Best questions for employee survey about communication effectiveness

Here are some of the best questions for an employee survey about communication effectiveness, along with simple tips on how to craft them. If you need to build a conversational survey fast, you can generate your own with Specific in seconds.

Best open-ended questions for employee survey about communication effectiveness

Open-ended questions invite employees to share honest, specific thoughts about workplace communication—helping you uncover obstacles, gaps, and hidden ideas. These are your go-to when you want richer context and unique perspectives, not just “yes/no” or ratings.

When leadership and staff have such open channels, it directly impacts clarity, trust, and engagement. In fact, 86% of employees and executives point to ineffective internal communication as a top cause of workplace failures [1]. Good open-ended prompts can surface the root issues quickly.

1. What information do you wish you received more regularly from leadership?

2. Can you describe a recent situation where workplace communication was especially effective or ineffective?

3. How do you typically find out about important changes or updates within the company?

4. What makes it challenging for you to share feedback or concerns with your team or manager?

5. How could our company improve how information is shared between teams or departments?

6. In your experience, what channels (email, chat, meetings, etc.) work best for important communication—and why?

7. What makes you feel most “in the loop” or “out of the loop” at work?

8. If you could change one thing about our company’s internal communication, what would it be?

9. How do communication practices here compare to other workplaces you’ve experienced?

10. Can you recall a time when unclear communication led to an avoidable problem or mistake?

Try using these or generate a set tailored to your context with an AI survey maker like Specific.

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for employee survey about communication effectiveness

Single-select multiple-choice questions shine when you want to quantify views, compare trends, or kickstart conversations. Sometimes it’s easier for people to choose from concise options—especially if you follow up to dig deeper later. The data here is quick to chart or segment, and excellent for pulling quick insights.

Here are three strong examples:

Question: How well do you feel informed about company news and updates?

• Very well informed

• Somewhat informed

• Rarely informed

• Not at all informed

Question: Which channel do you prefer for receiving important work-related information?

• Email

• Team chat (e.g., Slack, Teams)

• Company meetings

• Manager updates

• Other

Question: How clear are the directions or requests you typically receive from management?

• Always clear

• Usually clear

• Sometimes unclear

• Often unclear

When to follow up with "why?" We always recommend following up with “why?” after a single-select—especially when someone picks a negative or surprising answer. For example, if an employee answers “Rarely informed,” you can add a follow-up: “Why don’t you feel well informed about company news?” This uncovers the real reasons and details, rather than just surface-level stats.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Including “Other” as a choice allows employees to give input outside your pre-set categories. It’s essential when the survey audience might use communication tools (or have preferences) not captured in your list. Follow-up questions here can yield fresh, unexpected insights that may even shape future communication plans.

Should you include an NPS question for employee survey about communication effectiveness?

NPS—Net Promoter Score—isn’t just for measuring customer loyalty. In an internal context, it helps you gauge how employees feel about recommending your workplace communication. For instance, you can ask: “How likely are you to recommend our company’s internal communication to a friend or colleague?” Employees reply using a scale of 0-10. You can then follow up, asking passives and detractors what’s missing.

Using a communication NPS lets you benchmark improvement over time. Since 69% of employees say employer communication affects their decision to stay or leave [1], tracking this metric provides a signal of retention risk and culture health. Want to try it? There’s a ready-to-use NPS survey for communication effectiveness built into Specific.

The power of follow-up questions

Follow-up questions are where conversational surveys truly outperform static forms. Specific’s automated AI follow-up feature (learn about smart followup logic) is key — it dynamically asks clarifying or probing questions based on an employee’s answer. This not only gets us richer feedback, but also feels natural and engaging to the respondent. Instead of chasing ambiguous answers with post-survey emails, the AI clarifies in real time.

Let’s put that in perspective:

• Employee: “Sometimes updates are missed.”

• AI follow-up: “Can you give an example of a missed update, and how it affected your work?”

Without that follow-up, you’d be left guessing what “sometimes updates are missed” means. Almost every team has felt that pain at some point.

How many followups to ask? Most situations are well-served by 2–3 follow-up questions per open-ended prompt. That’s long enough to dig out the real why, but not so many that it annoys people. Specific lets you set the right intensity—and even allows the AI to move on if the answer is already clear.

This makes it a conversational survey—not just a robotic checklist—inviting genuine two-way feedback rather than static data gathering.

Easy analysis with AI: Even with all this rich, unstructured text, Specific’s analysis capabilities streamline the review process—read about AI analysis of employee survey responses, where the AI clusters key themes and surfaces insights instantly.

Try generating a survey with these automated follow-ups to see the difference. It's a breakthrough that delivers quicker, deeper insight than manual follow-up ever could.

Prompt ideas for ChatGPT or other AI: generate great employee communication survey questions

If you like to start with ChatGPT or other large language models, prompting them well gives strong results. Start simply, then layer in detail.

First prompt—basic:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for employee survey about communication effectiveness.

AI always works better with more context and goals. Here’s a stronger version:

Our company just rolled out a new communication platform, and we want to improve cross-team updates. Suggest 10 open-ended questions for our employee survey to help us uncover practical areas to improve communication effectiveness, tailored for a mid-sized tech company.

Once you have a list, try organizing it:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Then, pick the most relevant categories and drill into them:

Generate 10 questions for the categories ‘Feedback Culture’ and ‘Information Flow’.

Use these prompt strategies in an AI survey generator like Specific’s AI survey maker for best results, or ask for more tips in the platform’s chat editor feature.

What is a conversational survey?

Conversational surveys—like the ones you create automatically in Specific—are a major shift from traditional, static forms. Instead of dumping all questions in a rigid format, these surveys employ AI to adapt to answers, respond naturally, and probe where needed. It’s real dialogue, not a one-way questionnaire.

Here’s a quick comparison:

Why use AI for employee surveys?
The advantage is clear: using an AI survey generator like Specific, you get deep, actionable feedback in a fraction of the time, plus the survey is more engaging for your employees. These AI survey examples let you uncover blind spots and new ideas—from people who’d otherwise give only quick, incomplete answers. With so many employees (72%) reporting they aren’t fully informed about what’s happening at work [1], the conversational format encourages people to share honestly and completely.

Specific is designed specifically for conversational surveys—offering a seamless experience from survey creation, through natural respondent interaction, to instant, AI-powered analysis. Both creating a survey and collecting high-quality feedback become effortless using the platform.

Curious how to build and launch your own? Here’s a practical guide on how to create an employee survey about communication effectiveness—and how Specific helps at every step.

See this communication effectiveness survey example now

Start collecting actionable insights with a conversational AI survey. See how quickly you can create, launch, and analyze a survey tailored for employee feedback on communication effectiveness—unlocking deeper engagement and smarter decisions instantly.