Workplace Wellbeing Question Bank
A provenance-tracked catalogue of workplace well-being survey items drawn from the public commons. Item wording is taken from each item's primary source, and only where verified verbatim and licensed for redistribution. Topic groupings are editorial and are not the normative OWHS construct-domain codelist.
What this is
The Workplace Wellbeing Question Bank is an openly licensed, provenance-tracked catalogue of survey items for measuring well-being at work, drawn from the public commons. Each item is traced to the primary instrument it came from, its wording is taken from that primary source rather than from any secondary compilation, and its licence status is recorded so that anyone reusing it knows what they are permitted to do. The aim is a catalogue that an employer, researcher, or tool builder can trust: correct wording, honest attribution, and clear rights.
How the topic groups work
The items are arranged into topic groups purely as a browsing convenience. The grouping is our own editorial choice, grounded in widely used public frameworks: the HSE Management Standards for the work-design groups, and ONS and OECD practice for the well-being outcome groups. These groups are not the OWHS construct-domain codelist. The codelist is normative and changes only by RFC; these groups are editorial and can be rearranged without any change to the standard.
Succession, stated plainly
A well-known earlier catalogue, the Workplace Wellbeing Question Bank, was published in July 2020 by the What Works Centre for Wellbeing. The Centre announced its closure in December 2023, ceased operating on 30 April 2024, and was formally dissolved on 15 October 2024. Its question bank remains a useful and widely cited piece of work. We treated that document as informing coverage only: it helped us see which topics from the commons are worth including. It did not inform arrangement. The grouping and ordering here are our own and reproduce no prior document's selection or arrangement. We did not reuse its guidance text, and we did not copy item wording from it. Where an item is included with wording, that wording was taken from, and checked against, the original primary source. This is done out of respect for the original work and for the instrument authors, and to give the catalogue a clean licensing basis it can be maintained on.
How to read an item
Every item records its topic group, a short description of what it measures, its response scale, its primary source and citation, the copyright status of that source, whether a benchmark is available, and whether its wording has been verified. Items whose wording has been verified against an openly licensed source show that wording. Items that are catalogued but not yet verified, or whose source does not permit redistribution here, show provenance only. Nothing is paraphrased: an item either carries its exact source wording or it carries none.
Topic groups
Changelog
- v0.1.0 (2026-07-11). Initial build. 85 items across 13 editorial topic groups, arranged independently of any prior compilation. The four ONS personal well-being questions completed (earlier compilations often omitted the anxiety item) and verified verbatim against the ONS source, with current published UK benchmarks attached. WHO-5, PERMA and NHS Staff Survey items referenced by provenance only; wording is never reproduced without an open licence or the source's permission, and no permission requests have been made. See rights and licensing for the full per-source audit.