The Importance of Employee Pulse Surveys

When deployed correctly, employee pulse surveys are an incredibly powerful tool to gain real employee insights into your business. Of all of the various types of staff surveys available, employee pulse surveys allow you to discover how your employees feel about specific issues, giving you the data you need to make critical decisions about the workplace, workloads, initiatives, policies or operations. A pulse survey does what it says on the tin, they allow you to keep your finger on the ‘pulse’ of your business. In this article, we will run through why employee pulse surveys are so important.

First up, what exactly is an employee pulse survey?

Think of an employee pulse survey as a briefer but more frequent version of the standard ‘employee engagement survey’. Whereas a more generalised employee engagement survey may only be issued once or twice a year, cover broad subjects and take 20 minutes or more to complete, a pulse survey is designed to target specific questions relating to the business and only take a few minutes to complete. Pulse surveys are normally 10-15 questions long, but can be as simple as just a couple of very specific questions.

If you want to know the thoughts of your employees on any recent changes that have been implemented, how they feel about a certain policy, how inclusive your organisation is, or anything else that will give you the employee insights you are looking for, pulse surveys are the ideal staff survey choice.

The benefits of frequent employee pulse surveys

As mentioned above, one of the main benefits of frequent employee pulse surveys is they give you the ability to spot any trends that may require immediate attention. Once identified, you have the data required to make the necessary changes. The employee insights gained will also allow you to measure the impact of any recent initiatives or changes that have been made, so you can analyse whether said initiatives were successful. Another powerful benefit of pulse surveys is you can get up-to-date feedback on a specific issue to gather the information you need to drive positive and meaningful change.

Giving your employees a real voice

As experts in an array of employee survey services, we analyse a huge amount of employee data on a wide range of workplace issues. One common theme we see that has a huge impact on general employee well-being is whether employees feel they have a voice that will be heard. A frequent pulse survey that offers employees a platform to voice their opinions not only provides that voice but also promotes a better company culture of employee engagement. By offering this kind of frequent, but brief staff survey, you are giving your employees the chance for anonymous feedback, which if acted on shows the employees their voices are being heard and they are helping to drive positive change.

Things to think about when considering a pulse survey

The idea of employee pulse surveys is to gather up-to-date information on a specific issue, and then use that data to take meaningful action (if required). So a good rule of thumb is to only survey employees as fast as you can use the employee insights to take any necessary action. Think of it like this, it’s better to not ask your employees a question at all than to ask a question and not act upon their answers. Also, specific issues will only require answers from the employees affected, so be sure only relevant people are sent a survey. At its core, an employee pulse survey is designed to be brief and to the point and should give you a better survey engagement rate than other types of staff surveys. But if deployed too regularly, or sent to employees the questions are not relevant to, survey engagement levels may decrease which will impact your data.

Is it time you put your finger on the pulse of your business?

So as you can see, employee pulse surveys are incredibly important for many reasons, but mostly to give you employee insights on a specific area that could help drive positive change or reinforce recent actions. As experts in a range of employee survey services, including pulse surveys, 360 feedback surveys, employee engagement surveys and other staff surveys, The Survey Initiative have the experience and expertise to create employee pulse surveys that will give you the data you need to drive meaningful change.