Change readiness survey questions to ask employees

To measure change readiness before a reorganisation, ask the people affected a short set of questions covering each ADKAR stage (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement), then add questions on trust in leadership and on how much room people have left for change. Use a validated scale such as ORIC when you need a score to track over time, and open questions when you need to know what to fix. The questions below are ready to copy.

What should a change readiness survey measure?

Readiness means people understand the change, want it to work, know what it asks of them and have the time and support to do it. Prosci’s ADKAR model splits this into five stages, starting with understanding why the change is needed and ending with sustaining the new way so people don’t slide back.

The order matters when you read the results. Prosci’s guide to using ADKAR points out that when Knowledge scores are low, more training is not always the answer. Check first whether Awareness and Desire are there. A finance team that doesn’t accept the case for a shared service centre will sit through the system training and still not use it.

Two things sit outside ADKAR and decide a lot. One is whether people trust the managers and leaders running the change. The other is capacity. In a Gartner survey of 473 HR leaders in July 2024, 73% said their employees were fatigued from change and 74% said their managers were not equipped to lead it. A readiness survey that skips both will miss the reason half its scores are low.

Change management survey questions for employees, by ADKAR stage

Run these before the announcement if you can, or in the first fortnight after it. For a scored survey, pick two or three from each group and turn them into agree or disagree statements. For an interview or a set of open text boxes, five or six of the open questions go further than twenty items.

Awareness: do people know why?

1. In your own words, what is changing?
2. Why do you think the organisation is making this change?
3. What have you heard about it so far, and where did you hear it?
4. As far as you know, how will it affect your own role?

Desire: do people want it to work?

5. What would make this change worth it for you?
6. What worries you most about it?
7. What might you lose if it goes ahead?
8. What are people in your team saying about it among themselves?

Knowledge: do people know what to do?

9. What do you still need to know to do your job after the change?
10. Where would you go with a question about the new way of working?
11. What has the briefing or training so far left out?

Ability: can people actually do it?

12. Which part of your daily work do you expect to be hardest under the new set-up?
13. What would you need to work the new way with confidence?
14. What could stop you working the new way on a busy day?

Reinforcement: will it stick?

15. Think about the last big change here. Did it stick?
16. What would show you the organisation is serious about this one?
17. What would make it easy to slip back to the old way?

Trust and leadership

18. How much do you trust the people leading this change to tell you how things really are?
19. How has your manager talked about the change with you so far?
20. If part of the change was not working for you, who would you tell?
21. What do you think leadership may be overlooking?

Capacity

22. What else is changing in your work at the moment?
23. What would need to stop or slow down to make room for this?
24. How has your workload been over the last month?

Questions 20 and 22 to 24 are also your early warning for fatigue. We cover what to look for in why change fatigue happens and how to detect it early.

When should you use a validated readiness scale like ORIC?

ORIC, short for Organizational Readiness for Implementing Change, comes from Shea, Jacobs, Esserman, Bruce and Weiner (2014) in Implementation Science. The final measure has ten statements in two subscales of five: change commitment (do we want to do this?) and change efficacy (do we believe we can?). People rate each on a five-point scale from disagree to agree. The statements are written about the group, so people answer for “people who work here” rather than for themselves.

Use ORIC when you need a number you can compare: across sites, before and after a decision, or in a report to a programme board. It is short and has published psychometric testing behind it, which a home-made scale does not.

Know its limits. The authors say further work is needed to test its convergent, discriminant and predictive validity, and the early studies used convenience samples of students. More practically, a score tells you readiness is low in a depot. It cannot tell you whether that is because the last rota change was reversed after three weeks or because nobody has explained this one yet. Those two depots need different responses.

Most teams end up combining the two. Use the scale for the trend line and a few open questions from the list above for the reasons.

How do I measure change readiness before a big reorganisation?

Ask early enough to change the plan. Gartner’s ReimagineHR session on workplace change recommends gauging employee readiness to decide the timing of a change. That only works if the results arrive before the go-live date is fixed.

Ask everyone affected, including the front line. Managers are usually further along than their teams, because they heard about the change sooner and have had longer to think about it. A reorganisation that looks ready from the leadership offsite can look very different on a night shift.

Read the results by team. An average readiness score of 3.6 can hide one team at 4.5 and another at 2.4, and the second team is the one that will decide whether the reorganisation works. Look at which ADKAR stage is lowest in each team, because that tells you what to do next: more explanation for low Awareness, more listening for low Desire, more practice and cover for low Ability.

Tell people what you heard and what you will do about it. If the capacity questions show a team already carrying two other changes, say what you will pause or move. Asking and then changing nothing is a quick way to lower readiness for the next change.

Ask again after the change goes live. The same questions, asked a few weeks later, show whether readiness turned into use. See our guide to a post go-live pulse survey for the follow-up set.

Why do the open answers matter most?

The answer to “what worries you most about it?” is usually the most useful line in a readiness survey and the hardest to act on, because written answers to survey boxes tend to be short. A follow-up question (“what makes you think that?”, “can you give an example?”) is where the actionable detail turns up.

Spradley handles that part with interviews. Each employee gets a one-on-one AI interview, by text or voice, invited by email or Slack and answered on their own phone or computer. The interviewer follows up on each answer, and the report groups what people said into themes with the quotes behind them, so you can compare departments. Numbers and ratings are never shown for fewer than five people, and a privacy judge checks each written finding. Read more on our change management page, and if trust is the weak spot in your results, start with how to measure psychological safety.

Frequently asked questions

Key terms

change readiness

How prepared people are for a change: whether they understand it, want it to work, know what it asks of them and have the time and support to do it.

ADKAR

Prosci’s model of individual change in five stages: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement.

ORIC

Organizational Readiness for Implementing Change, a ten-item scale published by Shea and colleagues in 2014. It measures change commitment and change efficacy on a five-point scale.

change fatigue

The apathy and frustration that set in when the changes landing on a person or team outrun their capacity to absorb them.

minimum group size

The smallest number of responses a group needs before its results are shown. Five is a common default; smaller groups are hidden or combined with a larger one.