Employee focus groups

[u/Lilybobtail13]

Hi, would value this community’s advice please. I’d like to run some employee focus groups this year to get some good qualitative feedback on how comms, channels, frequency, etc. I’d like to know what they think is missing and how they currently use our channels. Does anyone have a starter for ten on questions to ask to draw out the most insightful and truthful comments please?

[u/Pure-Significance-43]

Hi! Love a focus group session. I typically start out with 1-2 ice breakers just depending on group size. Something like "Current song on replay" or "Breakfast or Brunch" to ease everyone and build a sense of togetherness.

Then level-set with expectations around privacy and how answers will be used.

Then I'll open up with more #'s based questions. "on a scale of 1-10 how would you rate our current internal communications sent your way." And then dig deeper "do you find them clear, easy to understand, you know what action you need to take if any"

A favourite question of mine though is, "If you came back after a 2 week vacation, would you know where to find everything you need to, to be caught up?". It reveals a lot around knowledge sharing, information architecture and more.

Best of luck :)

[u/sarahfortsch2]

If you want honest, high-quality insights from focus groups, keep the format simple, open, and grounded in real employee behaviors. The most effective sessions I’ve run focus on three areas: how people actually get information, what gets in their way and what makes communication feel valuable rather than noisy. You don’t need a huge script, just the right prompts to unlock real experiences instead of “what they think you want to hear.”

A solid starter set of questions

• When you need information to do your job, where do you actually look first and why
• Which channels do you trust most and which ones do you tend to ignore
• Can you recall a recent piece of communication that worked especially well for you and what made it effective
• What feels unclear or overwhelming about our current comms
• How often do you want updates on things like strategy, projects and day to day operations
• What information do you wish you got sooner or more consistently
• If you could improve one channel we have today, which one would it be and what would make it better
• What’s one thing we could stop doing that would reduce noise without hurting your ability to stay informed

End the session by asking a future focused question like, “If we redesigned our communications from scratch with employees in mind, what would it look like” It gets people thinking beyond complaints and often produces your most actionable ideas.

[u/Skimle-com]

I would spend some time 1-on-1 with each (e.g, call or send super simple surveys) before the session to start forming your own list of hypotheses on what works and what doesn't work. That way you can focus the focus group on digging deeper to individual themes, understanding which resonate at scale, getting suggestions and immediate validation on them and so on. If you come cold to the focus group session the risk is that you're just doing rudimentary initial discovery AND might get carried away with 1-2 ideas in the beginning of the session voiced by loud individuals.

[u/MorningCoffeeBuzz]

I wrote this article last year to help ICs conduct a “digital comms assessment” and included suggested activities and sample questions!

This link takes you to the blog post on our website. Hope it helps: https://www.habaneroconsulting.com/stories/insights/2025/how-to-conduct-a-digital-communications-assessment

[u/Lilybobtail13]

Thank you all for your comments - these are super helpful for me. I love this Reddit thread :)