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Employee Workload & Burnout Risk Pulse Survey

Measures how manageable employees find their day-to-day workload, where their time actually goes, and early signs of burnout risk — for HR and people managers running a workload or capacity check-in. An AI follow-up interview digs into the real story behind the busiest or most strained response instead of settling for a number.

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Sample questions

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

13 questions · ~7 min
Q01
Message

Thanks for taking a few minutes for this workload check-in. Your honest answers help us catch overload before it causes burnout or turnover — this takes about 5 minutes and your individual responses are kept confidential.

Q02
Opinion ScaleRequired

Thinking about the last 30 days, how manageable has your overall workload been?

Scale: 1 – 7
Min:Completely unmanageableMax:Very manageable
Q03
Multiple ChoiceRequired

In the last 30 days, how often did you work outside your scheduled hours (early mornings, evenings, or weekends) to keep up?

  • Never
  • Rarely (1-2 times)
  • Sometimes (about weekly)
  • Often (several times a week)
  • Almost every day
Q04
Point AllocationRequired

Thinking about a typical work week, allocate 100 points across where your time actually goes.

  • Meetings
  • Focused / project work
  • Administrative tasks
  • Email and messages
  • Ad-hoc or unplanned requests
  • Other
Allocate 100 points
Q05
MatrixRequired

How much do you agree with each statement about your current workload?

4 rows × 5 columns
  • I have enough time to do my work to the quality I want
  • I can take breaks during the day without feeling guilty
  • Work is distributed fairly across my team
  • I can fully disconnect from work after hours
Columns: Strongly disagree · Disagree · Neutral · Agree · Strongly agree
Q06
Rating ScaleRequired

How satisfied are you with the support your manager gives you in managing your workload?

Range: 1 – 5
Min:Very dissatisfiedMax:Very satisfied
Q07
Multiple ChoiceRequired

In the last 30 days, did your workload cause you to skip, shorten, or cancel personal time (PTO, plans, or a lunch break)?

  • No, not at all
  • A little, occasionally
  • Yes, more than once
  • Yes, regularly
Q08
Opinion ScaleRequired

How likely are you to start looking for a new job in the next 6 months mainly because of your current workload?

Scale: 0 – 10
Min:Not at all likelyMax:Extremely likely
Q09
AI Interview

Explore the real story behind this person's workload rating: what specifically makes their week feel manageable or overwhelming right now, and whether it's driven by volume, unpredictability, unclear priorities, or team staffing. If they reported working outside scheduled hours often or skipping personal time, get a concrete recent example of what happened and why. If they indicated any likelihood of job-hunting due to workload, gently probe what change would need to happen for that to go away.

Q10
Multiple Choice

What would most help reduce excessive workload for you right now?

  • More people on my team
  • Clearer priorities from leadership
  • Fewer or shorter meetings
  • Better tools or automation for repetitive tasks
  • More realistic deadlines
  • Redistributing work more evenly across the team
Q11
Multiple Choice

Which best describes your department or function?

  • Engineering / Product
  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Customer Support
  • Operations
  • Finance / Legal
  • People / HR
  • Prefer not to say
Q12
Multiple Choice

How long have you been with the company?

  • Less than 6 months
  • 6 months to 1 year
  • 1-3 years
  • 3-5 years
  • More than 5 years
  • Prefer not to say
Q13
Message

All done — thank you for your honesty. HR and your leadership team will review these responses in aggregate to spot workload hotspots and prioritize fixes; no individual answers are shared with your direct manager.

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

  • Goes beyond a single manageability score with an AI follow-up interview that probes the real story behind the busiest or most strained response
  • Combines a time-allocation exercise (constant sum) and a workload-belief matrix with hard behavioral indicators like skipped personal commitments and after-hours work
  • Directly surfaces flight-risk signal (likelihood to job search due to workload) alongside a manager-support rating, giving HR both a leading and lagging burnout indicator
  • Ends with a concrete 'what would help' question, so the report gives leadership an actionable lever, not just a diagnosis

SurveyMonkey

Employee Workload Survey Template

A ready-to-field static template focused on workload perception, likely covering hours worked and general satisfaction questions. It's built for quick deployment on SurveyMonkey's established distribution and reporting infrastructure. It appears to rely on fixed question sets rather than any dynamic probing into individual responses.

What it does well

  • Fielding-ready template on a widely used survey platform
  • Backed by mature reporting and benchmarking tools
  • Simple to deploy for a quick workload check-in

Where it falls short

  • No adaptive AI follow-up to dig into why a specific employee rated their workload as unmanageable
  • No voice AI interview option for richer qualitative input
  • No published methodology on how questions map to burnout risk scoring

QuestionPro

Employee pulse sample questionnaire and survey template

A general employee pulse questionnaire sample rather than a workload/burnout-specific instrument, so teams would need to adapt or supplement it to focus on workload and early burnout signals. It's positioned as a broad engagement pulse tool with QuestionPro's standard survey and dashboard features. Like most static pulse tools, it treats each question as a fixed data point rather than a jumping-off point for deeper inquiry.

What it does well

  • Broad pulse-survey framework covering multiple engagement dimensions
  • Established platform with dashboarding and segmentation features
  • Sample questionnaire lowers the barrier to getting started

Where it falls short

  • Not purpose-built for workload/burnout risk, requiring customization to match this use case
  • No adaptive AI interview to explore the story behind a strained or busiest response
  • No automated per-response quality scoring or transparent prompt methodology

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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