We live in the culture of immediacy. We want effective solutions, but also fast ones. It’s the same when we want to implement programs and measures to boost the motivation, commitment, and satisfaction of our internal customers: the employees. But to achieve this, you need to obtain relevant and practical information about their work experience. This is where pulse surveys are essential.
What is a pulse survey?
The pulse surveys are short, quick, and frequent questionnaires that we sent to our employees to explore how is their work experience within the organization. To do this, the surveys are divided by subjects and, in general, cover factors that influence the company’s results: satisfaction, motivation, communication, work climate or employee commitment.
Among the main characteristics, pulse surveys:
- Are shorter. The number of questions varies depending on what we want to focus, but they do not usually exceed ten questions and they are completed in just a few minutes.
- Are more frequent. They are weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc. The ideal is to do at least one a month.
- Are flexible. Each pulse survey deals with a specific topic and, in addition, they can be used to measure the impact of recent events, such as: knowing how Covid-19 affects the mental health of the workforce or what is their degree of adaptation to homeworking .
- Are chronological. Making historical comparisons to see the evolution of an aspect and how it varies over time is much easier to achieve with pulse surveys than with other types of traditional annual employee surveys.
How pulse surveys help your organization?
Many companies use pulse surveys to take care of the well-being of their employees or to design action plans based on the data extracted from this tool.
Why are pulse surveys so helpful for boosting business? Let’s see some of the advantages that this resource for leadership and talent management has compared to other types of surveys:
- High participation rate: With short questionnaires that don’t take up a lot of time to complete, employees are more likely to spend a few minutes answer them without interrupting their productivity.
- Fast response: Responses are fast and so are results. This allows you to detect problems before they become serious and take preventive measures.
- It promotes open communication: pulse surveys are anonymous, which encourages participants to give their opinions openly about everything that the company can improve and / or reinforce.
- Significant and regular feedback: with this type of survey the recency effects disappear so you can obtain reliable and relevant data, facilitating the development of action plans that really help drive the business.
- Boost Employee Engagement: Simply listening to employees frequently means they will realize that their opinions matter. When that happens, their engagement and work satisfaction increase.
- It reinforces the positive image of the company: related to the previous point, listen to your employees helps to improve the image and the reputation your the company.
All these benefits ultimately translate into data and information that help in making better decisions and in creating better work environments that promote motivation and effectiveness of teams.
With pulse surveys, we all win: employees will be more satisfied, customers will be better served, and the organization will see those benefits in its bottom line.
How to create an Employee Pulse Survey?
Now that you know the advantages of pulse surveys, you may want to start using them within your business strategy and Human Resources management. But before starting to design them, you must consider a series of key aspects:
- Define the objective: Before we start sending surveys non-stop, we must take a moment and think “what do we want to achieve?” “What is the purpose of the survey?” “What do we want to measure?”
- Choose the right questions: It is essential that the questions in the pulse surveys are related to the objective we want to assume. And not only that, but the format is also important: open or closed answers? Directed or random? Likert scale or Thurstone scale?
- Define the sending frequency: the sending rate determines how often employees will receive surveys. Long time term could have negative effects on responses while a time too short could make pulse surveys less effective.
- Define the communication channel: it is also important to define the channel through the workers will receive the pulse surveys, which will always be the same. You can send them manually through an internal communication channel, or use specialized software such as Team Insights.
- Analysis: One thing is clear: pulse surveys are useless if we don’t analyze the feedback. A frequent study of the responses is an essential step to understand the motivations of your teams and to know what factors are those that influence both positively and negatively in their work performance.
- Share the results: It is also a good idea to share the results obtained with the entire workforce, which shows transparency and builds trust relationships.
- Take measeures: This is the real goal of pulse surveys. It is not to collect data, but to use that data to make decisions and actions that help improve the organization.
- Make adjustments: Once the process is done, evaluate its effectiveness and make changes in all those aspects that can be improved: frequency of sending, type of questions, etc.
All these factors will critically influence the quality, reliability and validity of the data obtained.
Why should you use Team Insights?
If you don’t have time to design pulse surveys, but you like the idea of implementing them in your organization, you have the option of using specialized professional software.
Team Insights it’s a SaaS (Software as a Service) of pulse surveys that allows you to obtain accurate information from your team through reliable metrics in real time and see their evolution over time.
The advantages of having our application include:
- Friendly graphics: You will be able to see all the important information at a single glance thanks to our dashboard that includes friendly graphics easy to understand for everyone, even for those without specific training in data analysis.
- Shorter analysis time: All data is displayed automatically and is segregated by subject, so you can quickly analyze specific factors. In addition, you can see the historical evolution of each of the items and obtain precise details that will make it easier for you to understand your team.
- You manage the experience: define who can (or cannot) see the data, how often the surveys are sent, and how to show the results thanks to the quantity of filters available.
- Integration with other applications: Do you want to have all the tools in the same workspace? Team Insights can be integrated into SAP SuccesFactors, Meta4, Workday, Denario / BesTalent IA, etc.
- Personalization: TI adapts to the needs of each organization. Apart from our models with efficiency scientifically proven, the application has a survey generator with which you can customize the pulse surveys at the time and objective you need.
- Assistance: With Team Insights you have the option of having an assigned senior consultant, who will offer you continuous support and regular reviews of the product and its results.
- Adjusted to your needs: There are three benefit plans: Free, Advanced and Premium. It is not necessary to spend the entire budget and you can extend the license whenever you need it.
In addition to all these advantages, Team Insights is very easy to use, it is intuitive, powerful and accessible for any professional.
Do you want to discover everything that pulse surveys can do for your organization? Ask for a DEMO . It’s free!
