Demo Guide: How to ask follow-up questions in employee surveys

Last updated October 2024.

How to ask a follow-up question in your employee surveys

Setting up a free-text follow-up question in Stribe is super easy.

1. Type your main quantitative question.
2. Click the ‘Check question’ button to see if your survey question is a great one using Stribe’s AI survey writing assistant (Optional).
3. Select ‘Yes’ for ‘Would you like to ask a free text follow up question?’
4. Type your follow-up question.
5. Click the ‘Suggest Word Tiles’ button to add Word Tiles (Optional).

Click the expand icon on the top right to view FULL SCREEN

What is a follow-up question?

Follow-up questions are free-text (qualitative), open-ended questions that come after a scored question (quantitative) in a survey to give people the opportunity to provide their feelings in their own words.

Follow-up questions are excellent for understanding people’s individual thoughts and experiences and getting a better sense of the context behind their scored responses.

Examples of good follow-up questions

Good follow-up questions are open-ended, have a neutral tone of voice, and ask for elaboration and actionable feedback.

For example:

• What challenges do you face in your current role, and how could we support you in overcoming them?
• Can you describe a time when you felt particularly motivated at work?
• What’s one thing we could do to improve your overall experience at work?

Why use follow-up questions in employee surveys?

Using follow-up questions is important for getting more context and digging deeper into the experiences of your employees.

Follow-up questions are your opportunity to gather qualitative insights alongside quantitative data – both are as important as each other – to get a full view for analysis.

Advantages of asking follow-up questions:

• Gather richer and more nuanced feedback
• Encourage employees to share insights or suggestions that may be new ideas for improvement
• Give employees a chance to share the reason behind their scores
• Show employees that you value their feedback and want to hear their thoughts
• Give employees a chance to share what’s important to them and highlight issues that you may not have considered

What if I only want to ask a free-text questions?

We wouldn’t recommend it.

When it comes to free-text questions respondents can enter large amounts of text which makes analysing the responses difficult and time-consuming.

That’s why we always recommend coupling free-text follow-up questions with scoring questions (quantitative). This allows you to get a full view when analysing results and reduces the time you will need to spend examining the free-text questions. Word Tiles also come in handy here!

Sometimes, you will have a free-text question in mind and no quantitative question to pair it with. To create a quantitative question you can edit the question to be a statement or close-ended question.

For example:

• What’s one thing we could do to improve your overall experience at work? ➡️ On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with your overall experience at work?
• Can you describe a time when you felt particularly motivated at work? ➡️ How often do you feel motivated at work?

Follow-up questions best practice and tips

When written well, follow-up questions can give you so many added insights to your employee surveys. Here are our top tips for writing your follow-up questions:

• Open-ended
• Always anonymous
• Specific, clear and simple
• Ask for elaboration and actionable feedback
• Neutral tone of voice and language

Finally, we would recommend finding a tool (like Stribe) that allows for the opportunity to continue the conversation off-the-back of follow-up question answers –  while respondents remain anonymous.

This is quite a unique feature that many of our customers find super helpful, especially when dealing with particularly tricky situations, or if they need additional context from respondents.

You can read more about how to message employees about their follow-up question answers in Stribe’s Help Centre.

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