Run Better Pulse Surveys: The Complete Guide for HR Leaders

Most organizations don’t keep mind-readers on their full-time payroll. Yet we make decisions every day in response to how our employees think and feel – sometimes based on nothing more than an educated guess.

Admittedly, it can take a lot of work to get real-time data about employee sentiment. Employee engagement surveys are a massive effort; most companies don’t deploy them more than once or twice a year. But employee sentiment and experience is a dynamic and changing paradigm, and it’s essential to have some agile ways of getting at answers about how employees feel.

What Is a Pulse Survey?

A much lighter lift than exhaustive employee surveys, pulse surveys comprise a few – or even a single – questions. And they can be deployed more surgically, going to a random sample over time or to selected respondents based on specific triggers.

When used well, pulse surveys help leaders to:

• Identify and resolve challenges: Check in with employees to pinpoint and address issues negatively impacting their experience.
• Elevate innovation: Use pulse surveys to solicit suggestions and crowd-source ideas to improve programs and processes.
• Amplify employee voice: Create a platform employees trust for ongoing, open dialogue that helps every worker feel heard.
• Ease organizational transformation: Use pulse survey feedback to spot existing or potential friction points, amplify inclusion, and increase buy-in.

When to Use Pulse Surveys

But did you know that pulse surveys can also be incorporated into your company’s processes to provide incredible insights into key programs and experiences? Here are a few ways of using pulse surveys you may not have considered:

1. Onboarding: Better understand your onboarding experience and identify opportunities for improvement. You can deploy onboarding surveys at intervals to new hires, managers, and other involved team members. Questions cover areas such as their understanding of their role, satisfaction with onboarding, effectiveness of training, and initial impressions of the company culture. You can also use pulse surveys to better get to know new hires and tailor their new hire experience!
2. Organization/Leadership: Explore employee perceptions of leaders and trust in the leadership team. Understand how people are aligned with your company’s strategic goals and the effectiveness of communications from the top. Pulse surveys can also help you to assess employees’ relationships with their managers and triage possible areas for improvement.
3. Culture and Engagement: Assess the effectiveness of your culture, teams, or departments, and overall employee engagement. Pulse surveys can help you understand how aligned employees are with your company’s goals and values – and their happiness in their roles. Your team can also use surveys to keep a finger on the pulse of organizational health – assessing physical, emotional, and mental well-being – including stress levels and feelings about work-life balance.
4. Benefits and Rewards: Assess satisfaction with benefits and suggest possible improvements for your people programs. Pulse surveys can be regularly used to ask employees how they feel about your total rewards and benefits processes – such as open enrollment or annual reviews.
5. Learning and Development: Gauge the effectiveness and efficacy of your LMS and training programs, and understand how people prefer to learn. Check in periodically on learning retention and utilization to see how learning efforts are effective over time.
6. Project-Based Surveys: Post-mortem surveys on specific projects can help you understand how well those projects were executed. Identify specific challenges or silos encountered, assess project leaders and processes, and find opportunities for future improvement.
7. Event-Based Surveys: Use surveys after specific events or around changes within the organization. You can assess satisfaction with company activities and better understand employee resilience and feelings on changes, including leadership changes, layoffs, mergers and acquisitions, and company restructuring.
8. Offboarding: Just because employees have moved on doesn’t mean they don’t have interesting feedback to offer. Use alum surveys to identify strengths and areas for improvement in the departure process, and keep tabs on your employer brand.

Pulse Survey Best Practices: How to Get Meaningful Insights

Pulse surveys are a little different from large-scale employee surveys, and to effectively implement the ideas above, we suggest that you use the following best practices/

How Often Should You Conduct a Pulse Survey?

Pulse surveys should be used frequently. Capture real-time feedback by surveying small segments of your employee population regularly.

Craft the Right Questions for Actionable Feedback

Design your survey with questions that focus on specific issues or groups. Avoid ambiguous or generic questions. The more detailed the questions, the more precise the feedback you will get — making it easier to understand exactly what action needs to be taken.

Keep Surveys Short & Focused for Maximum Participation

Limit surveys to one, two, or three questions.

Make Them Accessible

Surveys are no good if no one notices or can complete them. Ensure your surveys meet employees where they are, standing out and getting noticed in the flow of work. Make them accessible on multiple devices for ease of completion.

Turn Data Into Action

Generate actionable insights by defining clear objectives, using a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions, and segmenting data by role, department, tenure, demographics, etc.

How to Implement an Effective Employee Pulse Survey

Now that we’ve covered some of the best practices, here are steps to follow and get started with your pulse survey.

Choose the right software and tools.

Software like Enboarder offers real-time analytics and reporting, and the ability to access on any device, encouraging more participation.

Set clear objectives and key metrics.

What are you trying to measure with your pulse survey? Define the metrics at the onset, such as employee engagement, onboarding satisfaction, job readiness, etc.

Create an engaging rollout and communication plan.

Clearly communicate to employees the purpose of the survey and the benefits of their participation (i.e. acting on their feedback!). Use multiple communication channels for distribution, such as email, Slack, etc.

Collect, analyze, and act on employee feedback.

Once you’re happy with the number of responses, close the survey and start to analyze the data for trends and insights. Be sure to share high-level findings with employees to promote transparency and trust. Create a clear action plan based on what you’ve learned.

15 Employee Pulse Survey Questions to Steal

Need some inspiration? Here are some sample questions to get started on the right track.

Engagement & Job Satisfaction

Do you feel your work is valued by the company?

Are you motivated to go above and beyond in your role?

Do you see a clear path for growth in the organization?

Leadership & Communication

Do you feel leadership communicates company goals effectively?

Does leadership make an effort to listen to employee concerns?

Do you have weekly check-ins with your manager?

Work-Life Balance & Well-Being

Do you feel you have a healthy work-life balance?

How often do you feel stressed at work?

Is your workload manageable?

Workplace Culture

Do you feel a sense of belonging at work?

Are company values lived by your team?

Do you believe the company fosters an inclusive work environment?

Remote & Hybrid Work Experience

Do you have the resources you need to work effectively?

Do you have regular check-ins with your manager?

Do you feel a sense of belonging despite working remotely?

Using Pulse Surveys to Build a Stronger Workplace

With Enboarder’s onboarding software, you can create a cadence of pulse surveys that support your employees at every stage of their journey and bring a steady flow of deep insights back to key groups like HR, OD, L&D, and your leadership team. Enboarder seamlessly integrates questions into your trusted communications channels and helps to break through the noise and ensure completion rates.

Pulse surveys are a transformative tool that can help build a better, more responsive, and engaged organization. Are you using them to their fullest potential?