Top 10 tips for pulse surveys
By Carly Bradford and Aaron Silvestro
Pulse surveys allow you to keep abreast of challenges staff face in a rapidly changing environment. This feedback enables timely action that can make a real difference to the everyday experience of staff. Pulse surveys enable you to invite staff to provide targeted feedback on a particular topic, or to collect feedback from a specific work area. They can also help maintain focus on strategic priorities and provide consultative feedback during change processes to improve outcomes.
Maximising the benefit from pulse surveys requires a different approach to engagement surveys.
Here are our top 10 tips for pulse surveys:
Identify your purpose: Articulate a clear purpose for each pulse survey. This will avoid project creep and inform both the content of the survey and the level of reporting. Note that a pulse survey should be measuring something you can reasonably expect to change (or at least start to impact) within the time between surveys. Some strategic priorities concern highly complex ingrained issues that require both time to unpack and patient, multi-pronged approaches to generate an impact. While checking in on the progress of initiatives allows fine-tuning of your approach, too frequent surveying of these areas will only entrench the feeling of these issues as being immovable.
Streamline survey design & implementation. Pulse surveys increase the frequency of feedback. Hence, a timely process for governance and signoff needs to be in place to allow content and communications to be quickly approved. Stakeholder consultation will be more limited than what is undertaken for a full-length survey, so it’s important to be clear upfront on who should be involved.
Limit demographic breakdowns. Pulse survey results need to be quickly communicated and acted on. Focus on having sufficient depth of demographics to be able to understand the issues and where they lie, without over-investing in unpacking and actioning feedback for small work areas.
Facilitate senior leadership commitment upfront. Setting up for a fast turnaround of results to senior leadership and then back out to staff is essential. If you’re running 3-4 surveys a year you can’t afford to spend the first month digesting the results before sharing key messages. It helps to have a clear upfront commitment from senior leadership on a time frame for results discussion and identification of quick wins.
Design your survey to encourage balanced feedback. As pulse surveys often focus on areas for improvement, this can run the risk of creating an overly negative representation of the organisation or problem. Managers can find such feedback confronting, and the follow-up communications can have a negative tone. This can create barriers to taking action. You can mitigate this risk by including questions on complementary strengths, supports which facilitate change, or improvements observed. Reporting change scores also focusses the discussion on improvements. This helps ensure balanced feedback, with opportunities to recognise and celebrate achievements.
Assess impact on key outcomes. Include key outcome measures within the pulse survey, such as employee engagement, wellbeing, and progress. This allows you to track whether you’re bringing staff along with you as you implement initiatives. It provides a metric to measure the impact of changes as they are deployed.
Include text comment questions. The feedback from text comments allows you to understand the context of results and identify quick wins – without having to seek further input from staff. Keeping the focus of text questions narrowed to a specific topic ensures the feedback is relevant to the survey purpose.
Anticipate lower response rates. Response rates for pulse surveys are generally lower than for full employee engagement surveys. The scope and support around pulse surveys is more limited, typically resulting in a lower level of buy-in from staff. This can be mitigated in part through very focused design and communications. Plan to concentrate actions at the highest levels, rather than using the survey as a tool for assessing performance of small work areas where the impact of lower response rates can impair reliability of results.
Keep the survey window short. Shorter survey live windows (e.g., one week) help keep the momentum moving and maintains a level of urgency to complete the survey. Given the increased frequency of surveys, this also maximises the turnaround time for actions between surveys.
Consider appropriate timing and survey fatigue. The more frequent your surveys, the more likely you are to encounter survey fatigue from staff. It’s essential both to clearly communicate actions taken as a result of survey rounds and allow some time for initiatives to get underway. Without this, cynicism can arise where staff are being asked the same questions on repeat without seeing any impact from their feedback. The focus of your survey will also impact timing, as will the rapidity with which the context of staff’s experience is changing, and your level of internal resourcing to support the survey process and actions. The most appropriate timing for your organisation may look like anything from a very frequent pulse survey (such as weekly or monthly) to a check-in held every three, six or twelve months. In some cases organisations may choose to vary the focus of their pulse surveys across rounds, checking in on a range of topic areas across the year. This permits for frequent feedback while still allowing time for actions to mature before you check back on a particular focus area again.
Can we help you?
As with all surveys, good planning is the key to driving effective results. Thinking of using pulse surveys in your employee feedback program? Our Voice Pulse survey is available for use under our survey service subscription. Plus read our article on when to use a pulse survey and why. You can also 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.