When we begin working with an organization to conduct an employee engagement survey, we often see a burning eagerness to ask open-ended questions about every single variable in the organization. After all, open-ended questions provide color and nuance to qualitative data—right? Though collecting more qualitative data is a noble desire, there are good reasons to use no more than two open-ended questions.
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In my last blog, I advocated all the reasons why open-ended questions are so valuable. We’ve helped clients all over the world run employee engagement surveys, and advocate the collection of qualitative data through comment questions. How about asking an open-ended comment question after each section in the survey? If you have grouped your questions into categories or dimensions such as the Job, Supervisor, or Communications, it makes some sense to ask employees to give specific feedback for each of these areas using an open-ended question.
However, this approach does not provide the results one might hope. In fact, surveys using this method have significantly higher completion times (each additional open-ended question generally increases completion time by about two minutes) and significantly lower participation rates. Asking a question after each dimension leads to rater fatigue, survey abandonment, and does not increase the amount of qualitative feedback.
Instead, use two open-ended questions at the end of the survey.
Regardless of categories or question order, the survey concludes with two general questions: one focusing on the strengths of an organization and one asking for potential improvements. Usually, employees already have thoughts that come to the top of their mind regarding strengths and improvements and we find that they will list them here if they feel strongly about them. This also provides them an outlet for any other feedback that may not have been solicited in the quantitative portion of the survey.
We’ve found that those organizations using two open-ended questions at the end of the engagement survey experience good survey completion times (about 8 minutes with 50 total questions) and a significantly higher participation rate. What’s more, these questions lead to extensive additional insights that would not have been gleaned by quantitative data alone.
Here are two open-ended questions we like to use:
- What are the greatest strengths of our organization?
- What are the areas that need the most improvement in our organization?
When you’re getting ready to start this year’s employee survey, take a look at last year’s structure. If you asked more than two open-ended questions—or if you failed to collect qualitative data entirely—try using two this year instead.
Let us know your experiences using open-ended questions on employee surveys. Do you have some good open-ended comment questions that you would recommend?
