How to take informed actions with qualitative survey comments

Use engagement survey comments to get to the core of employee issues to increase engagement and retention

March 24, 2022

Open-ended, qualitative comments from employee engagement surveys are often as important as the quantitative response. They not only allow organizations to collect employee feedback at scale, but also give direct insights into real-time employee problems and suggestions — providing background to the scores they have given for the survey questions asked.

As a result, by taking advantage of these open-ended survey comments HR and talent managers can take appropriate measures on areas that truly matter to the employees and enhance employee satisfaction by showing that their feedback is heard and valuable to the organization.

However, survey comments are often left unnoticed because it is not easy to organize and gather insights from hundreds and thousands of comments.

This is where SuperBeings comes in.

To access the survey comments, login to your SuperBeings dashboard and click on Comments on the left sidebar.

SuperBeings Survey Comments

SuperBeings uses state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology powered by Machine Learning to analyze every piece of qualitative feedback provided by employees. It then segregates and classifies relevant pieces of comments together into different categories, sub-categories, indexes and sentiment (tone) of the comment based on the topic and sentiment.

You can select the timeline you need by clicking on the calendar sign on top left (as shown in the image below) and filter your view by using the segments, sub-segments and sentiment options.

The image below shows the HR’s view of the total (unfiltered) comments for the last 6 months.

employee engagement survey comments 1 — SuperBeings comments overview for HRs

Select Segment, helps you filter the comments based on department, gender, location, manager, tenure and title.
Select Index helps you filter the comments based on the four primary index provided by SuperBeings - manager satisfaction, job satisfaction, wellbeing and engagement. If you have created any custom index using the Custom Pulse feature, that will also show up here.
Select Subtopic lets you filter the comments further according to the sub-driver categories for each primary index. For example, if you have used the Job Satisfaction filter, your sub topics would be career opportunities, team work, involvement etc.

How to make sense of the survey comments

As you can see in the example above, the total number of comments received here is 100 over the last 6 months. Out of the hundred, 43 comments have been given by employees from the engineering department, with a sentiment distribution of 56%, 30% 14% against positive, neutral and negative response.

If you notice a recurring pattern that employees are not happy with, you can hold 1:1 meetings with the respective team's manager to see how things can be improved.
Or, if there are any structural changes that are repeatedly suggested by employees, you can take up the issue with the leadership and see if any organization level changes can be made.
Positive comments can help you identify and reinforce positive aspects of any team and continue what works.

However, before you proceed to further interpret the data and decide the necessary course of action(s), it’s important to acknowledge the comments received.

SuperBeings lets you filter comments by acknowledgement status. You may choose to acknowledge any comment with or without a written response. The concerned employee will be notified on Slack. Even a quick acknowledgement such as —