Employee engagement is the driving force behind people’s success for enterprises worldwide. All organizations strive to transform their workplaces into ones that attract high-performing talent, achieve high productivity, and retain their top performers for a lifetime.

Traditionally, HR has used an annual engagement survey to measure, understand, find ways to improve employee engagement. These surveys can be effective for getting a comprehensive picture of an organization’s overall employee performance and engagement. But, modern organizations have improved on this by including more frequent surveys into understanding their employees. These frequent and efficient employee surveys take only a few minutes to complete and can offer real-time, actionable feedback and deeper insights for the management.

What is a Pulse Survey?

A pulse survey is an easy-to-implement and easy-to-use survey designed to strategically collect employees’ thoughts and opinions about the workplace and related topics. It is a way to derive feedback strategically and in a timely manner.

Best Practices of Pulse Surveys

Pulse surveys can be designed according to business needs. Organizations vary in their expectations and are at different stages of growth. Whatever the reason for pulse surveys, the objective remains the same – getting valuable feedback from employees. The factors to be kept in mind when designing a pulse survey include:

Keep Pulse Surveys Short

Pulse surveys are meant as a quick check on employees’ perceptions about the organization as a whole or any particular initiative. It works best when the questions are specific and targeted.

Keep Pulse Surveys Simple

Pulse surveys must be easy to implement and complete. While the framework of a pulse survey can be simple, the data you collect is likely to be complex. Therefore, pulse surveys should be focused enough to elicit answers to ensure that you get the information you need. 

Keep Pulse Surveys Flexible

While annual engagement surveys offer comprehensive data to understand the different drivers of employee engagement, pulse surveys are a popular shift because they are simple and straightforward. They can vary by length, topic, frequency, etc.

Make Pulse Surveys a Strategic Part of Listening to your Employees

Pulse surveys are not meant as a replacement for annual surveys. However, they are an essential part of employee listening strategies. It ensures that you are keeping up with employee pulse as you seek their opinion on any aspect of the organization. It also makes employees feel heard.

Why do you need Pulse Surveys?

Employee engagement surveys are useful to gather feedback from the entire organization. It can be time-consuming and labor-intensive to sift through insights that cover a broad range of topics. Pulse surveys help you get feedback from a specific group of employees to understand their needs and experiences.

The work environment is complex, and understanding the ins and outs of employee experience can be a little challenging. But, pulse surveys are effective tools to evaluate the various programs and their success, including orientation programs and onboarding processes, training and development initiatives, etc. You will get real-time, actionable data from pulse surveys.

Benefits of Pulse Surveys

Pulse surveys offer several benefits for organizations of all sizes. For instance:

• Increased transparency through frequent communication
• Improved work culture
• A deeper understanding of the workforce
• Builds trust and earns loyalty
• Collect feedback in real-time
• Enable smart decision-making

Essentially, pulse surveys help you understand your people. With an easy-to-implement tool, you can build an intuitive and actionable pulse survey that will continuously give you insights into employees. Frequently derived insights can help organizations drive better employee experience. A robust tool that helps you build effective pulse surveys will come with automatic analytics, drill-down reporting, user-friendly interfaces, and role-based dashboards.

The insights drawn from pulse surveys will impact your bottom line as they have built-in action planners for managers to implement improvements, monitor and manage the progress of actions taken, and ensure an enhanced work experience. Enterprise-wide pulse surveys can be used to drive enterprise-wide improvement. You can choose a pre-built tool or create and customize one that suits your business. Typically, pulse surveys have multiple questions, embedded data, logic and will be mobile and web compatible. Pulse surveys, when used efficiently, help employers stay in control of company-wide performance.

Wrapping up

Pulse surveys enable leaders and managers at every level of the organization to drive change and monitor progress. They can also chart a course of visibility and transparency to ensure that everyone in the organization is on track and moving towards the same goal. Employees get to have a say at an individual level through pulse surveys. At the organizational level, employers become better listeners and find value in reading the company’s pulse as a whole.

Also Read: Employee Engagement Survey Best Practices