In Spain, 10% of working people feel engaged in their work. Across Europe the figure rises to 12%, and worldwide it reaches 20% (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2026 report). These are averages, and your company may be well above or well below them. The only way to find out is to ask.
Many small companies put off the climate survey because they imagine it long, expensive and run by a consultancy. With fifteen well-chosen questions and one week on the calendar, you get a first reliable picture of what is happening inside. Here are the questions, the method to launch it and the way to read the results.
What a climate survey is for in a small company
A climate survey measures how employees experience their work: whether they are clear about what is expected of them, whether their manager helps them, whether the team works, whether they see a future in the company. Sometimes, in small companies where everyone knows each other, we believe everything is fine simply because we know each other. The survey puts numbers where there were impressions, and above all it gives a voice to those who rarely speak up in a meeting.
The data point that weighs most in the reading is the direct manager. Gallup estimates that team managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement between units of the same company (Beck and Harter, Gallup Business Journal, 2015). That is why this survey devotes a whole block to the direct manager, and why the results are read by team as well as overall.
15 questions are enough
A short survey takes five minutes to answer. DO'IN TALENT's criterion is that every question must lead to a possible decision. If a bad answer leaves you with nothing to do, the question is surplus.
The fifteen are grouped into six blocks: the work itself, the direct manager, the team, recognition and development, leadership and communication, and a closing block with a recommendation question and an open one.
To see where your company stands on organisation, roles and team management, take the free HR maturity assessment: 15 questions, 3 minutes and a profile showing what to sort out first.
The fifteen questions
Questions 1 to 13 are answered on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is "strongly disagree" and 5 is "strongly agree".
My work
- I am clear about my priorities and the results expected of me.
- I have the tools, information and permissions to do my job without unnecessary delays.
- My workload fits within my working hours most weeks.
My manager
- My manager regularly tells me what I do well and what I can improve.
- I can raise a problem or a disagreement with my manager calmly.
- My manager takes my personal situation into account when organising the work.
My team
- In my team we help each other out when someone is overwhelmed.
- In my team I can put forward a different idea knowing it will be heard.
Recognition and development
- When I do good work, someone recognises it.
- In the last year I have learned things that make me a better professional.
- I see a path to grow in this company.
Leadership and communication
- I hear about important decisions from the company itself, and in good time.
- I trust the direction set by the leadership.
Closing
- On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to someone close to you as a place to work?
- If you could change just one thing to work better here, what would it be?
The downloadable template includes the fifteen questions with the scale, the introduction message to send to the team and a table to calculate the results.
Free template Short climate survey, fifteen questions The questions with their scale, the message to introduce the survey to the team and the table to calculate the results. In PDF, ready to copy into your tool. Download the template (PDF) →How to launch it in one week
- Announce it before you send it. A short message from the leadership saying what it is for, how long it takes, who will see the results, what we will do with them and when they will be shared back with the team. That last date is a commitment, so we must set it and keep it.
- Choose a tool you already have. Google Forms or Microsoft Forms are enough for a first survey. Set it up to collect responses without email or name.
- Ask for a single profile field: the area or team. Age, length of service or sex, in a small company, make it possible to guess who answered and can create mistrust. With the area you have what you need to read by team.
- Set an anonymity threshold. Results are shown only for groups with a minimum number of responses. Survey platforms work with thresholds of five to ten responses; in a small company, five is a reasonable figure. Smaller teams are grouped with a similar one.
- Keep the survey open for seven to ten days, with a reminder halfway through.
How to read the results
Favourable percentage. For each question from 1 to 13, count what share of the responses are 4 or 5. It is the easiest figure to explain and to compare the following year.
eNPS. Question 14 adapts to employees the Net Promoter Score that Fred Reichheld presented in Harvard Business Review in 2003. Anyone who answers 9 or 10 is a promoter; anyone who answers 0 to 6, a detractor. eNPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, and it ranges from minus 100 to plus 100. An example: with 20 responses, 9 promoters and 4 detractors, the result is 45% minus 20%, that is, plus 25.
By team, as well as overall. An acceptable company average can hide a team in the red. Compare each team with the company average, always respecting the anonymity threshold.
Open answers, grouped by theme. Read them all, group them into four or five themes and count how many times each one appears. Avoid quoting literal sentences that could identify who wrote them.
What makes the survey work: sharing the results with the team
The survey gains or loses its value in the following weeks. In an analysis by the firm Inpulse of 40,000 responses, 54% of people took it for granted that their company would leave the results in a drawer, and that group's engagement was far lower than that of those who expected change (theHRDIRECTOR, April 2022). In the United States, two out of three people consider that their company falls short in acting on their survey results (Quantum Workplace, study of 1,068 employees, 2023).
Three steps are enough to close the loop:
- Share the results within a month, with the whole workforce, the good and the improvable.
- Choose two or three actions, with an owner and a date. More actions dilute the effort.
- Take each manager through their results and agree with them what will change in their team.
Repeat the same survey a year later. The comparison between years is what turns a snapshot into a trend.
Where the climate survey ends and the psychosocial assessment begins
Two tools should be kept apart. The climate survey is a management decision and you design it to suit you. The psychosocial risk assessment is part of occupational risk prevention: in Spain, Law 31/1995 requires prevention to be planned on the basis of a risk assessment (article 16), and the INSST, the national institute for occupational safety and health, points out that this assessment must cover all risk factors, including psychosocial ones (NTP 702). There are specific methods for it, such as FPSICO, from the INSST itself, or CoPsoQ-istas21, and it is carried out with the prevention service.
The climate survey complements that assessment, and the legal obligation stands even if you run the survey. If the survey reveals excessive workload or sustained tension in a team, it is a good signal to review the psychosocial assessment with your prevention service.
Frequently asked questions
How often should you run a climate survey? One full survey a year, always with the same questions so you can compare. In between, if you want to follow a specific topic, quarterly pulses of three or four questions are enough.
Anonymous or confidential? Anonymous: nobody, including whoever runs it, can know who answered what. In a small company it is the option that gets the most candid answers. Confidential means someone knows the identity and commits to protecting it, and it requires a trusted external person.
Does it make sense with fewer than fifteen people? Yes, reading only the result for the company as a whole, because anonymity is lost when you break it down by team. Below ten people, a round of one-to-one conversations with an external person usually yields more information than a form.
What is eNPS and what is a good score? It is the recommendation question applied to the company as a place to work. More than the score on its own, what matters is how it evolves from one year to the next and the gap between teams.
Judith Ruiz de Esquide Fernández is the founder of DO'IN TALENT, a people leadership firm based in Madrid. She brings 26 years in people leadership and general management: 16 years of HR at L'Oréal and Air France/KLM, 10 years as General Manager of technology startups and scaleups, 6 years teaching digital transformation at IE Business School and 10 years as an executive coach and leadership speaker. Law and Psychology graduate, PADE from IESE and board education from ESADE. Full professional profile.
HR Maturity
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