Employee Survey Tips: Skipping Questions

I spent seven years leading methodology and data science for employee engagement surveys at Peakon and Workday. Over that time, I’ve worked with everyone from tiny tech startups to massive retail brands, mining operations, football clubs, and even government entities. Now that I’m no longer directly involved in survey creation, I can share my honest thoughts on the most effective ways to run employee surveys.

See the complete set of tips & tricks for running employee engagement surveys.

If you run an employee survey that allows individual questions to be skipped (which it should!) then you might wonder if this has an impact on representation or margin of error. This is what to expect from employees skipping questions.

Scale Questions

On rated scale questions, it's normal for no more than 2% of questions to be skipped. The only time I've ever seen significant deviation from this figure is when a question was not applicable to a proportion of the workforce. This can happen if employees who are required to be in-office are asked about flexible working, for example.

I built alerts that would automatically detect questions where the skip rate remained significantly above 1%, as this was almost always a sign that a survey could be improved.

You should avoid asking irrelevant or inappropriate questions wherever possible, otherwise you may increase the risk of survey fatigue.

Comments

If you collect text comments in addition to scale answers (which I highly recommend), you should expect much higher skip rates on the optional comment component. The exact skip rate will depend upon the topic of the question, the survey frequency, company culture and other factors, and I don't think there is any simple rule of thumb on this side of the data.

Open-ended Questions

On fully open-ended questions, e.g. the magic wand question, skip rates are always higher, and it can be normal for 75% of respondents to choose not to provide feedback.