Employee Pulse Survey Guide: Everything you need to run a pulse

Employee pulse surveys are a more frequent way of collecting employee feedback. They can be stand-alone or combined with annual or ‘census’ surveys in your employee voice strategy.

This blog post will show you how to create great pulse survey questions and what to include in an employee pulse survey, as well as how often you should run them and where they fit into your existing survey programme.

Pulse surveys typically measure employee engagement, collect feedback on a specific business issue, or track the impact of change initiatives.

During Covid-19, many organisations opted to run pulses to keep up with the rapid pace of change. Post-lockdown, organisations are using them to understand how people feel about remote working, and their preferences for working arrangements.

Pulse surveys are effective for most organisations. However, it’s vital that you can respond and make changes after every round of feedback.

What is a pulse survey?

A pulse survey is a short ‘check in’, usually used between full employee surveys to measure how people are feeling. An annual employee survey may cover all aspects of how to improve employee engagement. A pulse survey, on the other hand, typically focuses on high-priority issues that you need to track progress on. For example you could use a pulse survey to assess stress at work or to understand what support people need for financial wellbeing as the cost of living rises.

What are the benefits of an employee pulse survey vs engagement survey? 

Annual or bi-annual engagement surveys provide a fantastic opportunity to connect with your people in a meaningful way that drives significant change. The data is broad and deep, providing rich analysis of how your people feel and what factors are driving engagement.  

However, a lot can happen between survey’s so it is helpful to keep in touch with engagement and key issues on a more regular basis.  

Employee pulse surveys gather more regular feedback and give you the opportunity to respond quickly and often to improve your culture, talent retention and performance.  

Below are some more benefits of an employee pulse survey vs engagement survey:  

1. Gather feedback between annual in-depth surveys
2. Check-in on people during periods of change or uncertainty 
3. Ask about specific issues e.g. the transition to hybrid working
4. Report on the impact of post-survey actions or pilot programmes

Learn more about the benefits of pulse surveys in our blog.  

How often should you run a pulse survey? 

Employee surveys are only as effective as the action taken as a result. If you ask staff for their honest feedback and opinions, they will expect change. If you can’t deliver this, you will have failed, and they’ll tell you as much. Your score for belief in action will swiftly deteriorate.  

Typically, organisations run one or two pulses between annual surveys. This frequency allows you to review and act on the data before running your next pulse survey. 

While ‘always on’ feedback works well in the consumer space, it does not translate as well in the employee world. The insights don’t change as frequently, and employee survey response rates suffer when people are asked too often.  

The bottom line, of course, is that all organisations are different. How you survey will depend on all of these factors, and providing you set and meet your peoples’ expectations, and act in response to their comments, you’re on the right track. 

Pulse surveys help keep employee engagement on track

If you’re responsible for employee engagement planning in your organisation, you’ll understand the difficulty in keeping up momentum throughout the year.

Pulse surveys are brilliant for checking progress against actions decided after your deeper annual survey, providing metrics for reporting and giving you much needed visibility.

Armed with pulse survey results you can adjust or reprioritise actions, and communicate progress quickly. This helps keep the momentum for progress and change, whilst you work towards improving scores for the next annual survey.

Employee pulse surveys also provide evidence to justify additional budget for new initiatives that can drive future employee engagement.

As pulses are more frequent, they give you the opportunity to raise issues that are important at a particular moment in time, like Diversity & Inclusion. Instead of waiting for the next annual survey, you can gather feedback immediately.

What’s the difference between Pulse, Annual and Always On?

Changing from traditional surveying needn’t be daunting. Some organisations are choosing to solely use pulse surveys for employee listening, while others are using pulses alongside their annual survey.

Hear from Queen’s University Belfast about their pulse survey approach.

Introducing employee pulse surveys alongside other listening techniques provides a full measure of the employee experience and helps you make changes quickly.

Comparing types of employee survey

How does an employee pulse survey fit into your business?

Introducing pulse surveys doesn’t always mean ditching your annual employee survey. People Insight help organisations combine listening techniques and frequencies into an integrated listening strategy. This gives you a full measure of the employee experience with clear, actionable insights.

 An example of an integrated listening strategy

TSB: An integrated listening model at work

TSB’s listening model includes multiple ways for leaders to glean actionable insight. There are a range of routine approaches for the whole organisation, for instance:

• Annual deep dive surveys for issues that matter to the organisation and them individually
• Fortnightly stand up Q&A ran by execs for topical issues
• Online discussions & polls to get quick responses
• Team meetings and 1:1s for more local discussion and to generate feedback

TSB also built in the option to add listening activities at key moments, for example quarterly employee pulse surveys to check in on engagement issues.

Employee engagement pulse survey questions

Use the free pulse survey questions below to build your employee engagement pulse survey.

Our series of free pulse survey questions help dig into specific issues such as Diversity & Inclusion, Hybrid Working and Employee Wellbeing.

Free pulse survey questions

How many questions should be in a pulse survey?

Pulse surveys are more concise than annual employee surveys, allowing you to focus on specific topics. We recommend including 15 pulse survey questions.

How do you design employee pulse survey questions?

Effective employee pulse survey questions are unambiguous, based on the same response scale throughout and are either all positive or all negative. If running a change management surveys, it’s good practice to ask the same questions before and after the change. This helps measure progress consistently.

