When we start working with an organization to conduct an employee engagement survey, we often find managers and HR teams very eager to ask open-ended questions about each variable in the organization. After all, open-ended questions provide color and detail to qualitative data, right?
We observe this desire mostly in companies that will conduct a survey for the first time or will conduct a survey again after a long period of time (2-3 years). Because they see the survey as an important opportunity to get a comprehensive picture of what employees think, they want to collect more information whenever possible. While collecting more qualitative data is a noble and understandable desire, there are indeed good reasonsnot to "use" more than two open-ended questions.
SAMPLE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT SURVEY
In a previous blog post, I shared all the reasons why open-ended questions are so valuable. To date, with our partner Decision Wise, we have helped clients around the world conduct employee engagement surveys, and our data has shown us that it is good practice to collect qualitative data in employee engagement surveys with comment questions. With this in mind, why not consider asking open-ended comment questions after each category in the survey? If you have grouped your questions into categories or dimensions such asWork, supervisor or communication , it makes sense to ask employees to provide specific feedback using open-ended questions for each of these areas. However, this approach does not yield the expected results. This is because companies using this method have significantly longer survey completion times (each additional open-ended question increases the completion time by approximately 2 minutes), which dramatically reduces participation and completion rates. Asking one question after each dimension leads to rater fatigue and dropping out of the survey, so it does not increase the amount of qualitative data.
Instead, use only two open-ended questions at the end of the questionnaire, taking into account the following suggestions.
In best practices, regardless of categories or question order, the survey ends with two general questions, one focused on the strengths of the organization and the other asking about possible improvements. Often, there are things about strengths and improvements that employees already have in mind and we know that if they have strong ideas about them they will list them there. This also provides a space for other feedback that may not have been asked for in the quantitative part of the survey.
At the very end of the engagement survey, we found that organizations that used only two open-ended questions had a good survey completion time (around 8 minutes for a total of 50 questions) and significantly high participation rates. Moreover, these questions lead to an extensive collection of additional insights that cannot be captured by quantitative data alone.
Two open-ended Employee Engagement questions that we like to use:
As you prepare to launch this year's employee engagement survey, take a look at last year's structure. If you have asked more than two open-ended questions or have completely failed to collect qualitative data, try using two this year.
Please share with us your experiences with using open-ended questions in employee surveys. If you have any open-ended comment questions you would like to suggest, I would love to hear them.
Bahar Sen