What is pulse survey :
A complete guide to help you assess
the pulse of your organization

A pulse survey will tick all the right boxes for you in terms of getting frequent feedback from your employees, higher actionable responses for the survey, and more honest participation.

But, here's the catch. No staff pulse survey can be of help to any organization unless the employee feedback is acted on. Collecting employee feedback and generating engagement reports are not enough. You have to start acting on the feedback and communicate the same with employees. Nothing short of this can instill trust among employees towards the leadership.

In short, the real key to the success of a pulse survey mechanism is how you convert employee feedback into dialogues that influence action and deliver quantifiable business outcomes.

During World War I, most industrial leaders were concerned about the attitude of their employees as it led to labor strikes and resource shortages during wartime. In response, leaders had to come up with a scientific approach to workforce management.

Like how William Horman rightly said, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. A pressing need challenged the leaders from that era to implement an attitude survey. They asked employees questions about the management and coded the responses on a scale of one to five through agreeable or disagreeable context.

This process helped them formulate an average attitude score that they could use to compare and track engagement levels amongst the employees of various departments.

Even though conducting employee surveys back then was way ahead of its time, it had its limitations. Surveys were based on a paper - pen approach and did not guarantee employees any anonymity. As a result, employees were not very confident enough in expressing unbiased feedback in the fear of negative consequences.

Cut right to the late 1990s and early 2000s. We witnessed the technological era where employee surveys began to be conducted quickly securely over the internet. Except for moving to a more digital process, there was no significant change in the employee survey mechanism during this period.

Thanks to cloud - based software, running surveys is easy, less expensive, and readily accessible. Cloud - based employee engagement platforms have made it possible for organizations to enhance their capabilities when it comes to conducting employee surveys and has enabled them to measure trends and the pulse of their employees more frequently.

One conclusion to the evolution of employee surveys is this: across time, there has always been a need for behavioral science practices to increase employee engagement, even as we probably lacked the tools to fully make it happen.

It is safe to also assume that getting feedback from employees is not a recent trend data, instead, it has been at the core of developing a good company culture from the very beginning.

Annual engagement surveys usually serve as a year-on-year comparison of the engagement levels of employees. These surveys collect and unearth a lot of valuable data from the entire organization for deeper analysis which can then be eventually used for goal setting and finding ways to improve employee satisfaction, work culture, and company values.

But leaders need to understand that, no matter how good an annual engagement survey is, it is not just enough. Engagement surveys that are run annually are nothing but a yearly report. With no real-time information handy, acting on insights from annual surveys is a backward-looking exercise.

Imagine having run an employee survey in January 2020, right before the pandemic. You got the insights you needed and have a great action plan in place until the next survey in 2021. But as you spent the next 365 days implementing every big and small task on that action plan, a pandemic shook the world, employees started working remotely, people fell ill and so much more happened.

Would that action plan based on an annual survey run in January have any credibility once the pandemic struck? Because by then, the needs of your employees would have had changed drastically.

Yes, we agree that this is an extreme situation and most probably, a one-off instance. But a lot of things change over a period of 365 days including your employees' engagement levels, loyalty to the organization, motivation to work, and more.

Unlike annual surveys, complete pulse surveys are more frequent, specific, and much shorter in size, which will give you real-time insights into your employees’ engagement levels without causing your employees any survey fatigue.

Pulse survey questions let you ask targeted questions to a specific group of people about the current employee affairs and over a period of time. Such timeliness can help gauge the mood of your employees after a recent appraisal season, gather employees' views about a recent policy change in the company, their requirements in professional development opportunities, and much more.

This aspect of the pulse survey would provide you a level of transparency that would never be achievable with an annual survey alone.

The insights from regular pulse surveys help managers resolve an issue then and there without letting that convert into a larger problem, say, the cause for attrition. It is this aspect of the pulse survey that makes it widely popular in leadership circles.