People Insight’s employee pulse survey design starts with our employee engagement model, PEARL™. It provides a great starting point for employee engagement pulse survey questions.

If you’ve run an annual survey using the PEARL™ question-set, take a look at the key issues that emerged i.e. your key drivers or responses that were far below historical/external benchmarks. These are usually the areas you have decided to act on!

Track the success of your post-survey action plan by asking these priority questions again in your pulse survey. Then, review the changes in quantitative scores and open-text comments.

Example employee pulse survey questions 

Firstly, we recommend including these 5 questions in every survey to track employee engagement over time. These questions represent the PEARL™ engagement index; the 5 factors which demonstrate how engaged your people are:

1. I am proud to say I work for <Client name> 
2. I would recommend <Client name> as a good place to work 
3. Working here makes me want to do the most meaningful work I can 
4. I would still like to be working at <Client name> in two years’ time 
5. I care about the future of <Client name> )  to measure changes in engagement

Secondly, include 5-8 driver questions; the ones that influence the engagement index questions above. Focus on the questions you have taken action on.

Then, consider if there are any other burning employee survey questions that we need feedback on. Aside from your employee engagement actions, what else is going on in the organisation or environment that you need feedback on? Include 1-3 of these, if required.

Also include the question ‘I believe action will be taken as a result of this survey’. This will show how much people trust your organisation to act on their feedback. We recommend including this question in every survey you run. Combined with your survey response rates, this can help measure survey fatigue within your organisation.

Open-text pulse survey questions

Finally, include 1-3 relevant open text questions. These will really depend on what your employee pulse survey is measuring. For example:

If you want to track the impact of change since your last survey, a great question is ‘What changes have you seen, if any, since the last survey?’

To gather insights about company culture, try ‘What 3 words would you use to describe our culture?’ You can track these 3 words over time to understand how aligned they are with your values, how they change and differ around the organisation.

Below are some great open text questions from recent pulse surveys exploring the impact of hybrid working on the employee experience:

• What else could we do to better support you with working from home?
• What else could we do to support your health and wellbeing at the moment?
• Are there any burning issues that we haven’t covered before?

What to look for in employee pulse survey software

The right pulse survey tech can make your team’s life easier and speed up post-survey action. Look out for these features when comparing survey tech:

• Easy to take part surveys – Your pulse survey should be accessible across devices; available in multiple languages and show you real-time response rates
• Easy to interpret results – An interactive results dashboard will customise user access levels; highlight survey action areas; drill down deep into the data; compare everything internally and externally; and let you search, analyse and group open-text responses.
• Multiple surveys in one platform – You should be able to easily switch between survey insights, for example your annual engagement survey, joiners/leavers surveys and pulse surveys – all in one place.
• Built-in action planning – Within your survey results dashboard, look for the functionality to save questions to an interactive action plan, assign action owners and report on action planning across your organisation.
• Suggestions for action ideas – Your results dashboard should contain action planning ideas and resources to help managers. People Insight’s action planning Inspirations suggest actions that have been successful for organisations like yours.

Taking action after an employee pulse survey 

Acting on your pulse survey feedback is vital to keeping people engaged with the survey process. Here are our tips for action planning success:

1.      Define ownership and expectations before you start

Consider which stakeholders you need to get on board in order to drive change effectively. Brief them about the process, what they will need to do and how you expect them to support it.

2.      Engage your line managers

Line managers are closest to the change happening ‘on the ground’, which employees feel most keenly. In order to be effective, local action planning must be led by line managers. Some ideas are:

• Share their team’s feedback – People Insight’s results dashboard customises access so that line managers can focus on their team’s results. Managers can also use the iDeck to create instant results presentations, saving them time and making it easier to share results. Here’s an action planning workshop to lead with your team
• Inspire action planning confidence – Get managers excited about acting on their team’s survey results. People Insight’s action planning Inspirations suggest creative action ideas within your results dashboard. Specific to your survey questions, managers can instantly add tasks to their interactive action plan.
• Ask mangers how it’s going – Provide a way for managers to feedback and ask for help, particularly if this is a new process for them. People Insight offer Super User results dashboard access, so you can check in on manager progress and spot who needs more help.

3.      Communicate what’s happening

Share top-level results with your organisation as soon after your survey closes as possible. Infographics are a great visual way of announcing headline results and for sharing progress later on. Keep people engaged by communicating what changes are coming, when to expect them and how they reflect your pulse survey feedback.

Keep reading: 6-step employee survey comms plan

Employee pulse survey pitfalls to avoid

1.     Collecting data, but not doing anything with it.

People don’t get tired of surveys, but of the lack of change after them. Act on their feedback and communicate the changes being made so people see the value of taking part in the survey process. People won’t participate if nothing happens as a result of their feedback. Act on feedback and communicate the changes being made so people see the value of taking part in the survey process.

2.     Survey Fatigue: Asking too many questions.

Pulse surveys are great for diving into specific topics, while annual surveys can cover more depth. Keep your pulses short to gather focused insights you can do something about. Remember, don’t ask for lengthy feedback too frequently or people will get fed up and either not respond at all, or give poor quality feedback.

3.     Not leaving room for comments.

Quantitative responses are great for analysis and benchmarking. However, including a couple of open text questions in your pulse survey will provide additional insight into employee sentiment and suggestions for change. Leave these optional so the survey doesn’t feel strenuous.