“Do you check your bank account once a year? Of course not, that would be crazy. So then why do we only check on our employees once a year?” – Jacob Shriar
Happy and engaged employees are one of the necessary assets for any business that wants to be successful. We understand that it can be difficult to keep tabs on how happy every single employee is as your company grows or evolves but, checking in on your employees once a year is simply not enough.
How can you be sure that your employees are happy with their work and engaged with your organization? The answer is pulse surveys!
What is a Pulse Survey?
A pulse survey is a short, quick survey that is sent out to employees on a regular basis (you decide the cadence, but it’s usually monthly or quarterly). They are typically 5-15 questions that check on various topics such as employee satisfaction, job role comfortability, overall communication, relationship building, work environment, and other developments.
Pulse surveys provide invaluable feedback for management. They give you the opportunity to discover and address issues among your staff before it’s too late. Gathering employee feedback on a regular basis through a pulse survey is the first step towards making more informed decisions that can positively affect both your people and your profits.
Now, let us walk you through how to do a pulse survey… the right way!
How to do a Pulse Survey
We recognize that it can be time-consuming to reach the high levels of engagement that you need to inform a good survey, so we’ve put together this guide with a few of the ground rules on how to create an effective pulse survey for your staff.
- Define the purpose – It is crucial that you make the purpose of your pulse survey efforts clear from the beginning. Pulse surveys can cover a wide array of topics, so it is important to distinguish the exact component that you’d like to focus on in each survey. Nobody wants to take the time to fill something out that feels like it has no purpose or significance.
- Ask the right questions – While there are no rules about the questions you should ask in a pulse survey, the questions should apply to all respondents, and should contribute to your end goal in some way. Avoid the temptation to throw in those extra, unrelated questions. People tend to lose patience trying to answer questions that don’t apply directly to them, and they ultimately end up abandoning the survey.
- Choose the right cadence – The best way to narrow down how often you should be sending out surveys is to think about how often the components you are measuring are going to change over time. For example, job satisfaction may tend to fluctuate more than engagement or the work environment.
- Only survey if you intend to act – Survey fatigue is a real thing. If your staff feels like their feedback is going unheard and not leading to meaningful action or change, you’ll start to see lower participation and even skepticism. After conducting a pulse survey, you should make an actionable plan to communicate your findings and course-correct as needed.
- Explain the purpose – Last, but certainly not least, you must be able to explain to your team how the survey fits your overall engagement strategy. An engagement strategy does no good if it only lives in your head, so it is important to have clear communication about why the survey is taking place, when to take it, where to take it, and most importantly, how the results will be used.
- Making Sense of Pulse Surveys When all is said and done, you need to be able to uncover trends or reveal the impact of specific events on the employee experience. Knowing where to even start to analyze and take action can be confusing, and that is why many teams turn to third-party solutions like Etho.
Etho Pulse Surveys
Numbers don’t lie… and that’s a good thing! Pulse surveys allow you to not only read survey feedback, but also view metrics and customizable KPIs within the platform. With Etho, you will be able to see what your team voted the most for, what they want to see changed, and what they want to be kept the same. All this information can be expressed as data for further analysis, allowing you to make more informed choices.
Etho’s employee pulse surveys help you answer lingering questions and use data to connect with your team. You’ll gain candid feedback, improve satisfaction and retention, and, most importantly, provide a clear and direct way for employees to shape your culture.
Our easy-to-use pulse survey software allows for open communication between you and your team. Now, you can better understand what they are thinking and feeling without clunky spreadsheets or complicated document sharing.
Want to know what your employees really think about their company, role, or even you? Request a demo today to get started.
