Written Comments

Most organizational surveys include some form of open-ended question.  The resulting written comments can be a valuable source of information for the organization, providing helpful insights into why employees hold certain attitudes and perceptions.  They can indicate how strongly people feel about something.  Comments may also contain suggestions for how issues raised by the survey could be addressed.

Questar can include as many comment questions as you like (one of our clients provides over 40 opportunities for employees to say what’s on their minds!), although we recommend limiting the number to three or fewer.  Even then, the sheer number of comments that can result from an employee survey can be overwhelming to an organization – especially for top leaders looking at results for the entire company.

Questar offers several options to make dealing with comments easier:

Coding:  Questar can code your comments.  We develop a coding scheme (taxonomy) based on a small sample of the comments, and then verify it against a broader sample to ensure the categories are comprehensive, precise and mutually exclusive.  Once the taxonomy is finalized, all comments are coded.  Comments can then be reported by category.

Self-coding:  Questar’s system can allow for self-coding of comments, i.e., respondents select the category into which the comment falls from a pre-determined list via a drop-down box.  Comments can then be reported by category.

Cleaning:  Comments can be reported verbatim or cleaned to remove proper names, profanity, etc., prior to reporting.

Length:  We can limit the length of the comment to a specified number of characters to force employees to be judicious in their writing.

Analysis:  Questar can also provide a written comment analysis for the overall company and/or the major company divisions.  This is a consultant-written report providing an in-depth analysis of your comments by major topic area, identifying critical sub-themes.

 

Comments from paper surveys are transcribed and merged with online comments.  With multilingual surveys, comments are translated to match the reporting language.  However, comments may also be reported in the respondent’s original language. 

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