Most lists of climate survey questions have the same problem: fifty items with no selection criterion, jumbled together, with no word about why each one is there or what you would do with the answer. Copying them produces a long survey people fill in to get it over with.

These thirty are grouped by the six dimensions a climate programme has to cover, five per dimension, and each item carries the reason it earns its place. They are written to be copied as they stand.

The rule behind all of them: a climate item is worth asking if it points at something a named person could change this quarter. If the answer gives nobody any work, the question is well-intentioned noise.

What makes a climate question good

Four criteria, and all four show up when you read the answers rather than when you write the question.

Actionable. "I have enough time to do my work well" points at staffing and planning. "How happy are you?" points nowhere: happiness is not a working condition and nobody can be assigned to fix it.

One thing. "Is your manager competent and supportive?" is two questions. When somebody scores it low you cannot tell which half failed, which is exactly what you needed to know.

No double negative. "Don't you feel communication is lacking?" — a "no" there can mean either thing. Write in the positive and let the scale do the work.

A condition, not a feeling. The feeling is the outcome. The condition is what produces it, and what can be changed.

The 30, by dimension

The first item in each block is the one that already appears on the climate pillar. The other four open the same subject from different angles, so the rotation does not keep asking the same way.

01

Demand and pace

The strongest predictor of burnout, and the one managers most consistently underestimate on their own teams.
  1. I have enough time to do my work to a standard I am proud of.Separates volume of work from standard expected. It drops when workload forces people to deliver worse than they know how to, which is where the wear starts.
  2. In a normal week, my workload is sustainable."Normal" is the word doing the work: it excludes the closing week and asks about the baseline. If the baseline is already unsustainable, there is no peak season to survive.
  3. I can take my breaks without feeling I am falling behind.Measures recovery, not hours. A team that does not recover accumulates fatigue even on an eight-hour day.
  4. When urgent work arrives, somebody helps me decide what gets postponed.This one points at the manager, not the person. Without prioritisation, "urgent" only means everything gets done equally badly.
  5. I finish my day without taking unfinished work home.The boundary. It is the item that moves fastest when a vacancy has gone unfilled for months.
02

Autonomy and control

High demand with low control is the classic strain combination. Either alone is survivable; together they are not.
  1. I have a real say in how I do my job day to day."Real" is deliberate: it separates having an opinion from the opinion changing anything.
  2. I can decide the order in which I do my tasks.The cheapest form of autonomy, and the first one lost when supervision is added.
  3. When I see a better way to do something, I can try it.Measures whether improvement is possible or merely welcome in the speech. It falls long before the others when an organisation is stiffening.
  4. I have the information I need to decide without waiting for approval.Separates a permission bottleneck from an information one. Two different problems, two different fixes.
  5. The rules I follow make sense for the work I do.Rules that make no sense do more than slow people down: they teach that compliance is theatre, and that spreads to the rules that matter, safety included.
03

Leadership

Climate scores cluster by manager far more tightly than by department. The segment matters as much as the item.
  1. My manager gives me the context I need to do my job well.Asks about a specific behaviour, not likeability. A well-liked manager who gives no context scores low here, and should.
  2. I know what is expected of me this week.Short-horizon clarity. It is the item that collapses first during a restructure, weeks ahead of any other.
  3. My manager hears about problems in time, not after they have blown up.Measures the flow of bad news upward. Read it with dimension 05: if both are low, the problem is not an inattentive manager, it is a quiet team.
  4. When I ask for something I need to do my work, I get an answer.An answer, not a yes. The damage is done by silence, not by refusal.
  5. I get feedback often enough to correct course.Sets the bar at usefulness rather than ritual. A punctual annual review can score low here, quite rightly.
04

Recognition and reward

Effort–reward imbalance predicts exit intention months before anyone updates a profile.
  1. The effort I put in is noticed by the people it should be noticed by."The people it should be" avoids the generic-praise problem: being recognised by someone with no weight repairs nothing.
  2. When something goes well, it is said who did it.Attribution. On teams where credit drifts upward, this falls well before any general satisfaction item.
  3. What gets rewarded here is what actually matters for the work.Catches bent incentives: when visibility is rewarded over outcome, people know it long before leadership does.
  4. Opportunities to grow are handed out in a way I can follow.Asks about the process, not the outcome. Someone passed over for promotion can score this high if they understood how it was decided.
  5. What I get back matches what I put in.The useful version of the pay question: it is about proportion, and proportion can be moved with recognition, scope or workload, not only with money.
05

Psychological safety

The dimension that gates every other answer: a team that cannot say a hard thing will not say it on a survey either.
  1. I can raise a problem here without it being held against me."Held against me" matters: the cost of speaking up is rarely immediate, which is why it is invisible in the meeting.
  2. You can admit a mistake on this team without being marked for it.Your own mistake is harder to report than someone else's. Where this drops, problems surface late and expensive.
  3. When someone disagrees, they are heard.Separates permitted disagreement from useful disagreement. Plenty of teams let people speak and change nothing, and people learn the difference.
  4. I can ask for help without it being read as not coping.Predicts silent overload. Read with dimension 01: high workload plus this item low is the pattern that precedes a resignation nobody saw coming.
  5. Bad news travels up without being filtered.The organisational version of the four above. If this is high and the others low, what you have is a good manager inside a bad system.
06

