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Best questions for employee survey about performance feedback

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Adam Sabla

·

Aug 20, 2025

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Here are some of the best questions for an employee survey about performance feedback, as well as practical tips on how to craft them. You can use Specific to build your own AI-powered survey in seconds.

What are the best open-ended questions for employee survey about performance feedback?

Open-ended questions dig deep—they invite employees to share in their own words, revealing nuanced insights you might otherwise miss. These questions are ideal when you’re aiming to understand context, surfacing underlying motivations or issues, and giving voice to experiences that multiple-choice can’t capture.

HubSpot saw measurable impact using open-ended survey questions, uncovering burnout and work-life balance concerns that drove a 20% boost in employee engagement in a year. The qualitative nature of these responses paved the way for meaningful organizational improvements. [1]

Here are 10 of the best open-ended questions we recommend for employee surveys about performance feedback:

  1. What aspects of your current role do you find most rewarding, and why?

  2. Can you share an example of feedback you received that truly helped your performance?

  3. Where do you feel you could use additional support or resources to excel?

  4. What do you wish your manager or team did differently when providing feedback?

  5. Describe a recent situation where feedback (or lack of it) had a big impact on your work.

  6. What kind of feedback do you find most motivating?

  7. What barriers do you face in giving or receiving honest feedback?

  8. How does performance feedback currently affect your motivation or engagement?

  9. What’s one thing that would make performance feedback more useful for you?

  10. How do you prefer to receive constructive criticism?

These questions allow employees to elaborate, resulting in richer, more actionable responses. Just remember—open-ended comes with a tradeoff: responses take longer to analyze, and you may see lower completion rates if your survey is too lengthy or demanding. [2]

What are the best single-select multiple-choice questions for employee survey about performance feedback?

Single-select multiple-choice questions shine when you want to quantify feedback, easily spot trends, and make results simple to analyze. They’re ideal for quickly gauging sentiment or identifying baseline behaviors—while also providing a comfortable entry point for respondents who may not have a lot to say.

Single-select formats make it easy to compare and segment responses—for example by department or tenure—while open-ended questions can drill deeper later. Still, they do risk oversimplifying complex experiences, so it’s best to pair them with open-ended follow-ups. [3]

Here are 3 multiple-choice question examples for employee performance feedback surveys:

Question: How often do you receive helpful feedback on your performance?
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly

• Rarely or never


Question: How would you rate the usefulness of feedback provided by your manager?
• Very useful
• Somewhat useful
• Not very useful

• Not useful at all


Question: What is your preferred way to receive performance feedback?
• In a private 1:1 conversation
• In written format
• In a group/team setting

• Other


When to follow-up with "why?" It’s powerful to ask “why?” after a multiple-choice is answered. For example, if an employee selects “Not very useful” for feedback from a manager, instantly following up with, “Can you share why the feedback hasn't been helpful?” can uncover root causes you’d never see in the quantitative results alone.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Including an "Other" option gives employees a chance to express perspectives that weren’t anticipated. A follow-up open-ended question when “Other” is selected unlocks surprising realities you might overlook in rigid answer sets—sometimes those surprises are gold mines for new insight.

NPS-style question for employee survey about performance feedback

NPS (Net Promoter Score) isn’t just for customers—organizations use it internally to gauge employee sentiment about critical processes, including performance feedback. The classic NPS asks: “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our performance feedback process to a colleague?” followed by a “why?” This creates a clear, simple metric and a jumping-off point for follow-up.

Using an NPS-style survey for performance feedback can help you track overall sentiment over time, spot areas for improvement, and benchmark against other organizations.

The power of follow-up questions

Follow-up questions are where true insight lives. A well-chosen follow-up—especially automated and context-aware, like Specific offers through our automatic AI follow-up questions—helps you go from superficial answers to deep, actionable data. It's exactly how we ensure clarity and get full context, turning vague replies into something you can work with.

For example, imagine what happens when you don’t ask a follow-up:

  • Employee: “Feedback is fine, I guess.”

  • AI follow-up: “Can you share what makes the feedback only ‘fine’? Are there specific aspects you wish were different?”

That one more question often makes all the difference. Automated follow-ups mean these clarifiers happen in real time, without waiting for emails or review cycles—saving research time and avoiding miscommunication.

How many followups to ask? In practice, two to three follow-ups per question are usually enough. It’s important to stop when you get the answers you need—Specific lets you configure this for each question, so every interview is efficient and respectful of employees’ time.

This makes it a conversational survey. The survey feels like a dialogue—not a form—making it more engaging for everyone involved.

AI analysis, even with lots of unstructured text—that’s where Specific shines. Our AI survey response analysis makes sense of all these deeper, open-ended responses, and you can also learn more about how to analyze survey feedback with AI. Don’t let manual text review limit your insights.

These smart, conversational follow-ups are a new concept—try generating a survey on Specific to experience how much more detail you get with almost no extra effort.

How to compose a prompt for ChatGPT or other GPTs to come up with great questions for employee survey about performance feedback

The quality of your prompt drives the quality of your AI-generated questions. For employees and performance feedback, start with something simple:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for employee survey about performance feedback.

But, you get even better results by adding context—describe your company, goals, or challenges:

Our organization is focused on rapid growth and remote work. Suggest 10 open-ended questions focused on how feedback practices impact employee motivation and development.

Want to organize questions and brainstorm different angles? Ask:

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

Then, pick a category and go deeper:

Generate 10 questions for the category "Feedback Frequency and Quality".

What is a conversational survey?

A conversational survey feels like a real back-and-forth, not a checklist or faceless web form. Instead of static lists, the survey adapts in real time—asking deeper questions when needed, skipping irrelevant ones, and following the flow of a natural conversation. This approach results in better engagement and more authentic responses—especially for nuanced topics like employee performance feedback. With an AI survey generator like Specific, you create these conversations at scale in just a few clicks.

Manual Survey Creation

AI Survey Generation (Conversational)

Write and rewrite each question by hand

Describe goals in natural language—AI does the rest

Limited or no follow-up capability

Asks smart, real-time follow-ups for deeper insights

Difficult and slow analysis

Instant theme analysis, segmentation, and reporting powered by AI

Static, non-engaging experience

Feels like a real conversation—higher response rates

Why use AI for employee surveys? Using an AI survey builder streamlines creation, automates analysis, and enables a level of real-time engagement simply not possible with static forms. For example, you can try our guide to building your own conversational employee feedback survey. With Specific’s best-in-class conversational survey experience, you get richer feedback—and your team and employees feel genuinely heard.

Explore more with our AI survey generator or tweak surveys instantly with our AI survey editor—all in one place.

See this performance feedback survey example now

Ready to craft a better feedback loop? See what a high-impact, AI-driven performance feedback survey looks like—and deliver actionable insights faster, easier, and with more clarity for your entire team.

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Sources

  1. Psico-Smart Blog. Beyond the numbers: Using qualitative feedback to improve employee satisfaction survey effectiveness.

  2. Culture Amp. Why open-ended questions matter in surveys.

  3. YouEngage. Best survey questions for employee feedback—a comprehensive guide.

Adam Sabla - Image Avatar

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.