Employee Survey Tips: Should You Use Open-Ended Questions in Employee Surveys?
If you’re looking to truly understand how your employees feel and why they feel that way, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Open-ended questions bring depth and nuance that purely numerical ratings often miss. Here’s a closer look at how you should be using free-text feedback in your surveys.
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’re looking to truly understand how your employees feel and why they feel that way, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Open-ended questions bring depth and nuance that purely numerical ratings often miss.
1. Text Adds Essential Context
A score of 4/5 or 8/10 can tell you things are going well, but it can’t tell you why. A single comment, however, can reveal specific details:
- What made a project successful?
- Why do employees love or dislike a new policy?
- Which leadership behaviors inspire teams to go above and beyond?
These personal anecdotes and stories resonate more strongly with managers and executives than raw data points ever could. Employees’ own words capture emotional undertones, highlight specific pain points, and even generate new ideas.
My rule of thumb is that one comment can be worth ten times a numerical score by offering the “why” behind the “what.”
2. Make Text Input Part of Every Question
Many organizations tack on one or two open-ended questions at the end of the survey. The classic example is something we call the magic wand question.
If you had a magic wand, what’s the one thing you would change about [your organization]?
While this can still yield insights, it tends to lead to responses about either the physical environment (since it's directly in front of you!), or short-term events that are fresh in the memory. Virtually no-one will ever answer this question with thoughtful comments on innovation culture, or reflect on autonomy in decision making.
A better approach is to pair a text field with each rating question. And it's even better if that question asks not for general comment, but rather why the user gave the score they did. If someone chooses a low score on “Work-Life Balance,” for example, it's incredibly useful to learn that their workload has doubled recently due to a key project ramping up.
However you must always keep it optional and make this obvious. Not everyone will want to provide commentary for every question, and forcing it will dramatically affect participation rates. Make sure to clarify that comments are welcome but not mandatory. This encourages those who have strong opinions to speak up, without pressuring others to type filler responses and pollute the data.
3. Reduce Redundancy in Follow-Ups
It’s common practice to host focus groups or send out additional surveys when you discover a low-scoring area. The problem is, this adds time and administrative overhead, and it risks survey fatigue among employees.
If you already collect thorough open-ended feedback, you often have all the context you need right there in the initial survey results. Instead of scrambling for more data, you can jump straight into root-cause analysis and action planning. And if certain areas do need a deeper dive, your initial open-ended responses can guide more targeted discussions, making follow-ups far more efficient.
Use a purpose-built system like Sunbeam to analyse the text and turn it into action.
Sunbeam
Sunbeam is a feedback analytics platform designed to make working with open-ended, text-based feedback as straightforward as working with scores. Too many organizations overlook the rich insights hidden in qualitative responses, and Sunbeam aims to fix that. By combining deep industry expertise with cutting-edge AI, Sunbeam makes it simple to analyze and act on text feedback, ultimately helping HR teams unlock the full potential of employee engagement data.