Receiving feedback and adapting quickly is essential to survive as a company, especially if you’re a startup. Pulse surveys are a practical tool that enables organizations to gather feedback from their workforce, customers, or any specific audience.

This feedback is critical for identifying improvement areas and implementing positive changes. Effective use of pulse surveys can only happen if you know the best practices in a pulse survey. Let’s see what they are.

1. Have a clear goal for your pulse surveys.

The first step in creating a pulse survey is to establish a clear objective. Have a metric in mind that you want to know more about - employee happiness, stressful working hours, lack of communication between teams, reaction to a new policy, and so on. A clear goal and a metric ensure that the questions are focused, the responses are relevant, and the outcomes are actionable.

2. Keep your pulse surveys quick and short.

A pulse survey should be brief. Aim for 5-15 pulse survey questions that participants can complete quickly. Use a blend of quantitative and qualitative questions. If you’re a company of up to 30 people, every response to a qualitative question will be worth a gold dime to know your employees.

Short pulse check surveys respect the time of your audience, leading to higher completion rates and more accurate responses. This becomes all the more important if you’re asking working people in an employee pulse survey to share information.

Additionally, a concise format allows for more frequent distribution, let’s say twice monthly, offering continuous insight into the issues that pulse survey questions can showcase.

2. Know who the pulse survey is for.

For effective pulse surveys, it's important to segment the employees, especially if you’re a big company with more than a dozen teams, with each team having 8-12 members or more.

Segmenting your employees based on criteria like department, role, or seniority in the company will help build relevant questions and keep the survey meaningful. Since averages can be deceptive and there is no “average” employee, go with a segmented one.

3. Consider what and how you're asking it.

Knowing about the exact questions is one part but not the main one. The way pulse survey questions are phrased and placed is crucial.

“Phrasing” means using clear, straightforward language that directly addresses the metric you’re trying to know more about. Instead of asking, “Are you resting well after office?” ask, “On how many days of the last week did you sleep well as per the 7-8 hr sleep window?”.

“Placing” means you start with lighter questions to build trust and then go into the hard-hitting questions that rewrite a deeper thought. You can’t ask me about my mental health unless you’ve asked about my experience at the recent team dinner.

Go for closed-ended questions with simple response options (single choice, multiple choice, smart buckets) for ease of completion and analysis. This makes sense in the employee engagement pulse survey. Saying that, don’t forget to include a few open-ended questions for qualitative insights.

4. Anonymous pulse surveys yield better insights.

Remember to keep the responses to a pulse survey anonymous. This allows participants to provide honest feedback without fear of getting smacked by their boss. Anonymity increases the accuracy of the data and leads to higher completion rates.

An employee engagement pulse survey cannot individualize actions to be taken post-survey; it surely can indicate a cluster of problems that people across teams are experiencing.

5. Iterate to find the ideal frequency of a pulse survey.

The frequency of pulse surveys is important. Too frequent surveys can lead to fatigue, while infrequent surveys might miss important trends.

Decide on a frequency that suits your needs, whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly, based on the situation and audience engagement.

A pulse survey could also have a specific timing - before a product launch, during hiring season, or during tax filing month.

Putting your survey results into action.

The effectiveness of a pulse survey is measured by the actions taken after getting results. Knowing the right pulse survey questions is not enough. You must analyze the data, identify patterns, cluster similar and sub-responses, and share the findings with your employees.

Encourage your team to participate in improving the work culture. This will demonstrate the value of their feedback and promote a company-wide sense of responsibility. Also, make the best use of the data already shared in the employee engagement pulse survey.

Keep learning. It's a marathon, not a sprint!

Treat pulse surveys as an ongoing practice and not like a one-time fix for some problem that you apprehend. Regularly gather feedback and adjust your strategies based on the responses.

This ongoing process encourages honest communication, builds trust, and enables continuous improvement in how the company operates as a whole.

This goes along with knowing that you must use a form-building platform that allows for faster data collection, enables A/B testing visual elements, and can take inputs in various formats - voice, text, and image.

WorkHack is one such platform where you can build pulse surveys and deploy them quickly. Do check out our AI Form Builder for free now.