Employee Pulse Surveys
Increasing employee engagement, happiness and the health of your business.
Whether you are looking to find out how happy your staff are, how valued they feel in your business, or how likely they are to recommend your firm to their friends; the ability to swiftly measure and respond constructively to their views is invaluable. With the right data you can keep your employees more engaged, happy and productive, and your company moving forward.
While an annual or six-monthly employee survey can help you to gather effective feedback and a deeper insight into how your staff are feeling, it can take time to devise, implement, collect and then analyse your responses, particularly if your company has more limited resources for carrying it out.
Highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability
Gallup
And with surveys spaced quite widely apart there is also the possibility that you could miss out on gathering and responding to key employee feedback, should a major issue or negative trend develop during the in between times.
However, the alternative of not engaging with your staff risks leaving them dissatisfied, de-motivated, less productive and more likely to leave. This can lead to an increased employee churn rate and potentially leave you open to bad reviews on sites such as Glassdoor, which can ultimately harm your reputation and future success.
In contrast, by gathering more regular feedback, you are better able to identify and positively respond to any developing trends or workplace issues. This is where the use of a pulse survey is extremely beneficial.
Put a pulse survey to work
Boost your employees’ engagement levels and improve the way they feel and contribute to your business
What is an employee pulse survey?
An employee pulse survey is a fast and more frequent survey method that can be used to quickly ascertain the levels and drivers of employee satisfaction and engagement. The pulse survey can provide an effective snapshot of your employees’ current thoughts and a valuable insight into the health of your company.
How pulse surveys help HR teams
Employee engagement pulse surveys
Through more frequent surveys, you can demonstrate how much you value your employees’ feedback and build stronger relationships them. Pulse surveys can also be extremely useful for helping to keep staff engagement levels high during an employee’s lifecycle with your company, from their initial onboarding through to development and retention.
Check if existing plans are working
From training and appraisals to health and safety, employee recruitment to retention, your survey feedback will enable you to see how well any existing plans are working, so you can quickly make any necessary improvements
Validate investment in the process
By making it relatively simple to present your survey findings, analysis, and plans for employee improvements to senior management, and in a short space of time, pulse surveys are a great way to validate your investment in the employer/employee feedback process.
A study of 64 organisations revealed that those with highly engaged employees achieve twice the annual net income of organisations whose employees lag behind on engagement.
Forbes
Where pulse surveys add value
Given the many changes that a company can go through as it grows and evolves, there can be many scenarios where obtaining more regular feedback from your staff through an employee pulse survey can be highly beneficial to your business.
Take your employees’ pulse
Better understand what your employees think and create a more committed and responsive workforce.
Benefits of employee pulse surveys
A well written, designed and regularly run employee pulse survey can deliver a series of benefits. Let’s take a look at five of the key advantages.
Companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202%
Gallup
Example pulse survey questions
To get the most out of your survey, you need to ask questions that are more likely to deliver responses that you can really do something useful with.
Essentially you will be looking for answers that are measurable and insightful, which tell you what’s good and bad about your workplace, how valued and engaged your employees’ feel and how they believe things can be made better.
For the best results try to make sure your questions are short, clear and easy to understand and provide a simple to answer format.
Consider using rating style questions such as the Likert scale, that typically provide 5 response options ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree.
Given that employee pulse surveys are quick to create, simple to manage, frequently distributed and generally yield higher response rates than other survey types, they are an ideal opportunity to gain some valuable insight. So, you will want to make sure you get them right.
3 tips for effective pulse survey questions
Devise questions everyone will recognise
Ensure your questions are broad enough to apply to all your respondents. If you ask employees to answer questions that are only relevant to some of them, those that don’t identify with a question might either skip it or answer it untruthfully.
Mix up your question format
Try including at least one open and closed-ended question. It often works well to pair these questions together, with the open-ended question following the closed one, so you can get a better idea of why a respondent chose to rate their initial answer in the way that they did.
Make your questions simpler to measure
Think about including questions that deliver easily measurable results, which once acted on can produce some great business outcomes. Adding an employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a great example, enabling you to measure and quickly gain a snapshot of those employees most likely to be an ambassador for your company and advocate employment there.
Get better feedback
Improve the volume and quality of responses you need to make a positive difference to your workplace.
Key considerations before running your employee pulse survey
Teams classified as in the ‘high performance zone for engagement’ had a 37% net promoter score (NPS) versus 10% NPS for teams ‘outside of high performance zone for engagement.’
Gainsight
Maximise the value from employee pulse programs
If you are to get the most out of your survey there are several best practice steps you need to follow before, during and following feedback.
An employee pulse survey is a fast and more frequent survey method that can be used to quickly ascertain the levels and drivers of your employees’ engagement. The pulse survey can provide an effective snapshot of your employees’ current thoughts and a valuable insight into the health of your company.
Frequently asked questions
Q: What is a pulse survey?
Essentially, it is a fast and more frequent survey method that enables you to gain an effective snapshot of your employees’ current thoughts and a valuable insight into the health of your company.
Q: How do you conduct a pulse survey?
To conduct a pulse survey you need to incorporate the following steps: determine your survey’s purpose and what you want to measure, identify your participants, set a timeline, construct impactful questions, act on your results.
Q: How many questions are on the pulse survey?
Generally, pulse surveys are short, featuring no more than between 5-15 relatively simple questions.
Q: Why use an employee pulse survey?
They are quick and simple for employers to manage and easy for employees to read and complete, typically enabling higher than average response rates.
Q: What makes a great survey?
Generally, to ensure the highest volume and quality of responses, you will want to keep it short, simple and relevant. It’s also prudent to test your survey first, as this an effective way to identify and correct any problems before distributing it.
Q: What is a confidential survey?
A confidential survey is one where your responses are kept private.
Q: Are confidential employee surveys really confidential?
Yes, as the raw data from your responses is automatically tied back to your employee record in the back-end and its demographic information is automatically tagged. This subsequently means that anyone analysing your information will only be able to examine how it applies to a particular demographic rather any personal identifier.
Q: Should pulse surveys be anonymous?
It’s a good idea to make them anonymous, as you’re more likely to get open and honest responses when staff feel safe to do this without the worry of reprisal.
Q: How much does an employee satisfaction survey cost?
If you have an online survey account, which enables you to create unlimited surveys they can be pretty cost effective to run. The more costly aspect is likely to be your own internal labour expense of managing the survey through initial planning, delivery, reporting and analysis.
Free Coronavirus resources
COVID-19 has brought a new working dynamic and presents a rapidly evolving situation. Use these free survey templates to connect with your workforce.