Free AI Prompts to Summarise Anonymous Employee Comments into Actionable Insights

Turning raw employee voice into actionable insights is hard.

Most leaders struggle to make sense of open-ended survey comments. It can take hours to manually tag, cluster, and interpret everything, and the signal easily gets buried under noise or extreme outliers. Sarcasm and emotional tone are frequently misread, especially without numerical context, and leaders end up receiving summaries that are partial, oversimplified, or miss the real story entirely. And perhaps the biggest challenge of all: you simply can’t scale this process without help.

But with the right approach — and the right tools — you can turn this overwhelming task into consistent, high-quality guidance for every leader.

Below I’ll show you three levels of how to do it:

• Basic — a free prompt you can immediately use and share in your org
• More advanced — a complete prompt that aligns with your company values, understands context from survey ratings, sarcasm & nuance
• Automated at scale — how Teamspective does this automatically for you, leader by leader, survey by survey

⭐ Basic: A Free Prompt You Can Use Right Now

If you’re in a hurry and need a structured overview, here’s a simple prompt that turns a pile of comments into a readable summary.

Prompt:

[START OF PROMPT]

“Summarise the following anonymous employee comments into three sections:

• Strengths,

• suggestions, and

• challenges/risks.

Use only the information explicitly provided in the comments and the team context below. Do not guess identities, motives, individual situations, or causes that are not stated. Do not infer details beyond what’s written. Avoid speculation, assumptions, or invented themes.

When identifying themes, highlight only those that appear repeatedly across multiple comments. If something is mentioned by only one person, note it as a single-comment insight rather than a trend.

Use the team context only to help interpret tone, prioritisation, or seriousness — not to invent explanations. If the context does not clearly support an interpretation, mark it as uncertain rather than guessing.

Keep the summary neutral, constructive, and appropriate for a leadership audience.”

[END OF PROMPT]

This prompt gives you a digestible high-level overview, great for a quick review and getting started with analysis and actions.

That said, this prompt does have limitations:

• Doesn’t analyze why issues matter
• Doesn’t cross-reference values or expectations
• Doesn’t consider score ratings (so sarcasm or emotional tone might be missed)
• Works only for one chunk at a time

⭐⭐ More Advanced: A Complete Prompt for Deep, Nuanced Insight

When you’re helping leaders take action, or preparing updates for your CEO, HR, or team-level leaders, you should aim for more depth.

That means comparing comments to company values, detecting tone, and using numeric scores to contextualize interpretation.

This is where most summaries and AI tools fail.

For example:

• A team may write “Everything is fine 👍” …but give a 2.1/5 score on leadership.
• Comments may appear inconsistent without understanding the team’s baseline.
• Sarcasm often appears positive unless you compare it to ratings.

With a richer prompt you can:

1. Map comments against company values
Identify alignment, contradictions, or values at risk. Highlight more values-aligned actions.

2. Incorporate rating data
“So how serious is this really?”Scores help the AI understand tone, sarcasm, emotional weight and prioritisation.

3. Produce leader-ready output
Not just categories — but actionable recommendations.

This professional-grade full prompt is a longer one, available for download 👇

This is the prompt I always use, when a high-quality custom analysis is needed. It’s designed for HR and People leaders who need accuracy, nuance, and context-awareness.

⭐⭐⭐ Automated at Scale: How Teamspective Does This for You

If you’ve tried summarizing comments manually — or even with generic AI prompts — you’ve probably hit the same barriers:

• It doesn’t scale beyond 1–2 teams or topics
• Hard to get all leaders to copy the same prompt
• Quality varies depending on who wrote the prompt
• You still need to cluster themes, compare between teams, and ensure fairness
• Leaders need their own summaries, not one company-wide document
• You must protect anonymity and avoid over-interpretation

This is exactly what Teamspective’s platform automates.

What Teamspective does automatically:

• Analyzes thousands of comments per survey
• Sorts them into strengths, improvement areas, risks
• Connects insights with team ratings, values, and historical trends
• Detects sarcasm, emotional intensity, and urgency
• Generates leader-specific summaries for every department and team
• Ensures privacy and anonymity rules are respected
• Packages everything into clear, actionable recommendations

Every leader receives a clear, focused summary of their team’s reality: the top strengths they can build on, the most critical issues requiring action, the long-term patterns shaping team performance (across engagement, feedback, clarity, workload, and more), and a simple next-step playbook they can put into action immediately.

And you don’t spend a week wrestling with spreadsheets and copy-pasting quotes.

Final Thoughts

Employee comments are one of the richest sources of feedback in any organisation — but also one of the hardest to analyse well because input varies so much.

Depending on your needs, you can choose your level:

• Basic: free prompt for quick summaries
• More advanced: complete prompt for deep, values-aligned insights
• Automated: let Teamspective handle this across all teams, every survey, instantly

Most important is to not get stuck – pick you option and get started today!