Getting honest feedback about compensation and benefits through an employee opinion survey requires asking the right questions—ones that dig deeper than simple satisfaction ratings. If you want answers that lead to meaningful change, you need great questions on compensation and benefits that go far beyond a generic checkbox or a single score.
This article lays out great questions for these surveys, plus practical tips to collect nuanced opinions with privacy in mind—so you can build trust and turn insights into action.
Essential compensation questions that uncover real insights
When running an employee opinion survey, compensation questions shouldn’t stop at “Are you satisfied with your pay?” We need to probe different facets of how people perceive their compensation to understand what really drives satisfaction—and what might be holding it back. That’s especially relevant today: in 2023, CEO pay at S&P 500 companies jumped nearly 13%, far outpacing the 4.1% rise for private-sector workers and expanding the compensation gap. [1]
Pay Equity: “Do you believe your compensation is fair compared to others with similar roles and experience at our company?”
This surfaces how employees feel about fairness, not just their personal satisfaction.Transparency: “Do you feel you understand how compensation decisions are made in our organization?”
This helps reveal if lack of clarity is causing confusion or mistrust.Growth Potential: “Do you see clear opportunities to increase your compensation over time?”
This captures whether the path to higher earnings is visible.Market Competitiveness: “How well do you think your total compensation (salary + benefits) stacks up against the market for your role and skills?”
This identifies perceptions of being under- or overpaid.Performance Recognition: “Do you feel your compensation accurately reflects your performance and contributions?”
This can flag disconnects between achievement and reward.Compensation Mix: “Are you satisfied with the balance between base salary, bonus, and other incentive programs?”
This highlights how people feel about structure—not just amount.Cost-of-Living Adjustment: “Have recent pay adjustments kept up with changes in living costs?”
This is especially relevant given recent inflation trends.
Traditional employee opinion surveys often miss why someone feels the way they do. Dynamic AI follow-up questions can probe deeper—like asking what feels unfair or which aspects of pay structure create frustration—without making assumptions. You can learn more about automatic AI follow-up questions here to see how powerful this can be.
Benefits questions that reveal what employees actually value
It’s easy to assume everyone wants the same benefits, but in reality, preferences change across life stages and personal circumstances. To make the right investments, we need questions that map to those differences—and help prioritize what will actually make a difference for your people.
Healthcare: “How well does our healthcare offering meet your needs and those of your dependents?”
Work-Life Balance: “How satisfied are you with our vacation, paid time off, and flexible work arrangements?”
Retirement: “Do you feel confident about the retirement plan options and employer contributions offered here?”
Family Support: “Are our parental leave and family-related benefits adequate for your situation?”
Wellness: “Do our wellness programs (mental health, fitness, etc.) make a real difference for you?”
Professional Development: “Are the training and development benefits provided valuable and accessible?”
Unique Perks: “Are there other benefits or perks you wish we would offer?”
In one recent New York Fed survey, satisfaction with both wages and non-wage benefits dropped across the board, with pay satisfaction falling to just 56.7%—down from nearly 60% the year before. [2] That’s a real sign that common benefits packages might be missing the mark for many employees.
Conversational employee opinion surveys adapt in real time—when an employee signals health coverage is vital, AI-driven follow-ups can dig deeper on that topic, skipping what’s irrelevant. This approach personalizes every survey, feeling much more like a conversation than a checklist.
Surface-level question | Insight-generating question |
|---|---|
Are you satisfied with your benefits? | Which specific benefits matter most to you—and which fall short? |
Do you use the wellness program? | How have our wellness programs affected your well-being (if at all)? |
When you pair smart question design with conversational follow-ups, you start getting feedback your team can actually work with.
Configuring surveys to protect privacy while gathering honest feedback
When it comes to feedback about pay and benefits, anonymity isn’t optional—it’s absolutely critical. Employees need to trust that speaking up about sensitive issues won’t come back to bite them. That’s why designing privacy-first surveys matters.
On Specific, here’s how we configure surveys to protect privacy without losing depth:
Never include questions about personally identifying information (PII) like names, addresses, or other direct identifiers.
Target surveys by role, department, or tenure—never by specific person.
Report results only as aggregates (e.g., “product team,” “senior management”) instead of exposing individual answers.
Anonymous response collection is easy to set up with Specific—you simply mark the survey as anonymous in the settings, so there’s no possible way responses get linked to individuals.
Smart follow-ups without identification: When AI asks clarifying or follow-up questions, it never needs to mention manager names or identifying scenarios. You can instruct the system to avoid sensitive areas, and edit survey logic with our AI survey editor to ensure anonymity is respected for every round of feedback and follow-up.
With privacy locked down, people feel safe to share their real opinions on compensation and benefits—resulting in actionable insights rather than censored remarks.
Turning feedback into actionable compensation strategy
One of the biggest headaches in employee opinion surveys is analyzing all the open-ended feedback. Sorting hundreds of responses about compensation and benefits is a slog—unless you have AI to help spot the patterns by segment, theme, and role. AI-driven survey response analysis (like this example from Specific) can do the heavy lifting, giving you instant clarity on what’s working and what’s not.
Here are three analysis prompts you might use after running your survey:
Prompt: “Identify the top three compensation concerns that appear most frequently for the engineering and operations teams.”
Explanation: Surfaces critical pay pain points across specific roles or business units.
Prompt: “Which benefits are mentioned most positively by early-career employees compared to senior staff?”
Explanation: Reveals how priorities shift by segment, helping you target improvements.
Prompt: “Where are the biggest mismatches between the benefits employees want and those currently offered?”
Explanation: Highlights actionable gaps, so HR teams know where investment or communication is needed most.
Using AI-powered analysis, you can quickly spin up separate threads to explore compensation-specific and benefits-specific trends. That’s where you move from raw feedback to decisions about pay policy, perks programs, or budget allocation—turning survey results into a real strategic advantage. Recent research from Edelman also found employees are laser-focused on pay transparency and upskilling—so segmenting feedback by what actually matters helps avoid one-size-fits-all solutions. [3]
Launch your compensation and benefits survey in minutes
Combining great questions with a conversational AI approach delivers insights you can actually use—not just numbers on a dashboard. Specific offers expert-built templates for employee opinion surveys on compensation and benefits, and our AI survey generator can create a custom survey in seconds from a natural-language prompt like this:
Generate a conversational employee compensation and benefits perception survey for our marketing and engineering teams. Prioritize open-ended questions about fairness, benefits satisfaction, and growth potential, with role-based anonymity and deep AI follow-up.
Conversational surveys turn employee feedback from a dull checkbox exercise into a meaningful two-way dialogue—unlocking the candid insights that drive real culture and retention improvements.
Ready to see what’s working—and what needs fixing? Start building your own survey to discover what truly drives your team’s satisfaction with compensation and benefits.