Pulse Surveys 101

A “pulse survey” is typically defined as a quick check-in of an organization that provides management with expedited data into how the organization is perceiving the workplace.

Generally, they should be lightweight (<10 minutes) and present questions that align to optimizing employee experience and achieving business outcomes. 


You should start by deciding how often you’d like employees to receive the survey, depending on your appetite for response rate and risk avoidance for survey fatigue. 


  • Response rate: How many employees provide a response to your survey

  • Survey fatigue: People get tired of filling out meaningless surveys so they stop responding


If you ever want to feel survey fatigue personally: 

  • 1) open your email inbox -- that personal one you link to all the nonsense websites you order junk from

  • 2) search for the term “survey” 

  • 3) feel the existential dread. 


One of the top 5 searches in my inbox right now is for the open air parking lot in which I parked my car for a weekend trip at the airport. Canopy, look, you are just great -- but I can’t spend energy on these surveys.   


Minimizing survey fatigue, but maximizing response rate is of course the ideal when sending out an engagement survey. To ensure employees are motivated to respond, you should have a channel that predictably communicates survey results to employees. With those results you should bring action plans, and ideally after time, measurable progress towards those action plans. You should make it worth it for the employee to spend their time filling out the survey.


All surveys will benefit from a scaled analysis perspective by using questions that leverage a common scale, like a Likert scale (5 point Strongly Disagree -> Strongly Agree). Asking different questions with different scales adds a whole lot of variables that you do not want to deal with.


But that doesn’t mean you can’t ask more detailed questions in a Pulse - in fact, a Pulse survey can be an incredible platform to collect research on a representative sample of the organization over time. In doing so, you can ask a very small percentage of the organization a question (“In your own words, how could we make the workplace more productive?”) and get a representative result of the overall workplace without asking literally everybody.


Using a representative sample means we can mathematically discern the sentiment of the whole company using much fewer employees - preventing production disruption while also maximizing the value of the individual response. 


For example:


If you have a company with 10,000 employees, 

You send a survey to 700 employees each month,

And 60% of those employees respond...


Congrats! 


The 420 people who submitted responses represent, at a 95% confidence interval, the views of your organization within a 5% margin of error. In other words, that’s what statisticians tend to look at and go “yup, there’s probably a there there”.


It’s a super helpful calculation when understanding if your survey results are likely to be representative as a whole, and https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/ does a great job of explaining it.


So don’t let a pulse survey scare you -- it can be an incredibly effective tool when combined with the right analysts crafting questions and guiding leadership towards interpreting results. The most important part, as with any other engagement survey, is taking meaningful action on survey results. Good news, bad news, anywhere in between: have a plan of action.

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