Last updated July 2026
Most employee surveys tell you what people think, but not why they feel that way.
You might discover that engagement has dropped, communication is rated poorly, or wellbeing scores have declined, but without additional context it’s difficult to know what action to take.
That’s where follow-up questions make all the difference.
Well-crafted follow-up questions give employees the opportunity to explain their answers, share examples, suggest improvements, and raise issues you may never have thought to ask about.
Instead of leaving HR teams and managers guessing, they provide the insight needed to prioritise actions, build trust, and create lasting improvements.
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Setting up a free-text follow-up question in Stribe is super easy.
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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.
Good follow-up questions are open-ended, have a neutral tone of voice, and ask for elaboration and actionable feedback.
For example:
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:
We were looking for something that would level us up and help us achieve great survey engagement - that was Stribe. 
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:
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:
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.
About the author
Lucy Harvey, CEO at Stribe, has 11+ years’ experience in purpose-driven leadership roles across health, wellbeing, internal communications, employee engagement, and marketing. She is passionate about creating workplaces where people are happy, fulfilled, and feel comfortable and safe to talk.
