6 Mental Health Questions That Belong in Your Employee Engagement Surveys: Refreshed for Today’s Workplace
- Mind Share Partners
- Jun 24
- 5 min read
Is your workplace well-being strategy working? What are the biggest stressors for your people? Is it the same as last year’s?
Measurement is an important part of an organization’s mental health and well-being strategy. This can include strategies like employee engagement surveys, quarterly pulse surveys, town halls, or hosting employee listening sessions. Companies like Delta Air Lines and Starbucks have ingrained well-being into their employee feedback cycles.
Measuring the impact of your mental health and well-being strategy is important in today’s workplace where half of U.S. employees report moderate to severe levels of burnout, depression, and anxiety.
Benefits to measuring employee mental health
Understand the strengths and challenges of your culture when it comes to employee well-being. This includes evaluating what programs, processes, policies, and resources are working and what needs to be improved.
Uplift worker voice within your organization. Workplace mental health isn’t just the programs in place—it’s the experiences and perspectives of your people, too.
Maintain accountability to well-being goals, particularly when findings are shared with senior leaders and integrated into business goals.
Communicate to your people that you care about mental health and are prepared to take action to explore meaningful support.
Identify where to focus next. Measurement makes your well-being strategy more responsive, inclusive, and effective.
Six well-being metrics to include in your employee engagement survey
Here are six metrics (and sample questions) we suggest every employer consider—no matter the industry—when assessing workplace mental health and well-being through employee surveys.
1. Measure organizational support
Employees’ overall perception of organizational support for mental health and well-being is critical to measure over time. It’s both a pulse check on employee sentiment and a measure of how your well-being efforts are going.
In our 2025 Mental Health at Work Report in partnership with Qualtrics, we found that workers who felt supported by their organization around their mental health were:
3x more likely to trust their company and its leadership.
2.5x more likely to be satisfied with their job.
2.5x more likely to look forward to going to work each day.
2x more likely to intend to stay at their company for two years or longer.
Example question:
“Overall, I feel like [company] supports my mental health.”
Strongly agree
Agree
Mixed or Neutral
Disagree
Strongly disagree
2. Explore mental health stigma
Stigma is one of the most common barriers to more proactive and effective support for employee well-being. Our research found that half of U.S. workers wish that they could talk more openly about mental health at work. An effective workplace well-being strategy means that your people feel safe talking about their challenges and getting support when needed.
Consider exploring employee comfort levels talking to specific groups of people (e.g., to managers, HR, etc.). With that insight, you can take more targeted action. For instance, if most employees don’t feel comfortable going to their manager about mental health, it may be time to invest in manager training.
Example question:
“I feel comfortable talking about my mental health at [company] with…”
Colleagues
Managers
HR
Company leaders
* For each bullet, rate “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree”
3. Assess burnout
Mental health is a diverse spectrum of experiences, but burnout is a uniquely workplace-specific one. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), burnout stems from chronic and poorly unmanaged workplace stress. In this way, measuring burnout is a key way to understand the impact of your work culture on well-being.
While the Maslach Burnout Inventory is often considered a “gold standard” for burnout measurement., many other validated burnout scales exist and can be leveraged.
4. Evaluate work stressors
Work itself has a direct impact on employee mental health. At-times, employers over-rotate on therapy and self-care as key strategies to support well-being, where solving work-related stressors (sometimes called “psychosocial risk factors”) are actually the root cause. These stressors are often within a company’s, leader’s, or manager’s control. From setting standard offline hours to having conversations about working styles or offering flexible schedules, there are plenty of creative ways to shape a work culture that supports well-being.
Here are a few common work stressors:
Work-life balance
Flexibility
Sense of belonging
Decision-making power
Alignment with company values
Work stressors can be industry-specific, too, like “high client demands” for those in professional services.
For more workplace stressors, refer to this academic study (see section 4.5, Table 1) or this resource from the World Health Organization. Example question:
"Please select any of the following workplace stressors at [company name] that have a positive impact on your mental health at work."
High-quality mental health benefits and other resources
Quality work-life balance
Emotionally rewarding work (e.g., enjoyable, meaningful, fun, etc.)
Strong sense of connection to or support from your colleagues or manager
Decision-making power over my work and the way I work
* For this question use a customized list of workplace factors, the bullets above are examples. You can also add the counterbalance to this question, asking employees to select workplace stressors that have a negative impact on their well-being.
5. Ask about resources
Mental health benefits and other mental resources are necessary but insufficient. Our latest report found that only two-thirds of employees know how to find mental health resources at their company . What’s more, half say they’re too busy at work to take care of their mental health.
Understanding awareness of benefits is the first step in making sure benefits are meeting employee’s needs. Whether employees use resources is contingent on culture—that includes awareness, knowledge, and comfort accessing.
Example questions:
"I know how to find mental health resources at my company."
"I know which mental health resources would be helpful to me."
* Rate “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree”
6. Segment by seniority level
With any measurement approach comes segmentation—how the data looks different for different groups and demographics. This can include regional variation, differences by role or department, or common demographics like race and gender. Still, some are helpful than others.
Leadership tends to have more optimistic views compared to the rest of the workforce, which can result in a misguided well-being strategy and feelings of resentment among employees.
“The biggest consequence of ignoring those [and other] disconnects is talent attrition. Employees who feel misunderstood or ignored are more likely to disengage and seek opportunities elsewhere. Burnout is another major risk as it can lead to disengagement.” - Robin Erickson, head of human capital research at The Conference Board
Key considerations when implementing mental health metrics
Talking about mental health can be sensitive—especially in workplaces where there’s still high stigma, limited psychological safety, or little history of open conversations on the topic. Keep the following in mind:
Ensure responses are non-identifiable, and ideally, completely anonymous where possible.
Be clear about confidentiality (and its limits) to respondents before they complete your survey.
Clearly communicate what comes next and actions you’ll be taking as an employer.
Make mental health a key part of employee feedback
These six measures are just a starting point. Measuring well-being within your regular employee engagement surveys can help you understand your people and their needs better, evaluate the effectiveness of your programs and resources, hold your organization accountable to monitoring progress, and send a clear signal to your workforce that you are listening to them and invested in mental health for the long term.
For deeper support in measuring the efficacy of your organization’s well-being efforts, connect with us here.
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