Open-ended questions

• Onboarding and off-boarding questions, targeted to new starters tenure segment, with frequency set to Once. Example: What was your favorite thing during your onboarding?
• Question collection before a company Q&A session. Example: What would you like to ask [CEO's name] in the next company all-hands meeting?
• Feedback on a company offsite. Example: What did you think of our new structure for the offsite?
• Question on an initiative in a specific country, targeting the country segment. Example: Do you have any questions for our session covering the new Danish Holiday Act?
• General company feedback. Example: What's on your mind right now that you'd like to tell us?

Frequency

Each open-ended question acts as a standalone item, therefore you can set the frequency per question. Example: Quarterly, Monthly, Once, or Always.

If you need to ensure that a specific question displays in the next survey, set its frequency to Always. Change the frequency or deactivate the question before the next survey round, as needed.

Recommendation

Avoid using too many open-ended questions, instead focus on questions that will add value. Example: Having the questions What was the best thing that happened to you this month? and What's on your mind right now that you'd like to tell us? in the same survey might feel too repetitive.

Because open-ended questions allow free text answers, focus on formulating questions in a way that welcomes qualitative feedback.

We recommend phrasing the question in a way that invites yes/no answers, or asking employees to comment a number on a scale you define in the question text. It's uncommon for such approaches to deliver clean data sets due to the free text comment nature.

Limitations

• It's not possible to control the order of the open-ended questions. They display at the end of the survey, but you can't ensure that a specific open-ended question displays after another.
• Although you can configure manager access to open-ended questions, it's not possible to do this on a per-question basis.
• Unlike score-based questions, you can't configure open-ended questions on a per-schedule basis. Use question targeting and ensure that you activate or deactivate open-ended questions as needed, when using multiple simultaneous survey schedules.
• Open-ended questions don't have a dedicated visibility threshold setting that controls how many employees must answer each open-ended question before the response is visible. However, open-ended questions comply with the overall Comment visibility thresholds settings, that control how many employees must answer the survey before surfacing comments.