X icon white, transparent background.
Preloader gif in blue with white border, transparent background.
Loading...
X icon white, transparent background.
Surveys & Engagement

Making sense of ‘open comments’ in your engagement surveys

Leapsome Team
Making sense of ‘open comments’ in your engagement surveys
Build a high-performing and resilient organization with Leapsome
Request a Demo

To uncover the true potential of employee engagement surveys, we need to make sense of the priceless — and yet, easily ignored — information employees provide in their open comments. 

Open comments in engagement surveys allow employees to provide longer-form qualitative feedback, adding more background and color to the score they’ve provided to the survey question. Understanding these open comments empower HR and people ops teams with the context they need to uncover the real story behind the numbers. 

If you want to take informed actions to build a better work culture and support your employees, you must listen to the story they’re telling you.

But how to make sense of hundreds (or thousands) of open comments? The list might look like this — only much, much longer:

Introducing Leapsome’s all-new WordCloud feature 

The Leapsome platform uses cutting-edge Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to dissect and analyze all open comments in your surveys.

And how do we do that?

Basically, our platform transforms every piece of information into an easily digestible, highly actionable source of truth (shown in the image below).

Get a snapshot of the overall employee sentiment 

Each comment is analyzed by our Natural Language Processing service, powered by Machine Learning technology. As a result, the NLP algorithm:

  1. Automatically organizes the comment into a relevant category;
  2. Assigns a score (and color) to each comment based on the underlying emotion behind it. 

The underlying emotion spectrum ranges between “positive” and “negative” on opposite sides (depicted on the x-axis in the image above). 

From the example above, we can conclude that the overall sentiment tilts towards positive. 

Digging deeper, we see that the category “teamwork” is associated with positive sentiment; “meaningful work” with a neutral sentiment; and “reward” with a negative sentiment. 

The overall sentiment associated with any specific category takes the net result of comments distribution between the three sentiments (i.e., positive, neutral, and negative) and gives it a net sentiment score. 

Take informed actions by focusing on the most impactful areas 

The size of the bubble seen in our example represents the relative number of comments specific to the category. Higher frequency results in a bigger bubble. 

The example above shows that most of the open comments in that survey were related to the “professional growth” category. However, the “reward” category is the one with the most negative sentiment. 

The decision to tackle a specific category (whether it is “rewards,” “open communication,” or something else) will depend on the data-driven insights from the sentiment analysis along with your overall company or team strategy. 

This visualization aims to ensure that you get actionable insights from complex data structures to help you make informed decisions to support your people. 


— Interested in learning more about how sentiment analysis works or how you can use Leapsome’s surveys to measure and improve employee engagement within your organization? Book a demo and speak with one of our experts.


Written By

Leapsome Team

Written by the team at Leapsome — the all-in-one people enablement platform for driving employee engagement, performance, and learning.
See Leapsome in action
Take a quick tour

Ready to transform
your People operations?

Automate, connect, and simplify all HR processes across the employee lifecycle.

Image of a woman in a circleRequest a demo todayImage of a man in a circleImage of a woman in a circle

The AI-powered people platform for HR excellence and high-performing teams

Automate, connect, and simplify all HR processes across the employee lifecycle — from onboarding and performance management to employee engagement and development.

Talk to our experts and discover how Leapsome can help you streamline and modernize your people operations.

  • Save countless hours with automations ⏱️
  • Get AI-powered guidance, insights, and action plans 🪄
  • Adapt your people operations with ease as you scale 📈

Empowering teams at thousands of forward-thinking organizations

Schedule a demo

Our friendly team will be in touch right away!

Not ready for a demo? 
 instead!
G2 High Performer - Fall 2024G2 Badge Best Usability - Fall 2024G2 Momentum Leader - Fall 2024

Mitarbeiter entwickeln mit Leapsome

Stärken Sie Mitarbeiter-Engagement und Erfolg Ihres Unternehmens - wie andere führende Marken.

Interesse an Leapsome?

Unsere Produktexperten zeigen Ihnen gerne unsere Plattform oder eröffnen einen Account.

Purple transparent inverted identification card icon.
Purple transparent inverted mail icon.
Light purple and inverted ringing phone icon.
Purple transparent inverted employees icon.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Erfahren Sie warum Leapsome mit
4.9 / 5 auf G2 und Capterra bewertet wird.