Belonging

Weak on its own, decisive in combination: it is what holds people through a bad quarter.
  1. I feel like I belong on this team.Team, not company. Belonging is built at close range and is measured there.
  2. I can be myself at work.The cost of performing a character for eight hours is real, and it is paid in exhaustion rather than in output.
  3. There is someone here I can turn to.One trusting relationship changes the odds that somebody asks for help before resigning.
  4. My work means something to me beyond the pay.Meaning, not corporate purpose. It asks about the person's own work, not the company's mission statement.
  5. If a friend were job hunting, I would recommend this place.This is the eNPS question. If you already track it separately, do not duplicate it here: you would end up with two series of the same measure that disagree, and no way to say which to quote.

The 8 worth cutting

These are not forbidden questions. They are questions whose cost exceeds what they return in a recurring climate survey.

"Are you satisfied with your pay?"Almost nobody says yes, and the result gives nobody any work: pay bands do not move on a quarterly survey. The useful version is 04.5, which asks about proportion.
"Do you trust the leadership's strategy?"Measures an opinion about something the survey cannot move, and asking creates the expectation that it can. Save it for the annual study, where there is somebody to direct it at.
"Is your manager competent and supportive?"Two questions joined by an "and". A low score does not tell you which half failed.
"Don't you feel communication is lacking?"A double negative. "No" can mean it is lacking or that it is not, and there is no way to tell afterwards.
"How would you rate the work environment?"It is the score you already have, not the cause. Fine as a thermometer, useless as an instruction.
"What do you think of [named person]?"Turns the survey into a personnel file. In practice it breaks anonymity: people work out who might read it and answer accordingly.
"Are you thinking of leaving?"The most expensive of the lot. The people who are thinking about it are precisely the ones who will not answer honestly, so the number it returns is systematically optimistic.
"How happy are you at work?"Happiness is not a working condition. Nobody can be assigned to fix it, and a drop tells you nothing about what to change.

How to rotate them

Items are not changed, they are rotated. Rewording a question erases its history, because from then on you are not measuring the same thing. Rotating means asking three different items from the same set each round.

Thirty items, three at a time, is ten rounds. At a fortnightly cadence that is about five months to cover everything, and each dimension gets measured once a month. When round 1 comes back around, every question arrives with its comparison intact.

RoundDimensionsItems
1Demand · Leadership · Safety01.1 · 03.1 · 05.1
2Autonomy · Recognition · Belonging02.1 · 04.1 · 06.1
3Demand · Leadership · Safety01.2 · 03.2 · 05.2
4Autonomy · Recognition · Belonging02.2 · 04.2 · 06.2
5Demand · Leadership · Safety01.3 · 03.3 · 05.3
6Autonomy · Recognition · Belonging02.3 · 04.3 · 06.3
7Demand · Leadership · Safety01.4 · 03.4 · 05.4
8Autonomy · Recognition · Belonging02.4 · 04.4 · 06.4
9Demand · Leadership · Safety01.5 · 03.5 · 05.5
10Autonomy · Recognition · Belonging02.5 · 04.5 · 06.5

The dimensions are grouped that way on purpose: demand, leadership and safety read better together, because all three falling at once is a different pattern from any one of them falling alone.

The scale

A five-point agreement scale works for items written as statements, which is almost all of the above. A five-point frequency scale works for items asking how often something happens.

What matters more than the choice is not moving it. Changing scale between cycles breaks comparability and turns a trend into two snapshots that cannot be joined. Pick one and keep it, even if you later find a better one: the value of the series is that it is the same series.

On the midpoint

A five-point scale has a centre, and some people remove it to "force a position". We would not: removing the centre does not produce an opinion, it produces a coin flip from whoever genuinely sits in the middle — and you will read that as real.

Where they meet NOM-035

If you employ people in Mexico, the dimensions above are close cousins of the domains the standard evaluates: workload, control, leadership and relationships appear in both.

They overlap and do not substitute. NOM-035 requires instruments with their own published wording, and swapping a statutory item for a similar one from this list weakens the file. The climate programme gives the early signal; the statutory questionnaire gives the record an inspector asks for. Both official questionnaires are published in full here, and it is worth running the two programmes in one platform rather than ending up with two response rates and two anonymity stories to defend.

Five of these six are already a template

Bloomder ships 51 templates written by an organisational psychologist, and five of the dimensions above have one: Workload & Capacity Check, Manager Effectiveness Survey, Recognition & Appreciation Pulse, Psychological Safety Pulse and Belonging & Inclusion Pulse. Autonomy does not have one yet; those five items load as their own survey in a minute.

Start free →

If you are new to this, start with the whole picture: what a climate survey measures and how it differs from engagement. If what you want is the mechanics of running one, that is in how to run your first pulse survey.