In a Supermood survey, you can ask your employees a variety of questions. To help you make the best choices, you'll find here all the types of questions available, their benefits and their applications.
In this article:
Open questions (comments)
Open-ended questions are the most familiar: they are simply answered with a comment. They allow you to gather qualitative data.
Benefits
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Context: They allow teams to provide context to understand a field situation or their perspective on a topic.
Useful ideas: They are a good source of ideas to overcome the challenges your teams are facing.
Bonus: As they read the comments, managers can react on the spot.
Limitations
Lengthy analysis: Since open-ended questions are qualitative (and not quantitative), their analysis is rich but more complex and above all longer - although it is made easier by the detection of themes and tones via our analysis tools.
Lack of tracking: It will not be possible to obtain an evolution of feelings over time or a benchmark.
Low participation: Answering an open-ended question takes more time and thought. Given their optional nature, it is common to obtain a lower participation rate for open-ended questions.
💡 Pro tip
Open-ended questions can provide a lot of qualitative material. Therefore, we recommend that you limit the number of open questions to two per survey to allow for a smooth analysis. |
Closed questions (scores)
These are the ones that are answered with a score. They provide quantitative data that is easy to track and compare.
Benefits
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Score assessment: They allow you to identify the nature of the score (good/bad), and to benefit from the heat map's features.
Benchmark: By using the Supermood library's closed-ended questions, you give yourself the opportunity to obtain benchmarks to better understand where you stand.
More participation: Finally, on the participant side, they are quick and easy to answer.
Limitations
Lack of context: By nature, closed questions do not allow participants to provide more depth to their answer. Care must be taken to frame the question to avoid misinterpretation (Phrasing a closed-ended question).
💡 Pro tip
The choice of your question's scale is very important. We advise you to use the 1 to 5 scale as much as possible - to make it easier for the employees when taking the survey, and for the management team when analyzing it.
⇒ Learn more: How to choose a rating scale |
Closed questions, with comments activated
These hybrid questions combine the best of both worlds: they are first answered with a score, and then you have the option to add a comment to give context to that score.
Benefits
Limitations |
Lengthy analysis: While enabling comments is a great way to add depth to your team's responses, be sure to use this feature sparingly to avoid an overly arduous analysis.
💡 Pro tip
Given its benefits, this feature can be a victim of its own success and lose importance when overused. You may want to reserve it for broad questions that deserve context or a hot topic for which you are looking for action ideas, for example. |
MCQs
Multiple-choice questions consist of a list of checkboxes. These questions are very quick to set up and fill in, but provide less material for analysis.
Benefits
Limitations
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💡 Pro tip
Avoid the MCQ format for questions related to employees' feelings. A closed question, with a scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree", will simplify employee positioning and give you more possibilities for analysis (comparison by team, evolution, benchmark, etc.). |
Yes/No questions
Yes/No questions are simply predefined MCQs: the choice labels are automatically filled in ("Yes" and "No"), and the number of allowed answers is set to 1.
Benefits
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Limitations
Weak analysis: You will find the same limitations as for the MCQs in general: as the results obtained are not scores, it is not possible to compare them to overall scores or between different demographic groups. Also, no evolution over time or benchmark will be available.
💡 Pro tip
As with the MCQs, it is possible to modify a Yes/No question. For example, you can add an "I have no opinion" option if it is relevant. |