Which is better: Pulse survey vs engagement survey?

This blog post explores the differences between a pulse survey and annual employee engagement surveys and the benefits or drawbacks of each kind. We’ll share the 8 steps to creating successful pulse surveys, the pitfalls to avoid and some example questions to get you started.

What is a pulse survey?

Employee pulse surveys are a more frequent way of collecting employee feedback compared to the more established annual or ‘census’ survey. During Covid-19 the pivot from annual only survey programmes to more frequent employee listening accelerated, as organisations needed to keep up with the rapidly changing needs of their people. In a world where consumer, market and cultural change happens fast and data is prolific, this change is not surprising.

So, what is a pulse survey for? It is typically used to measure employee engagement – i.e., how motivated a person is to work productively for their organisation, and stay working there loyally for the foreseeable future.

Employee engagement overall doesn’t often change dramatically in the short term, but the factors that influence it can. So pulse surveys often measure more tangible things at specific points in time.

Typically, a pulse survey is structured as follows:

1. A questionnaire on a simple, accessible online platform
2. Includes around 10-15 closed questions
3. Contains 1-3 open text questions – to help you understand why people responded to the questions above the way they did.
4. Demographics such as what team people are in and protected characteristics like age and gender should be pre-populated so that respondents can just focus on answering the core questions.

Overall, the questionnaire should be quick and simple to develop, to respond to, and makes the results simple and quick to analyse.

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

Did we mention quick and simple?

Introducing employee pulse surveys provides more regular feedback and a more frequent take on the employee experience. You have the opportunity to respond quickly and often to improve your culture, talent retention and performance.

Provide quick feedback between annual in-depth surveys

After an annual survey, you’ll want to take action – but not wait a year to measure the outcome of that action. Pulse surveys are a nimble way to get quick feedback on the progress of your actions. As part of your employee voice strategy, they can be combined with additional listening activities like 121s, focus groups and forums.

Employee pulse surveys are good for your culture

Asking for regular feedback is a great indicator of a transparent company culture. Doing a survey (and of course acting on the results) is consultative, involving and inclusive, as noted by our clients TSB and Brewin Dolphin. It’s a ‘check-in’ that says you care about what your employees think and feel. Evidence shows that empathetic leaders are what’s needed right now after such a period of uncertainty.

Dig into specific issues

Annual surveys are great to measure employee engagement, diversity and inclusion, culture, or employee wellbeing in depth. However, you may have an ad hoc need for specific feedback. During lockdown organisations like London South Bank University used regular pulses to measure how effective the transition to working from home had been, and what tools and wellbeing support people needed.

Report on new pilot programmes

You can use a pulse survey to assess, the impact of new programmes. For example, the introduction of new vision and values. It will help you track how quickly your people understand and adopt your values and behaviours, and what impact this has on how people feel about their role, their manager and their loyalty to the organisation. As you tweak the vision and values programme, and it becomes more embedded, you can track the impact of your actions with pulse surveys at frequent intervals. This data is fantastic for keeping your programmes on track, and providing evidence to leadership teams.

Additionally, employee pulse surveys are a brilliant way to report on pilot programmes tested in one business division, giving you evidence to roll it out elsewhere. See how Fuller’s did this here.

Pulse survey vs engagement survey – so how do they differ?

We’ve established above that annual surveys and pulsing surveys differ – the former more strategic, and in depth, the latter; faster, lighter and more specific.

Frequency

Pulse surveys are more frequent than annual, typically every 6 months or every quarter. But this cycle isn’t rigid – survey frequency can depend on your feedback needs from time to time as they are quicker to set up than in depth surveys.

One word of caution; only survey as often as you can take action. Each time you ask for employees’ input, they expect something tangible to happen as a result. If you survey more frequently than quarterly, you don’t leave the organisation much time to decide changes as a result of the feedback, make the change, communicate the change and have everyone notice! Employees will become sceptical and your response rate will plunge.

Structure

Annual or census surveys measure long term trends in the employee experience. They are a deep-dive, strategic analysis that should coincide with business and workforce planning cycles.

At People Insight, we recommend the PEARL model of engagement as the starting point for an annual survey with:

1. 5 engagement indicator questions – these questions taken together show how engaged a person is
2. 30 driver questions – based on factors that influence engagement such as autonomy, reward or leadership
3. A range of optional thematic indices such as diversity and inclusion or wellbeing
4. 3-5 open ended questions that give more insight into why people answer the driver questions in a certain way
5. Detailed demographics so that data can be sliced and diced in useful ways.

Pulse surveys keep the 5 engagement indicator questions so that there’s consistent tracking over time, but keep to 5-10 driver questions and 1-3 open text questions.

8 Steps to a successful employee pulse survey

1. Why are you doing it?

Your first step is to consider the purpose of a pulse survey for your organisation. Don’t do one because everyone else is. Do it because you genuinely want frequent feedback from your employees, and are prepared to do something tangible and specific about the results in a timely way.

