Clearly, giving people time to assimilate some of their feedback before they have to discuss it in detail is extremely logical. After all, the majority of people want the opportunity to prepare for a conversation that has such potential impact on their development.

So then, the next question becomes, ‘how do you get the most out of that conversation?’ – something we take care to advise on, given it’s importance.

To echo those below – thanks for this.

Providing the right balance of ‘free text’ or narrative comment fields throughout the survey is also important – too many boxes become time consuming and laborious for the rater; too few make it difficult to provide summary comments against a multitude of questions spread over several competency areas. Our own research indicates that the right balance is three to five free text comments boxes spread throughout the questionnaire. Thanks again, great bogg

I completely agree – the really powerful feedback is often textual, and those 19 minutes were probably ‘richer’ thanks to all that text feedback.

However, I think it’s a mistake to rely too much on text feedback. Teasing out good quality ratings can be really valuable when clients are interested in aggregate statistics. And it’s all too easy for raters to not bother writing much (such as when it’s not in the company’s culture, as Vandy alludes to), in which case it’s really important for the design of the rated part of the questionnaire to be good enough to deliver insights without comments.

Mark.

Thanks for this – the stats are really useful. We share your avoidance of “quick and dirty” solutions. I guess the really interesting thing for me is whether the 19 minutes spent answering the HR questions gave better feedback to work with than the 14 minutes people spent answering the engineering company questions. We generally find that the narrative feedback is more useful than rating scale scores and use that insight when trying to gauge “how many” questions are needed.

Brendan

Another point to consider when thinking about the time to complete a survey is the nature of the organisation. If a large proportion of staff are scientific or highly numerate, they may be less comfortable with text responses. In your example, the engineers may well have found the rating responses easier (and therefore quicker) than the HR consultancy staff, simply because they work in absolutes a lot of the time.

Thanks for the great article.

I like what you’ve got to say here. If a person does have an emotional resonse to their feedback report, they have to work through the range of emotions before they can start to work seriously on an action plan.

Look forward to your future posts.