Employee Pulse Survey Guide: Strategy, Questions, Best Practices

Employee pulse surveys have exploded in popularity as employers sought more timely feedback from employees to help navigate the crisis.

However, even as more organizations adopt employee pulse surveys, questions about exactly what constitutes a pulse continue. The one point of agreement is that pulse surveys have a lighter ‘touch’ than the annual census or employee engagement survey, either because the questionnaire is shorter or the audience is smaller.

Our view is that a pulse survey can be many different things — and used for many different purposes. In this article, we’ll look at different employee pulse survey examples and pulse survey best practices that are applicable to whatever type of pulse strategy you adopt.

What is an employee pulse survey?

An employee pulse survey is a short, recurring check-in that gathers employee sentiment between larger listening events. Typically, a pulse will be focused on one objective (e.g., capturing employee feedback about a specific program or business process) or one topic area (e.g. manager effectiveness). A pulse survey is often a check-in, “taking the pulse” of organizational health and sentiment in the periods between more comprehensive census surveys.

How do you define your pulse survey purpose?

Employee pulse surveys provide a great way to listen and act on employee feedback, and can be deployed to the entire organization, a random sample, or a selected group. These are some of the most common objectives when conducting pulse surveys:

• Tracking sentiment over time

• Gaining better understanding of employee needs by “drilling down” on specific issues

• Staying connected with employee perceptions during times of crisis

Determining the “best” type of pulse survey requires a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve. For example, an employee pulse survey could be used for:

The purpose of your pulse surveys will determine both the survey cadence and the groups surveyed — as well as the number and type of questions you ask — so be clear on your objectives before you decide to do a pulse.

How often should you run pulse surveys?

Most organizations deploy pulse surveys quarterly or monthly; the exact cadence still depends on your objectives, your capacity to follow best practices, and your ability to act on results.

If you design an employee pulse survey program to frequently monitor employee feedback but do nothing with the incoming information, don’t be surprised if your program fails. Employees will begin to view your pulses as a fruitless exercise. Rather than helping you improve employee engagement and business performance, your program may lead to lack-of-action fatigue, where people view surveys as an insincere exercise.

Frequent pulse cadences can create avoidable problems:

• Wait-and-see: Leaders may delay action because another survey is coming soon.

• Trust decline: Employees can lose confidence that feedback matters, which can reduce participation over time.

• Resource limits: Some organizations lack the technology or internal capabilities to support daily, weekly, or monthly survey cycles.

Pick a cadence you can support with analysis, communication, and action.

Rule number one for pulse survey cadence is: Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Organizations must have strategies to drive meaningful change before increasing survey frequency.

• Unless you’re simply monitoring engagement, don’t ask employees for feedback if you don’t have the resources or bandwidth to follow up with action.

• Even when you are monitoring engagement, use what you learn from the trend to act if you can – even if that action is just a follow-up survey to dive deeper and gain more information about potential issues.

What are the best practices for pulse surveys?

When executed well, pulse surveys track trends over time and give leaders the agility to react between annual touchpoints. As with any survey, you still need to follow core best practices. Pulse survey best practices include:

• Establishing a clear purpose

• Maintaining a commitment to action

• Communicating promptly following the pulse to share results and to inform employees about actions taken in response to survey feedback

If you can’t incorporate all these best practices into your pulse survey, don’t do the survey; it may do more harm than good.

Some survey providers — typically those that offer only pulse survey software — recommend a move away from an annual census survey in favor of “pulse-only” strategies with very frequent (and perhaps intrusive) surveys for local teams or for the entire organization. While there are situations where frequent and even daily pulses may be appropriate, many issues don’t need to be tracked frequently to be critical focus areas for change. A well-deployed annual census survey with follow-up actions and appropriate monitoring could very well be more effective than frequent pulse surveys with constant measurement but no action.

These employee pulse survey strategy examples from clients demonstrate the value of adhering to pulse survey best practices:

• Ineffective Approach (Client #1): Quarterly pulses tracking only engagement outcomes. Result: Managers received no actionable data, and employee experience did not improve.

• Effective Approach (Client #2): Regular pulses tracking engagement plus manager effectiveness and team enablement. Result: Managers received specific insights (e.g., lack of career conversations) allowing for immediate corrective action.

The moral of the story is that like all other surveys, pulse surveys should be deployed with the goal of getting actionable feedback and taking action. There’s nothing wrong with monitoring engagement of course, but a better strategy would be to use those results to pinpoint areas in the organization where a problem may be brewing and you need more information, rather than sharing it. Survey results shared with managers can only lead to improvements if the pulse was designed to empower managers to take action.

How do you build an employee pulse survey strategy that works?

As we’ve noted, there are many different types of pulse surveys and survey cadences suited to different purposes. What’s most important is to adopt a pulse strategy that provides your organization with the information you need at the intervals needed.

While we've seen growing demand for pulse surveys, the most common trend is that our clients continue with their census survey program to create a wide and deep database for analytics. Many clients then choose to complement their census survey data with employee pulse surveys. This is a best-of-both-worlds approach: Census surveys establish a baseline, allow for tracking changes at multiple levels of the organization, and help identify issues for further exploration; pulses help to monitor, discover, or respond to emerging issues as needed.

Regardless of the provider or platform you choose for conducting pulses, you will likely want to ensure that the pulse survey software you select allows you to integrate your pulse survey data with your census survey data, as well as other people data. With this, you can identify patterns and investigate outcomes; without this, you will be left with a lot of disparate data that is hard to connect to gain insights.

In the end, your pulse survey strategy should be based on your organization’s unique needs and be practical in terms of your capacity to act on employee feedback. Always keep in mind that action – for improvement – is the ultimate reason for surveying; it’s better to ask less and act more than vice versa.

Need help designing your pulse survey strategy?

At Perceptyx, helping companies design listening programs to address their unique needs is our goal. With custom surveys paired to our platform and expertise in all aspects of survey design, strategy, and communication, we can guide you in developing a strategy that will help your company thrive.

Get in touch to learn more.