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Leader Transparency and Trust at Work Survey

Measures how transparent employees perceive leadership to be — sharing bad news, explaining decisions, admitting mistakes — and how that shapes trust and psychological safety. Built for HR and leadership teams studying organizational transparency, with an AI follow-up that unpacks a specific real instance of a leader being (or not being) open.

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Sample questions

A preview of what’s in the template. Every question is editable before you launch.

12 questions · ~7 min
Q01
Message

Thanks for taking a few minutes on this! We're looking at how openly leadership shares information, decisions, and even their own mistakes — and how that affects trust. Honest answers help most. About 5 minutes.

Q02
Multiple ChoiceRequired

In the last quarter, how often did your direct leader explain the reasoning behind a significant decision (e.g., a reorg, budget cut, strategy shift) to your team?

  • Never
  • Once
  • A few times
  • Regularly (monthly or more)
  • Not applicable / no major decisions occurred
Q03
MatrixRequired

How much do you agree with each statement about your leadership?

5 rows × 5 columns
  • My leader shares information about company performance, even when it's bad news.
  • My leader explains the reasoning behind major decisions.
  • My leader admits when they don't know something or made a mistake.
  • My leader shares the criteria used for promotions and raises.
  • Important information about company changes reaches me in a timely way.
Columns: Strongly disagree · Disagree · Neutral · Agree · Strongly agree
Q04
Opinion ScaleRequired

Overall, how much do you trust your organization's leadership to act in employees' best interest?

Scale: 0 – 10
Min:Not at allMax:Completely
Q05
Rating ScaleRequired

How comfortable do you feel admitting a mistake or a gap in your knowledge to your manager?

Range: 1 – 5
Min:Very uncomfortableMax:Very comfortable
Q06
Best–Worst Trade-off (MaxDiff)Required

Which of these topics would you most want your organization to be more transparent about?

  • Company financial performance
  • Strategic decisions and priorities
  • Compensation and promotion criteria
  • Layoffs and restructuring plans
  • Individual and team performance feedback
  • Leadership's own mistakes and uncertainties
  • Diversity and inclusion metrics
Pick best & worst per setBest:Most want more transparency onWorst:Least want more transparency on
Q07
Point AllocationRequired

Thinking about what builds your trust in a leader, distribute 100 points across these factors based on how much each matters to you.

  • Honesty, even when the news is bad
  • Competence and good judgment
  • Consistency between words and actions
  • Willingness to admit mistakes
  • Genuine care for employees
Allocate 100 points
Q08
Multiple Choice

Which channel has been most effective for you in receiving transparent updates from leadership in the last 3 months?

  • All-hands or town-hall meetings
  • Direct manager 1:1s
  • Company-wide email or newsletter
  • Internal chat channels (e.g., Slack)
  • Informal conversations
  • I haven't received meaningful updates
Q09
AI Interview

Ask the respondent to describe one specific, recent moment when a leader was either unusually open or unusually guarded (about a decision, a mistake, or bad news). Reconstruct what exactly was shared or withheld, how it made the respondent feel about that leader's honesty versus their competence, and whether it changed how much information the respondent now shares upward in return. If they say leaders rarely disclose anything personal or uncertain, probe what disclosing a mistake or limitation would need to look like for it to actually build trust rather than seem like weakness.

Q10
Multiple Choice

How long have you worked at this organization?

  • Less than 1 year
  • 1-3 years
  • 3-7 years
  • 7+ years
  • Prefer not to say
Q11
Multiple Choice

Which best describes your role level?

  • Individual contributor
  • People manager
  • Senior or executive leader
  • Prefer not to say
Q12
Message

That's everything — thank you for your honesty. Your responses will be pooled with others to help leadership understand which kinds of openness actually build trust, not just feel good.

What’s included

  • AI follow-ups

    Adaptive probes on open-ended answers that pull out detail a static form would miss.

  • Attention checks

    Built-in safeguards against rushed answers and low-quality respondents.

  • AI-drafted copy

    Wording, ordering, and branching written by the AI — tuned to your research goal.

  • Auto report

    Themes, quotes, and a plain-English summary write themselves once responses come in.

How it compares

We reviewed the closest templates from other survey tools. Here’s what they do well — and where this template goes further.

Why this template

  • Combines quantitative measures (frequency of leader explanations, trust opinion scale, comfort admitting mistakes rating, matrix of leadership statements, max-diff on transparency topics, and a constant-sum trust-driver allocation) with a qualitative AI follow-up that asks respondents to describe one specific recent instance of a leader being open or not — turning a general trust score into a concrete, analyzable story.
  • Includes context-setting and closing chat messages that frame the survey's purpose and set expectations about response pooling, which helps with honest reporting on a sensitive topic like leadership trust.
  • Captures respondent tenure and role level so HR teams can segment transparency perceptions by seniority or time at the organization.
  • Because the AI follow-up adapts to each respondent's own example, it surfaces specific behaviors (sharing bad news, explaining decisions, admitting mistakes) rather than only aggregate agreement scores, and every prompt used is transparent and auditable — with automated scoring generating a ready-made report.

SurveyMonkey

Organizational Transparency Survey Template

A static, fielding-ready questionnaire built around organizational transparency, credited to an academic contributor, which lends it some research grounding. It's a fixed-form survey rather than an interview experience, so all respondents see identical questions with no probing. Good for quick benchmarking but not for surfacing individual, story-level examples of transparent or non-transparent leadership.

What it does well

  • Backed by an academic contributor, suggesting research-informed question design
  • Ready-to-deploy on a widely used, easy-to-distribute survey platform
  • Focused specifically on organizational transparency as a construct

Where it falls short

  • No adaptive AI follow-up questions — every respondent answers the same fixed items with no probing into specific incidents
  • No voice AI interview or guided screen-share task options
  • No automated per-response quality scoring or transparent prompt methodology published

Ready to launch?

Open this template in the editor. Every part is yours to change before the first respondent sees it.

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