Enhance team performance and wellbeing with strengths-focused, actionable questions.
Quick answer: The most useful wellbeing questions go beyond “How are you doing?” They ask whether someone’s day-to-day work aligns with what they do best, what one change would improve the team’s workflow, and what support would help right now. Asked regularly and paired with a strengths-based approach, these questions turn into real insight rather than a box-ticking exercise.
Understanding how your team feels about their work is vital for maintaining engagement and productivity. However, it’s equally important to explore whether their tasks align with their strengths and energise them. The questions below go beyond a generic “How are you doing?” to get at both.
Why Wellbeing Matters in Teams
Wellbeing at work isn’t just about avoiding burnout, it’s a leading indicator of almost everything else a manager cares about. Teams with low wellbeing tend to show it well before it shows up in performance figures: shorter conversations, less initiative, more people quietly doing the bare minimum. By the time it’s visible in output, it’s usually been building for a while.
A 2025 meta-analysis published in Applied Research in Quality of Life, synthesising decades of workplace studies, found strong, consistent associations between people using their strengths at work and both their performance and their wellbeing. That link matters because it means wellbeing isn’t separate from how well a team performs, it’s tied to whether people feel their work actually uses what they’re good at. A team that’s technically meeting its targets can still have a wellbeing problem if people feel unseen, mismatched to their role, or unable to influence how their work gets done.
For public sector teams in particular, wellbeing carries extra weight. Higher education, health and social care, and local government have all faced sustained pressure in recent years, tighter budgets, rising demand, near-constant reorganisation, and that pressure lands on individuals long before it shows up in a strategy document. Asking the right questions regularly, and actually acting on the answers, is one of the few levers a manager has that doesn’t require more budget or headcount.
That’s what the questions below are for. They’re not a replacement for a formal wellbeing survey, but they’re a way of catching what a survey often misses: the specific, individual signals that show up in a real conversation long before they’d ever appear in aggregate data.
13 Wellbeing Questions Worth Asking
Questions about energy and strengths
1. “How do you feel about your work each day, and does it align with what you do best?” Encourages reflection not only on emotions but on whether the work itself leverages someone’s strengths, a strong signal for engagement and job satisfaction.
2. “What part of your role gives you the most energy right now?” Surfaces where someone’s strengths are being used well, so you can look for ways to build on it.
3. “What part of your week drains you, even if you’re good at it?” Not every strength should be used all the time. This question helps spot when someone’s overloaded in an area that’s tiring them out, regardless of skill.
4. “When did you last feel really proud of something you did at work?” A specific, positive prompt that often reveals strengths someone hasn’t named for themselves yet.
Questions about support and goals
5. “Do you feel supported in achieving your goals, and how can we better leverage your strengths to help you get there?” Connects goal support with strengths, encouraging employees to identify where additional tools, training or mentorship could help them grow.
Pro-tip: Revisit team strengths regularly to ensure they align with evolving roles and goals.
6. “What support would help you most right now?” An open, low-pressure question that shows genuine interest in how someone works best, rather than assuming what they need.
7. “Is there anything getting in the way of you doing your best work?” Gives people permission to name blockers, workload, unclear priorities, unhelpful processes, before they become bigger problems.
8. “What would make the biggest difference to how you feel at work over the next month?” Keeps the focus practical and near-term, rather than an abstract wellbeing conversation.
Questions about the team and workflow
9. “What one change would you suggest to improve our team’s workflow?” Encourages team members to think creatively and share useful insights, often surfacing friction points a manager wouldn’t otherwise see.
10. “What’s going well right now, and what’s making that possible?” Asking about what’s working, not just what’s difficult, helps surface strengths in action and gives people permission to name their own wins.
11. “Do you feel like your contribution is understood by the rest of the team?” Wellbeing often dips when people feel invisible, even if they’re not overworked. This question checks for that directly.
Questions for regular check-ins
12. “On a scale of one to five, how are you feeling about work this week, and what’s behind that number?” A quick, repeatable question that works well in regular one-to-ones, the follow-up matters more than the number itself.
13. “Is there anything you’d like me to know that we haven’t talked about?” A simple, open close to a wellbeing conversation that leaves room for whatever hasn’t already come up.
By effectively implementing and acting on the answers, initiating thoughtful wellbeing practices, and continuously monitoring these efforts, your team stands to gain significantly in terms of morale, engagement, and productivity.
Pro-tip: Initiate a wellbeing survey to gather anonymous feedback on how your employees perceive current measures. Use these insights, alongside the questions above, to target specific areas needing improvement.
How Strengthify Approaches Team Wellbeing
At Strengthify, we enhance team wellbeing by focusing on what individuals and teams do best. Through our strengths-based approach, we help organisations create supportive, high-performing environments where people feel valued, engaged, and energised.
Here’s how Strengthify can support your team:
- Discovery Workshops: Introduce teams to the strengths-based approach, helping individuals identify their unique strengths and understand how to leverage them for collective success.
- Management Development Programme: Equip leaders with the skills and tools to embed a strengths-focused culture, fostering trust, resilience, and sustainable team wellbeing.
- Strengthify Engage: The reinforcement layer that helps managers keep strengths visible in everyday conversations, so wellbeing check-ins connect to real, ongoing habits rather than a single survey moment.
If your organisation is grappling with issues such as employee burnout, our tailored framework uses evidence-based positive psychology methods to counteract these challenges. By empowering managers to recognise, celebrate, and utilise individual strengths, we help teams build confidence, improve collaboration, and create an atmosphere of growth and wellbeing.
Pro-tip: Tools from Strengthify can help keep strengths at the forefront of everyday conversations, driving engagement and performance over time, not just at survey time.
Are you eager to harness your team’s strengths for lasting impact? Explore more about Strengthify’s approach.
Related Reading
How to Improve Team Communication with a Shared Language The Role of Managers in Building a Wellbeing-Focused Workplace