When to use a pulse survey
By Carly Bradford and Aaron Silvestro
Shorter length ‘pulse surveys’ can abbreviate the survey/action cycle and increase the opportunity for keeping a ‘finger on the pulse’ of employee voice. When used well, they support employee satisfaction and strategic objectives.
Benefits of pulse surveys
The content of pulse surveys can vary widely depending on their purpose. Typically used as a mid-cycle check-in between full employee engagement surveys, pulse surveys can take a broad-brush approach by using a selection of individual questions from a full engagement survey. Alternatively, pulse surveys can use a targeted approach to provide a deep-dive on a particular topic or set of strategic priorities.
Whether broad or targeted, pulse surveys have a number of strengths which can optimise your employee feedback program:
Timely feedback: Pulse surveys are the tool of choice for timely feedback.
Monitoring: Effective for tracking changes in staff satisfaction and progress towards key objectives.
Identify quick wins: They help you to stay abreast of challenges that staff face and identify quick wins that can make a big difference on the ground.
Facilitate responsiveness: Information from pulse surveys enables prompt adjustments and resource deployment during periods of intense change or disruption where the staff experience can be changing rapidly (such as a pandemic, merger or shift in the marketplace).
Targeted & focused: Depending on their purpose, pulse surveys can invite staff to provide targeted feedback on a particular topic, or can collect feedback from a specific work area or subset of the organisation.
Maintain operating discipline: Help maintain focus on strategic priorities and provide consultative feedback during implementation of initiatives to improve outcomes.
Efficient implementation: Pulse surveys are faster and less resource-intensive to implement than full surveys. While for some organisations a quarterly or six-monthly check-in may be the ideal, their agility enables them to be deployed on a monthly or even weekly basis when rapid feedback is required.
Should pulse surveys replace full-length engagement surveys?
For all their strengths, pulse surveys have a limited ability to identify and prioritise issues that will provide the strongest return on investment. They generate less buy-in from managers and staff. This makes them less suited to initiating high impact, longer-term changes.
Conversely, the purpose of a full-length engagement survey is to provide diagnostics and prioritisation. For this reason, the majority of our clients use a comprehensive staff engagement survey (such as the Voice Engagement Survey) as their primary metric for strategic planning. The granularity of results allows an organisation to unpack staff experiences in detail, identify focus areas, and provides important information for a wider range of stakeholders.
These complementary strengths mean pulse surveys are often most powerful when used in conjunction with a full-length engagement survey, rather than to replace it. Pulse surveys are focused on assessing change and checking-in on areas that a full-length survey have identified as strategic priorities, allowing organisations to then be targeted, timely and responsive in their operational planning. The Voice Pulse Survey has been designed with this in mind. It is a short survey that assesses a sub-set of KPIs from the Voice Engagement Survey alongside measures of employee engagement, wellbeing and progress. Our approach to ‘keeping a finger on the pulse’ ensures a research-validated pulse survey is available to you within our survey service subscription.
Getting the most out of your pulse survey:
Maximising the benefit from pulse surveys requires a different approach to engagement surveys. Are you thinking of using pulse surveys in your employee feedback program? Read our top 10 tips for pulse surveys.
As with all surveys, good planning is the key to driving effective results. Reach out to your Voice Project Consultant for expert advice or contact us at enquiries@voiceproject.com or 1800 886 423.
Voice Project provides research-backed surveys that measure employee engagement, leadership capability and customer satisfaction. These state-of-the-art surveys help organisations get the best feedback to drive positive change. Voice Project works with organisations across the not-for profit, private and public sectors. Get in touch.