Focus group or questionnaire: which one actually shows you your psychosocial risks?

Tuesday, 4 p.m., in a meeting room at an 80-employee company in Sherbrooke. The HR director has gathered eight people around the table for a focus group on workplace climate. She opens with her first question: "How is everyone finding the workload right now?" Four seconds of silence. Then someone answers: "It's fine. Busy, but that's normal in September." Three people nod. The session will run 90 minutes and produce four pages of very, very polite notes.

She did nothing wrong. She used an excellent tool in a setting where it could not do its best work.

Now that identifying psychosocial risks (PSR) is a requirement for every Quebec employer, the question HR managers ask us most often is no longer "should we measure?" but "how do we measure?" Focus group or questionnaire? Both methods are credible. They simply answer different questions.

What a focus group does better than anything else

A focus group gives you the "why." A questionnaire will tell you that recognition scores low on the operations team. A well-run discussion will tell you it scores low because the only time leadership walks the production floor is when something has gone wrong. That kind of nuance does not fit in a checkbox.

This is exactly the logic behind the Grille d'identification de risques psychosociaux du travail developed, tested and validated by Quebec's Institut national de santé publique (INSPQ), an instrument built to be used in interviews. But the INSPQ (2021) is explicit about one condition: access to the Grid depends on completing roughly 12 hours of training and passing summative assessments, precisely because the validity of the ratings depends on the interviewing skills of the person running the session. In other words, a focus group is a specialist method, not an upgraded team meeting.

The conditions that make it work

Two factors determine the quality of what a group session actually produces.

Speaking up, first. Data from Mental Health Research Canada (2025), based on a survey of 5,008 employed adults across the country, shows that 52% of workers have experienced challenges that affected their work, but only 33% told their employer. Naming your own overload out loud is not a small thing to ask. That is exactly what neutral external facilitation, a clear confidentiality framework and groups composed without reporting lines are for: what stays unsaid in an ordinary team meeting comes out in a properly structured focus group.

Consistency, second. Notes taken in March and notes taken in October by a different facilitator, using different questions, cannot be compared. An interview protocol designed by experts, applied the same way from one period to the next and recorded in one place, solves that. Because Act 27 compliance does not hinge on a single snapshot: it hinges on an ongoing, documented process.

What a questionnaire does well, with one condition

A questionnaire plays on different ground: reach. It covers the entire workforce rather than a sample, it protects anonymity, and it produces quantified data you can break down by team and compare from one period to the next. That is what allows Quebec research to build solid portraits. The Enquête québécoise sur des conditions de travail, d'emploi et de santé et de sécurité du travail (IRSST, INSPQ and Institut de la statistique du Québec, 2011) used validated scales to measure that roughly 18% of Quebec workers showed a high level of psychological distress, and that more than 7% reported depressive symptoms they linked to their work.

The condition fits in one sentence: a questionnaire is only as good as its questions. Questions improvised in-house measure how polite your employees are, not how exposed your organization is. Questions written by workplace psychological health experts measure recognized risk factors, with wording designed to invite an honest answer rather than the expected one. That is precisely the difference between a satisfaction survey and a diagnostic.

How we work at Mentalia

We chose to start with the focus group. It produces the richest material for understanding what is actually happening inside an organization, and it is what lets you build measures that hold up rather than generic action plans. Our sessions run on scientifically validated instruments and on protocols designed by workplace psychological health specialists, which simplifies the process for you while improving the quality of the answers you get.

By late 2026, we are adding questionnaires to the platform. Organizations will then be able to use both, depending on what their situation calls for: the depth of a focus group, the reach of a questionnaire, or the two together. The results will live in the same place, in the same file.

What remains, in both cases, is the trail you leave behind. A CNESST inspector does not ask whether you ran a nice process: they ask what you identified, what you put in place, who owns it, by what date, and what it produced. Files scattered across a spreadsheet, an inbox and a set of meeting notes do not answer that question. A centralized platform, where the collection, results by team, period-over-period evolution, measures, owners and time-stamped history all live in one place, answers it in a few clicks.

Structuring your PSR process is not another line in the budget: it is an investment in the health of your teams and in the strength of your file.

Not sure which approach fits your organization? Book a free 30-minute consultation with our team.

Sources

• Institut national de santé publique du Québec, Risques psychosociaux au travail : de l'identification à la prévention (Grille d'identification de risques psychosociaux du travail, updated 2021): link

• Mental Health Research Canada, in partnership with Workplace Strategies for Mental Health and Canada Life, Mental Health in the Workplace 2025 (survey of 5,008 employed adults, June 2025): link

• IRSST, INSPQ and Institut de la statistique du Québec, Enquête québécoise sur des conditions de travail, d'emploi et de santé et de sécurité du travail (EQCOTESST), summary (2011): link

• CNESST, Risques psychosociaux liés au travail (employer obligations): link