday decisions: who gets heard, how tradeoffs are explained, what managers reward, and what happens after a mistake. A useful survey measures those experiences instead of asking employees to rate a slogan.
Build sections for values, leadership, trust, voice, belonging, collaboration, recognition, learning, and sustainable work. Each section earns its place by connecting to a decision HR or leaders can actually make.
Replace loaded claims such as our leaders are inspiring with answerable experiences such as leaders explain the reasons behind important decisions. Consistent response scales make patterns easier to interpret.
Use optional department, tenure, location, or work-arrangement questions only when groups are large enough for responsible comparison. Keep names and direct identifiers out of an anonymous survey.
Four useful survey moments
An annual baseline, a values check, a change pulse, and a team diagnostic need different scope. Start with the decision, then collect only the evidence needed to make it.
Map broad strengths and friction across core dimensions, then select a small number of organization-wide priorities for the coming cycle.
Test whether employees understand each value, observe it in leadership behavior, and see it used when real priorities conflict.
Check clarity, trust, workload, voice, and connection after a reorganization, leadership transition, acquisition, or rapid hiring period.
Give a function or team specific feedback on manager practices, decision access, cooperation, recognition, and how safely people learn from problems.
Survey workflow
The generator creates a practical starting structure. Your team supplies the organization-specific values, confidentiality explanation, audience choices, and ownership for what happens after responses arrive.
Tell Makeform why you are surveying now, who should respond, which values or culture dimensions matter, and whether the survey should be anonymous. A specific brief prevents a generic question bank from taking over.
Use one scale direction, add not applicable where employees may lack visibility, remove double-barreled statements, and configure conditional comments for low ratings without forcing respondents to explain every score.
Explain the purpose, closing date, approximate effort, how anonymity is handled, who will review results, and when employees will hear back. Send reminders without implying that participation or positive answers are required.
Compare dimensions, read comments for recurring mechanisms, suppress unsafe small-group cuts, and share what leaders heard. Assign owners to a few visible actions and schedule a shorter pulse to learn whether experience changes.
Choose the right instrument
These tools overlap, but they answer different questions. Choose the narrowest survey that supports the decision, and avoid repeating the same broad questionnaire whenever leadership wants a temperature check.
Field guide
Six sections create a useful view of culture without turning the survey into an exhausting inventory. Adapt the statements to your organization, but keep them concrete, neutral, and connected to action.
Values in practice
Employees may know the value words and still see decisions contradict them. Ask whether leaders model the values, teams use them in tradeoffs, and systems such as recognition and promotion reinforce the same behaviors.
Trust and voice
Trust is not a general feeling alone. It shows up when employees ask difficult questions, report a problem, disagree with a decision, or admit a mistake. Separate these experiences so leaders can locate the barrier.
Belonging and respect
Belonging questions should address respect, access, and contribution rather than asking employees to endorse a broad inclusion claim. Optional comments can reveal whose ideas are missed and where team practices exclude people.
Leadership and communication
One leadership score hides different problems. Employees may understand the strategy but distrust follow-through, or trust their manager while lacking information from executives. Ask distinct statements at the appropriate level.
Collaboration and operating norms
Culture becomes tangible in meetings, handoffs, approvals, and competing goals. Questions about information flow and decision rights show whether collaboration is supported by the operating system or depends on personal effort.
Open comments and action
A few purposeful open questions add meaning to scores. Ask what should be preserved, what gets in the way, and which one change would matter most. Then communicate themes without publishing identifying details.
Related tools
Use focused surveys at moments that can explain the company-wide pattern, from onboarding and day-to-day engagement to feedback and exits.
Measure commitment, enablement, manager support, growth, and connection alongside culture signals.
Open toolExplore satisfaction with working conditions, support, recognition, and the overall employee experience.
Open toolCreate an always-available channel for specific suggestions and concerns between survey cycles.
Open toolGather more focused feedback about respect, access, participation, and inclusion practices.
Open toolLearn how new hires experience expectations, belonging, manager support, and stated values in practice.
Open toolUnderstand the culture, management, and work factors employees describe when they leave.
Open toolFAQ
Practical answers for HR and people leaders designing a culture survey employees can trust and leaders can use.
A company culture survey gathers employees' perceptions of how work actually happens: whether stated values guide decisions, leaders communicate credibly, people can speak up, colleagues feel respected, teams collaborate, and systems reinforce expected behavior. It turns a broad topic into specific experiences that can be compared, discussed, and connected to action.
Include neutral statements about values in practice, leadership behavior, trust, psychological safety, belonging, communication, recognition, learning, collaboration, and workload norms. Use a consistent five-point agreement or frequency scale, provide not applicable when needed, and add two or three open prompts about what to preserve, what creates friction, and what should change next.
Length should follow the decision, not a fixed benchmark. A targeted change pulse may need only several scaled statements and one comment. A broader baseline can cover multiple dimensions, but every question should lead to an interpretation or possible action. Remove repeated wording, avoid asking two ideas in one statement, and pilot the survey to estimate effort before launch.
Anonymous collection can make candid feedback easier, especially for sensitive questions about leadership, voice, and fairness. Explain exactly what you collect, avoid names and unnecessary identifiers, make segmentation optional where appropriate, and do not report cuts that could expose individuals in small groups. If the survey is confidential rather than anonymous, describe that distinction clearly.
Ask about one observable experience at a time and avoid praise, blame, absolutes, or language that signals a preferred answer. For example, use leaders explain why important decisions are made instead of our inspiring leaders always communicate transparently. Keep scale labels balanced, allow not applicable where visibility differs, and offer optional comments without requiring employees to justify a low score.
Start with response patterns by culture dimension, then examine individual items to find the mechanism behind each score. Read comments for repeated themes and concrete examples, not as a vote count. Compare employee groups only when the group size and collection method protect respondent privacy. Pair strong and weak signals, identify a few priorities, and document what evidence would show improvement.
Yes. Makeform offers unlimited free forms and responses, so you can generate, edit, publish, and collect responses without an invented response cap. The paid tier removes the Makeform badge. You can revise the generated questions, change the scale, add optional employee-group fields, and tailor the introduction before sharing the survey.
Share the major themes, including strengths worth protecting and issues requiring attention. Explain what leaders will act on, what needs more investigation, and what cannot change now. Assign an owner, a next step, and a communication date to each selected priority. Then use a shorter follow-up pulse to learn whether employees notice progress rather than rerunning the entire survey immediately.
Measure the culture employees experience.
