Work-Life Balance Survey

The Work-Life Balance Survey is a ready-to-launch questionnaire that measures how sustainable your employees' working lives actually feel, day to day. Rather than guessing whether people are overloaded, it asks them directly about workload fairness, contracted versus actual hours, the pressure to stay online, and whether they can genuinely switch off in the evenings, at weekends, and on holiday. With 21 questions covering these areas, it gives People teams a clear read on where the boundaries between work and personal life are holding and where they are quietly breaking down. Run it when you sense rising fatigue, before or after a busy period, or as a regular pulse to keep balance on the agenda.

Poor work-life balance rarely announces itself. It shows up later as burnout, quiet quitting, and resignations you did not see coming. This survey surfaces the early signals while you can still act on them. Responses tell you whether workloads are distributed fairly across teams, whether people are routinely working beyond their contracted hours, and whether your culture, spoken or unspoken, pushes them to answer messages after hours. That evidence informs concrete decisions: rebalancing work across a team, resetting expectations about response times, reviewing annual leave uptake, and coaching managers whose teams consistently report pressure. It turns a vague worry about overwork into specific, defensible actions leadership can prioritise.

The 21 questions group into a few clear themes. Workload and capacity ask whether contracted hours are realistic for the work expected, whether people regularly work beyond them, and whether work is spread fairly across the team. Focus and control look at whether employees can prioritise their most important work within normal hours. Culture and pressure probe whether managers or team norms push people to work late, as in "I feel pressured by my manager or team culture to work beyond normal hours." Boundaries and recovery cover disconnecting during evenings, weekends, and holidays, checking messages off the clock, and feeling comfortable using all allocated annual leave. Together these give a rounded picture of both hours worked and the ability to recover from them.

The template is free and needs no signup. Copy the 21 questions straight from this page, or download them, and load them into whichever survey tool you already use, such as Google Forms, Typeform, or Microsoft Forms. Keep responses anonymous so people answer honestly about hours, pressure, and leave. Most items work well on a simple agree-to-disagree scale, which keeps completion quick. Share the link with your team, set a clear closing date, and review results by team so you can act where the pressure is concentrated.