Employee benefits in healthcare: questions to ask before open enrollment

Employee benefits in healthcare decisions set the tone for a year of recruiting and retention, yet most hospitals and clinics never formally ask staff what they want from the mix.

A full 59% of US healthcare workers said they were likely to look for a new role in the next year, while the employers surveyed alongside them put that number at just 39%, according to The Harris Poll's 2026 Healthcare Workforce Barometer.

A healthcare employee benefits survey closes that awareness gap before it costs a unit a charge nurse or a clinic a front-desk lead.

This guide is a feedback tool, not benefits administration or insurance advice. Use the sample questions below to learn what clinical and admin staff actually value, then hand plan design and compliance decisions to your broker or carrier.

A hospital employee benefits satisfaction survey works best when it is broken into five short categories instead of one long form. Shift workers, clinical staff, and administrative teams each have different schedules and different stakes in the answer, so the question bank below is organized to make comparison easy later.

Standard rating questions tend to show that staff rate every benefit as important, which does not help you set a budget. A ranking or trade-off question forces a real choice instead. 

SurveyMonkey's employee benefits solution includes a built-in ranking format that asks staff to rank healthcare benefits such as vision coverage, a wellness program, a flexible spending account, and telemedicine services in order of importance.

For a sharper read on priorities, use a MaxDiff question, which forces respondents to pick a most-important and least-important option from a short list rather than rating everything the same.

SurveyMonkey's guide to MaxDiff analysis gives this HR example: "Which of the following benefits is most important and least important to you? Health insurance coverage, retirement plan contributions, paid time off, professional development funding."

Swap in options relevant to a healthcare workforce, such as shift differential pay, tuition reimbursement, or on-site childcare, and run it through the MaxDiff feature prioritization solution to get an automated, stack-ranked list.

Even well-designed benefits fail if staff do not know they exist. In SurveyMonkey's own research on shaping total rewards with employee insights, 23% of employees said they discovered a benefit only after they could have used it, most often with fertility and family-building benefits and flexible spending accounts.

Ask healthcare staff questions like these:

Satisfaction questions tell you where a current plan is falling short before it shows up in an exit interview.

Ask staff to rate their satisfaction with medical coverage, dental and vision, retirement contributions, and paid time off, and segment the results by role so a clinical floor and a billing department are not averaged into one misleading number.

Timing complaints are common and measurable. Namely research showing 31% of employees give their employer no better than a "C" for how they handled open enrollment.

Ask staff whether they had enough time to make an informed choice, whether information sessions fit around their shift schedule, and what would have made the process easier.

Segment every question above by shift (day, night, weekend), role (clinical versus administrative), and tenure.

The same Harris Poll report found that 51% of healthcare employers now name burnout and emotional fatigue as the top reason employees leave, a 15-point jump from the prior year.

Benefit dissatisfaction concentrated in one unit or shift is an early signal worth catching before it turns into a resignation.

Each question category above maps to a decision your organization is already trying to make. The table below connects the two.

Benefits and compensation are not the only drivers of healthcare turnover, but they are among the few an HR team can act on directly within a single budget cycle. Pairing that budget decision with real staff data, rather than last year's renewal numbers alone, is what turns a benefits survey into a retention tool.

Order questions from easy to sensitive: start with which benefits staff currently use, move into priority and trade-off questions, then awareness, then satisfaction, and close with timing and an open comment box.

Keep any matrix question short, since healthcare staff often complete surveys on a shared device between patients, and a long grid is the first thing people abandon.

Make the survey easy to reach for staff who do not sit at a computer.

A QR code at a nurses' station or break room, a kiosk mode on a shared tablet, or a text link reaches shift workers that an email-only survey misses.

For office-based admin staff, distribute through tools they already use, such as the Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations, so the survey shows up where they are already working.

Keep the survey anonymous so clinical and admin staff feel safe naming a plan or a provider network that is not working, and tell them up front how the results will be used.

SurveyMonkey's own research on HR trends found that over half (53%) of employees believe companies should focus more on their wellbeing, and over a third (35%) say their leadership does not understand employee needs.

Closing that gap starts with showing staff their feedback changed something.

SurveyMonkey is the world's most popular platform for surveys and forms, built for business and loved by users. Start from the Employee Benefits Planning Survey template to drop these questions into a ready-made structure, or build your own open enrollment check-in using the categories above alongside SurveyMonkey's open enrollment questions guide in the Learn library.

Remember the guardrail: this question set is for gathering feedback, not for administering benefits or giving insurance advice. Once you know what clinical and admin staff actually prioritize, bring that data to your broker or carrier to shape next year's package.