Rating Branching lets you ask a follow-up question based on how someone answered a rating question. You set a condition, such as "if a participant answers Strongly Disagree, show this follow-up", and only the people whose answer meets that condition see it. Because you design this in advance of the survey launch, everyone who triggers the rule sees the same branched question. Rating Branching helps you to collect targeted follow-up data where a rating response signals it would be useful. Branched follow-up questions are also flexible in format and can be set up as rating, free text, single select, and multiple select.

Rating Branching is an extension of Culture Amp's existing answer-branching capability, previously available only for single and multi-select questions, now applied to rating questions. For broader guidance on using branching logic, see Best Practices for Using Branching Logic in Surveys.

Employee listening relies on two kinds of data working together. Your rating scores are quantitative: they tell you what is happening, and at what scale. Your comments and open text are qualitative: they tell you why. Neither is more valuable than the other, and strong insight comes from using them together. This is where Rating Branching can help, by prompting for the qualitative "why" at the moment a rating points to something worth understanding.

Used carefully, Rating Branching can be a valuable tool in your survey design toolkit. It lets you pursue the "why" behind a score from targeted participants, without lengthening the survey for everyone else. To help with this, our guidance on using Rating Branching is based on several principles which reflect how people may experience a survey:

Our survey design guidance recommends keeping surveys to around 10 minutes or less, as longer surveys tend to lower both the quality of your data and your participation rates. This is because people only have so much attention to give a survey.

Fatigue is usually a sign of too much being asked, or of employees never seeing action on their feedback, not of a good question asked at the right moment. Branching may help here, because a follow-up only appears for the people whose answer warrants it, so you gather more without adding length for everyone. That advantage holds only when you use it sparingly - remember adding branching and any follow-up still asks more of them than answering a single rating question.

Psychological safety is the sense that an employee can speak up honestly without fear of negative consequences. In follow-up questions shown after a low rating, this matters because wording can shape how safe it feels to answer candidly.

Questions that imply blame or assume a cause can lead employees toward a particular response, and make feedback less reliable. Neutral, open-ended questions are more likely to generate honest, useful input.

Satisficing is a common survey response pattern in which people put less effort into answers when responding requires more time or cognitive effort. In a branching survey design, this risk can show up in a specific way: if employees notice that certain responses trigger an extra question, some may choose a slightly more favorable response to avoid the additional effort.

You cannot remove this risk entirely, but you can reduce it by using branching sparingly. When only a small number of questions include follow-ups, employees are less likely to anticipate them and adjust their answers. Our guidance later in this article on how many questions to branch is the primary way to manage this risk.

A branched follow-up question is answered by a smaller, more selective group than the main survey item: only the employees whose response triggered it. This means the results should be interpreted carefully. They provide useful context about that subgroup’s experience, but they should not be treated as representative of the overall employee population.

This is similar to how open-text comments are typically interpreted. Comments can provide valuable insight, but because they usually come from a smaller subset of participants they are not always representative of the views of all employees. The same principle applies to branched follow-up responses.

We recommend using branching when:

A few pitfalls to keep in mind:

Culture Amp offers a few ways to tailor what someone sees in a survey. While this article focuses on Rating Branching specifically, here’s an overview of each of the branching tools to help you choose the best feature for your needs:

These can also work together. You can layer a demographic rule and a Rating Branching rule on the same question, for example showing a follow-up only to people who rated wellbeing unfavorably and sit in a particular team.

The platform is flexible - you can apply branching to any rating question in your survey. To help you decide where it adds the most value, look for these signals in your data or strategy:

Branching is most useful where a score already signals something to look into. In most Snapshot surveys (for example engagement, wellbeing, or inclusion), that might mean triggering on unfavorable responses, such as Strongly Disagree and Disagree on a 1 to 5 agreement scale, to understand what is driving them.

You can also branch on favorable responses to understand a strength, for example asking those who answered Strongly Agree what's working well. Whatever you choose, ensure you focus on the responses that matter most.

In an evaluation survey, such as a training review, a threshold like a rating of 3 or below can lead into more detailed follow-up questions to pinpoint what is behind the score.

Before you publish, look at the survey as a whole. Someone who gives several low ratings could face a run of follow-ups one after another, so review the full experience rather than each question on its own.

As a general guide, we recommend branching up to 3 questions in a survey, or roughly 5% of your total questions.

This mirrors the advice in our survey design guidance to use no more than three free-text questions, since a branched follow-up asks for a similar level of effort (we find a free-text answer adds around 50 seconds, against roughly 10 seconds for a rating). Someone who gives several low ratings may trigger several follow-ups, and that effort adds up quickly. Keeping branching to your highest-priority questions avoids the fatigue and drop-off we covered earlier.

A branched follow-up follows all the usual principles of good survey question design: keep it clear, specific, neutral, and focused on one thing.

1. Be specific. Probe the actual issue, rather than asking a broad "tell us more".

2. Stay neutral. Avoid wording that implies an answer or assigns blame.

3. Avoid double-barreled questions. A follow-up with "and" or "or" is usually two questions, which makes the answers harder to interpret.

Before publishing, review the questions from the employee's perspective. Consider whether it could feel leading, or imply a judgment about you, rather than inviting an open and honest answer. If it does, reword it to feel more neutral and/or psychologically safe.

Match the type to the type of data you need:

Branched follow-up questions are only answered by a specific subgroup, so their results need to be read differently from the rest of your survey. Only employees who triggered the rule will see the follow-up question. In your reports, branching questions are marked with a split-profile icon, and the n= count shows how many people answered them. As a result, the favorability, comments, and summaries for these questions reflect that subgroup only, not your whole employee population.

Comments on a branched follow-up stay with that follow-up question. They do not roll up into the original rating question. This means the original question’s comments and summary reflect everyone who answered it, while the follow-up’s comments and summary reflect only the employees who triggered the rule.

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