2. Find an external survey partner

Go external to provide reassurance for staff about data confidentiality and data security with an experienced third party. Choose a survey provider that fits your needs – you might want the survey technology only, or you want support to design and build your survey, and expertise to get the right analysis and insights for your organisation.

3. Choose a pulse frequency that’s right for your organisation

Consider everything we’ve said above about the right timing for your survey, so you get fresh feedback at the right moment about the hot topics. Critically, plan the period after the survey, when you‘ll be taking action in as much detail as carrying out the survey itself. Don’t carry out another one until you’ve actually made some changes happen!

4. Design your survey

Whilst you might know generally what you want to ask, designing and structuring your survey so that its clear what you are asking, provides a frictionless user experience and delivers feedback in an actionable fashion is an art! An expert organisational psychologist knows exactly how to get the most robust, representative and actionable data from your survey – and how it fits into your wider employee voice programme.

5. Get your organisation ready for surveys

Ask your stakeholders (senior leaders, local leaders, employee resource groups) what employee feedback they need, share with them what you plan to ask, and what you want to do with the results. No doubt you’ll want them engaged in making changes happen after the event.

6. Communicate effectively before-during-after

Comms play a big role pre-launch in establishing awareness and trust so you can boost participation and get the most robust data and insights. But that’s not all – during the survey participants might have questions, afterwards they’ll want to know the results and how action will be decided and how they’ll be involved. Have a look at our guide to successful survey communications for plenty of tips on what to cover.

7. Engage stakeholders in action

Remember your senior leaders, local leaders and employee resource groups that you engaged before you started the survey? It will be much easier having done this to go back to them post survey and encourage them to lead others in taking action at board, team or local level. Your chosen survey tool should have inbuilt action planning functionality, with suggestions and tips for managers to make the process swift.

8. Make your pulse survey part of everyday communications

Following your pulse survey, results and action planning, don’t forget to continue the communications with a ‘You said, We did’ flavour. Whether at All Hands meetings, via newsletters, team meetings, in your Workplace or Slack channels, remind your people that something is happening because of their feedback – literally you said that – so we are doing this!

12 questions to ask in your pulse survey

Whilst you’ll have specific, unique questions to ask in your pulse survey, we suggest the PEARL framework as the starting structure, as mentioned above.

PEARL employee engagement indicator questions

Based on robust organisational psychology research, these 5 engagement questions (or statements) from PEARL are proven to indicate how engaged a person is. Use these in every survey to track engagement over time:

1 I am proud to say I work for <organisation>

2 I would recommend <organisation> as a good place to work

3 Working here makes me want to do the best work I can

4 I would still like to be working at <organisation> in two years’ time

5 I care about the future of < organisation> to measure changes in engagement

We recommend the statistically proven 5-point response scale for each statement in your survey:

• Strongly agree
• Agree
• Neither agree nor disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly disagree

Priority pulse survey questions

Consider very specific questions / statements for your pulse survey focussing on the key issues that you want feedback on and relate these to your specific performance metrics. It might be something that you’ve take action on since your last survey, a new programme you have introduced or structural changes within the business. For example:

6 Since the ‘Leadership4Future’ programme was introduced in June, I’ve had 1:1s with my line manager at least every fortnight.

7 Since the ‘Leadership4Future’ programme was introduced in June, my 1:1s with my line manager have been well structured.

8 Since the ‘Leadership4Future’ programme was introduced in June, the quality of feedback I get from my line manager has improved.

People Insight’s #1 favourite survey question to include in every survey

9 I believe action will be taken as a result of this survey.

The belief in action question shows how much people trust your organisation to act on their feedback. We recommend always including this question in every survey you run. Combined with your survey response rates, this can help measure survey fatigue – are people fed up with being asked, and do they trust you to deliver change.

Open text questions

Finally, again you’ll want to include 1-3 open text questions specific to your key issues. For example:

10 ‘What changes have you seen, if any, since the ‘Leadership4Future’ programme was introduced?

11 What else could your line manager do to support your development at the moment?

12 Is there anything else you would like to tell us about?

Pitfalls to avoid with employee pulse surveys

Survey fatigue.

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.

Collecting data, but not doing anything with it.

People won’t participate if nothing happens as a result of their feedback. You’ll erode trust.  Act on feedback and communicate the changes being made so people see the value of taking part in the survey process.

Lloyds Banking Group changed up their pulse survey approach after realising that managers were left with little time to take any action between surveys:

“…the problem with conducting such frequent surveys “was that [the firm’s approximately 8,000] line managers weren’t gaining any new insights and didn’t have time to digest that much data and take action” on what the latest employee polls told them.”

 David Littlechild, previously Head of Culture and Engagement at Lloyds

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.

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.

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 for everyone, across all devices, in multiple languages.
• 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.
• 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 are relevant to your survey questions and based on actions that have been successful for organisations like yours.