Do you know how your employees are feeling about their jobs or the company? Has there been a major event recently that has impacted your staff, like a restructuring or layoff? Pulse surveys can help you keep tabs on how people are feeling, and what can keep them feeling good.
Pulse surveys aren’t quite like the long annual surveys that employees tend to send out at the end of the year. They’re shorter, quicker surveys that take only a few minutes to complete and can be sent out as often as once a week, because they blend into employees’ workflows much better than traditional deep-dive surveys. Here’s what you need to know to make the most of pulse surveys.
Keep Them Short
Pulse surveys shouldn’t be more than 15 questions long, and that’s pushing it. Five or six questions should be enough. You’ll get high response rates from pulse surveys, but only if they’re short.
Use Them Often – But Not Too Often
You should use pulse surveys at least once a month but no more often than once a week. Pulse surveys are useful because metrics like engagement, motivation, and commitment to the company are fluid. They can fluctuate a lot over a period of months. That’s part of what makes annual deep-dive surveys less useful for measuring engagement. They have their place, but they can’t capture the ebb and flow of engagement over time the way pulse surveys sent out every couple of weeks can. You can track employee engagement and make adjustments on the fly when it needs a boost.
Just make sure you don’t use pulse surveys too often. More often than once a week will get tiresome for employees, and they may stop answering. Many companies find that every two or three weeks is the sweet spot.
Ask the Right Questions
Pulse surveys only have a few questions, so you have to ask the right ones. Four to ten questions is usually a good number – fewer than four doesn’t collect enough data, and more than ten is tiresome for the participant.
Don’t ask leading questions. Make your questions as specific as possible. Cover things like work/life balance, motivation, happiness, workload, and feelings about management. If you use a pulse survey vendor, they should be able to give you access to a library of questions you can choose from, and can help you choose the right questions to help you reach your goals. Remember to ask questions geared towards getting feedback for changes you’ve made, too – for example, you could ask participants to agree or disagree that they have seen positive changes to the company culture based on survey results or changes made due to survey results.
Act on Them
Employees like it when they feel their employees are open to feedback and willing to act on employee feedback. That willingness to act is key. The data you collect from your pulse surveys, and indeed the surveys themselves, become meaningless if you don’t act on the insights you’ve gleaned.
You can’t hide a failure to act on employee feedback from your employees for long. If you don’t act on the results of the pulse surveys, employees will notice and your engagement levels will take a nosedive as a result.
You need to commit to acting on the suggestions you get from your employees. Maybe that means giving out more recognition, doing renovations to the building, doing away with a policy employees don’t like, or loosening up a little on requirements like the dress code or working from the office versus working from home. Maybe it means improving working conditions with facility improvements or an investment in equipment.
Be prepared to act on the results of your pulse surveys – and make sure you leave yourself enough time before the next survey to complete your action plan, whether it’s remodeling the break room, buying new equipment, or handing out more incentives. Remember to leave time for employees to form an opinion of the results, too, so they can share that opinion in the next pulse survey.
Pulse surveys can give you an accurate picture of employee engagement and insights into what you need to do to increase it. Don’t overwhelm your employees with constant surveys, but collect a little data from them every so often so you can understand how they’re feeling and why they’re feeling that way, and so they can feel respected and valued. With pulse surveys, everyone benefits.