Here are some of the best questions for an employee survey about performance management, plus tips on creating them. If you want to build a smart, interactive survey fast, you can generate one with Specific—it’s a truly painless experience.
Best open-ended questions for Employee survey about performance management
Open-ended questions dig into real employee experiences—things you just don’t get from checkboxes. Use them to invite honest feedback, catch unique perspectives, and spot trends you hadn’t considered. They work best when you want detail and context, not just a score. But be sure to phrase them clearly; research shows poorly-structured open questions end up with vague responses that are hard to act on [1].
What’s one thing you wish was different about our current performance management process?
Can you share an example when you felt encouraged by feedback you received from your manager?
How could our process for giving performance feedback be improved?
What’s the biggest roadblock you experience with your yearly or quarterly review?
Describe a time when our goals or expectations were unclear. What would have helped?
How well do you feel your personal achievements are recognized here?
What makes you feel motivated (or demotivated) by our performance discussions?
Is there a resource or tool you wish you had for your personal development?
What do you find most valuable about the performance conversations you’ve had?
If you could change one thing about how progress is measured, what would it be and why?
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for Employee survey about performance management
Multiple-choice questions are incredibly useful when you need to quantify opinions or spot trends quickly. They’re great for benchmarking, and for those who prefer not to write long answers. Plus, for employees who might hesitate to share criticism, picking among options is less intimidating than typing out a paragraph. But don’t overdo them—mix them in for quick snapshots and to tee up richer conversations through follow-up questions [2].
Question: How clear are you about what’s expected of you during performance reviews?
Very clear
Somewhat clear
Not clear
Question: How valuable do you find the feedback from your manager?
Very valuable
Somewhat valuable
Not valuable
Other
Question: How often do you have meaningful performance conversations?
Once a year
Twice a year
Quarterly
Monthly
When to followup with "why?" Following up with “why?” is essential when you want to understand the reasoning behind an employee's choice. For example, if someone selects "Not valuable" when asked about manager feedback, a simple "Why do you feel the feedback isn’t valuable?" opens the door for deeper insights you can act on.
When and why to add the "Other" choice? Offering “Other” lets employees raise issues you didn’t think to ask about. After they pick “Other,” the AI (in tools like Specific) can instantly prompt them to elaborate—sometimes these follow-up answers reveal problems or bright spots you’d never have considered.
Should you include NPS in an employee performance management survey?
NPS (Net Promoter Score) isn’t just for customers—you can use it to benchmark employee sentiment around performance management processes. It boils down engagement to a single, easy-to-analyze number, while follow-up questions pull out the “why” behind the score. We’re seeing many organizations include NPS in their HR and employee feedback surveys because it helps them spot broad trends and track improvements (or declines) over time. Try an NPS survey for employees about performance management—you might be surprised at the clarity one question can bring.
The power of follow-up questions
Follow-up questions—the secret sauce! Instead of leaving feedback vague or incomplete, you can turn every survey into a real conversation. According to best practices, combining open and closed questions with follow-ups delivers richer, more actionable data than either alone [3]. Check out our write-up on automated follow-up questions.
Specific’s AI-powered surveys take care of this for you. The AI asks smart follow-ups, tailored to every answer—no human prodding required. You get full context and richer insights, and your employees get a chat that feels natural, not transactional. Saves you loads of back-and-forth or scouring through half-baked answers in your inbox.
Employee: “I’m not a fan of the annual reviews.”
AI follow-up: “Could you share a bit more? Are there specific aspects of the annual reviews that frustrate you, or would a different frequency work better?”
How many followups to ask? Two or three follow-ups usually do the trick for most open-ended questions. You can even set Specific to automatically stop following up once it’s collected enough useful info, keeping the conversation smooth and fatigue-free.
This makes it a conversational survey—feedback feels like a chat, not a form. People relax and share more. (Conversational AI surveys are what we do best at Specific.)
Easy analysis with AI: Even with open-ended and multi-step conversations, analyzing responses is simple. Read more on AI-powered survey response analysis or how to analyze responses from employee performance management surveys. AI summarizes, clusters, and spots trends—even in a sea of messy text answers.
Want to see this in action? Try to generate an employee survey in seconds and witness next-level follow-ups unfold.
How to compose a ChatGPT prompt for Employee survey questions
Crafting a great prompt is key if you want ChatGPT (or any AI survey maker) to give you solid survey questions for performance management.
Start simple, like:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for Employee survey about Performance Management.
You’ll get better results if you feed context—about your company, culture, goals. For example:
We’re a software company aiming to improve feedback for engineers and product managers. Generate 10 open-ended questions for an employee survey about our performance management process, focusing on feedback clarity, fairness, and development opportunities.
Then ask the AI to help you categorize and structure your survey:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Pick the categories that matter and push further with focused prompts:
Generate 10 questions for categories “feedback process,” “goal clarity,” and “recognition.”
What is a conversational survey?
A conversational survey uses AI to turn survey questions and answers into a natural chat—it listens, responds, and digs deeper as if you were talking to an expert. Unlike old-school, rigid forms, you aren’t just collecting fixed responses—you’re uncovering genuine opinions in context.
Here’s a comparison of traditional surveys versus AI-generated conversational surveys, like those you can build on Specific:
Manual Form Surveys | AI-Generated Conversational Surveys |
|---|---|
Boring web forms or static Google Docs | Chat-style conversation with smart follow-ups |
Respondent must fit thoughts into boxes | Flexible, follows up for clarity—feels like chatting with a person |
Manual analysis of responses, tedious sorting | Instant AI analysis—summaries, themes, even chat with your data |
Higher drop-off and survey fatigue | More engaging, better data completion rates |
Why use AI for Employee surveys?
AI survey generators, like Specific, help you build deeper, more actionable surveys in less time. With features like automated follow-ups, language localization, and instant analysis, you’ll hear exactly what employees mean—not just what fits in a checkbox.
If you want to try an AI survey example or even build your own AI-powered survey, start by reading our guide to creating employee performance management surveys or test-drive Specific’s AI survey generator directly.
We’ve built Specific to deliver a smooth, best-in-class conversational survey experience. Teams get nuances and trends they’d usually miss, while employees feel genuinely heard and understood.
See this performance management survey example now
Experience what a conversational, AI-powered employee survey can do—see example questions, real-time follow-ups, and how feedback transforms into insight. Create a more meaningful survey process, get better answers, and understand your team like never before.