Employee surveys: how to gather feedback about your group health insurance
Use this template for your next benefits survey
Health insurance benefits can cost 30% of an employee’s salary in the United States and more than that in Europe, making it one of the largest expenses on a business’ balance sheet. It’s also an essential offering for employee retention or, in some jurisdictions, legal compliance.
Since it’s both expensive and essential, there’s nothing worse than spending a lot of time and money to find the perfect group health insurance…only to realize your employees actually needed something entirely different.
Below, we’ll show how you can effectively collect and action employee feedback about their benefits to make the most of your investment. At the end of this article, we’ve even provided a survey template that you can use with your own team.
Step 1: Build your survey
To create a successful survey with a high response rate, you need to 1) be specific, and 2) keep things simple and 3) focus on personal experience.
Ask about specifics: Make sure you cover the three key areas of health insurance: routine care, specialist care, and paramedical (sometimes called “wellness”) care. If your organization already offers health insurance benefits, ask questions to better understand the on-the-ground experience of that coverage such as utilization, gaps in coverage, what they like and dislike about the plan(s), and how easy it is to understand or access their benefits.
Make your questions simple and easy to understand: Avoid complex medical terms, long questions, or questions with multiple parts. This can be confusing and frustrating, and could skew the answers. A simple open-ended question goes a long way to gathering more details about why someone loves or absolutely hates something, and a final (optional) “Anything else?” allows people to add more details that you might not have asked about.
In total, you want a survey that has about 6-12 questions, including a few follow-ups, taking between 2-5 minutes to complete on average. Anything longer and you risk people not completing the survey or rushing through and giving inaccurate answers.
Focus on personal experience: When designing your survey, it’s important to avoid the mistake of asking employees what specific solutions or insurance providers they want.
Most useful information about a group health insurance plan is gated behind a custom B2B sales call. Although people are experts in knowing what they personally need, a typical employee will not have a complete understanding of the market or be able to identify what plan is best for your organization. Their perspectives on specific providers or solutions are more likely to confuse the selection process than improve it.
Step 2: Administer your survey effectively
On average, only 25-60% of employees respond to internal surveys, citing concerns about privacy, retaliation, and wasting their time as reasons not to respond.
You can avoid these problems—and beef up your survey response rates—with effective communication about how survey results will make an impact:
Explain why the survey is being conducted: Let employees know why you’re seeking their input: to choose a solution that best meets the needs of the group.
Privacy and anonymity: We suggest keeping survey results anonymous. Health information is sensitive and employees will be less likely to be honest about their needs if they know their employer can see their answers, even if the promise of confidentiality is kept.
Set expectations: Tell employees the survey should only take 2-5 minutes to complete and ask that people take it seriously.
Time it deliberately: We recommend sending the survey at the start of a business day so people can see it when they log in, and early- to mid-week when they are in the workweek groove. Avoid sending surveys first thing on Mondays, Fridays, or before a national holiday where it can get lost in the shuffle.
The next business day after you send the survey out, send a follow-up:
Thank people who have already filled out the survey.
Encourage anyone who has yet to fill it out to take 2-5 minutes to complete it.
This amount of communication might seem like a lot, but it gives employees the awareness they need—otherwise, the rest of their day could easily get busy and take over all their time. As long as you keep the communication simple, brief and helpful, it won’t be overbearing.
Step 3: Make data-driven decisions about health insurance
A smart analysis will consider two things:
What is needed.
What is available on the market.
Start with a document that lists the healthcare needs named in the survey. Indicate whether it’s covered by your existing plan (if applicable) or not. Note how many employees indicated each need.
Look through any open-ended feedback to identify themes and note any further needs added in the custom fields.
This insight will give you a clear picture of what benefits your team actually needs. Then you can take this list to insurance providers to see what they can offer you.
Final step: Follow through
Let your team know what the next steps will be and when to expect more communication, so they feel as though they’ve actually been heard. After you select a plan, brief them on how their feedback influenced the decision. This will show your people their voices matter, and encourage open and honest feedback across the company, not just about benefits.
Employee health insurance survey template
Below is a template for surveying your team about their medical benefits. We recommend customizing the language with your organization’s current solution—existing health insurance, a health stipend, or no current insurance.
Title: [Your company name] healthcare survey
Overview: This survey is to collect information about your healthcare needs including routine, specialist, and wellness services. We will use this information to decide whether our current solution is working and to explore new options, if necessary.
{If you do not currently offer coverage: “We are exploring offering health insurance to our team members. To offer the right plans that will support your health needs, we want to hear from you.}
All survey responses are 100% anonymous and will only be used for statistical analysis.
The survey will take 2-5 minutes to complete, with 12 multiple-choice and open-ended questions.
We kindly ask that you take some time to complete the survey today or tomorrow—this will help us to choose the best possible health insurance for everyone.
Questions
How frequently do you use your health insurance benefits? (skip to question two if not currently offering benefits)
Very frequently (>2x per month)
Frequently (>1x per month)
Infrequently (~1x every three months)
Barely at all (Less than 1x per year)
How frequently do you visit the doctor?
Very frequently (>2x per month)
Frequently (>1x per month)
Infrequently (~1x every three months)
Barely at all (I can't afford to)
Which services do you use most often? (e.g., preventive care, specialist visits, emergency care) — Select all that apply:
Preventative care (e.g. annual physicals, screenings, yearly blood tests)
Regular doctor’s visits (e.g. visiting with the doctor when you feel sick or have an injury)
Have you taken advantage of wellness benefits (e.g. mental health benefits, yoga benefits, etc.) OR
Do you regularly access wellness care, such as mental health appointments, massage therapy or chiropractors?
Yes, through insurance
Yes, at my own cost
No
→ Open-ended follow-up: Optional: Do you use any services not included on the previous list, whether through insurance or not? If so, please name them.
Open text field
(If you provide health insurance already) How would you rate our current health insurance provider?
Great
It’s alright
No opinion
Needs work
→ Open-ended follow-up: Please explain why you gave the rating above to our current health insurance provider.
Open text field
What needs do you have that may not be addressed by our current solution?
Open text field
Has our current solution impacted your quality of life?
Yes
No
→ Open-ended follow-up: If “yes” - how has it impacted you?
Open text field
Have you had challenges in accessing or understanding your benefits?
Open text field
Anything else I should know?
Open text field
Katie Smith
Account Manager, Remote Health at SafetyWing
Katie curates, supports and cultivates access to healthcare for remote workers around the world.
Katie Smith
Account Manager, Remote Health at SafetyWing
Katie curates, supports and cultivates access to healthcare for remote workers around the world.
