Why Employee Pulse Surveys are Good for Your Business

According to a Gallup study, companies with engaged employees outperform those who don’t by a massive 202%. So, the ability to measure how your staff are feeling and quickly take any necessary steps to improve their happiness has never been more important.

While the traditional annual employee survey is still an effective way for you to gauge employee sentiment, given today’s busier and more rapidly moving workplace a tool that can allow you to more frequently collect, measure and then take actions based on how your staff feel will deliver even greater value. It’s something you can achieve with an employee pulse survey.

What is a pulse survey and why use them?

We go into greater detail in our blog, 'What Is A Pulse Survey?', but to summarise here: an employee pulse survey is a fast and more frequent online survey method that you can use to quickly ascertain the levels and drivers of your employees’ engagement. This helps provide an effective snapshot of your employees’ current thoughts and a valuable insight into the health of your company.

When used in conjunction with a larger employee survey, a pulse survey offers a shorter, more flexible solution, which you can use to regularly check-in with how your employees are feeling. This can be hugely beneficial, as it enables you to measure how well staff are responding to any follow-up actions you may have taken after deploying a larger employee survey. It also allows you to keep a closer eye on any fresh developments that might be negatively affecting your employees’ mood and engagement levels and take any necessary actions before it impacts your business.

5 more reasons to use employee pulse surveys

A happier, more engaged workforce forms the backbone to any successful business, which the insights that are revealed from a pulse survey can help you to create. And there are five key areas that employee pulse surveys help you to improve to develop these favourable conditions.

1) Your employee engagement levels will be higher

With pulse survey questions being fewer in number than standard surveys, your response rates should be higher, as staff are more likely to read and complete your questionnaire.

2) It’s much simpler to analyse and act on your response data

Compared with a larger annual employee survey where there will be lots of data sets to analyse, shorter pulse surveys are much easier to absorb, evaluate and make decisions on.

3) It helps improve your staff relations and retention

Through more regular dialogue, your employees should feel more valued and listened to, which will help boost your staff relations and retention.

4) You’re able to build a stronger company culture

Through eliciting more frequent feedback from your employees, you’re much better able to keep everyone aligned with your brand values, vision and mission, enabling you to develop happier and more trusting teams and build a stronger company culture.

5) It’s easier to keep your employee strategy on track

If you only survey your staff once a year it’s difficult to track how well any post-survey initiatives have performed and assess if your strategy is working. In contrast, with more regular pulse surveys, you’re able to track and measure your progress more frequently and take any necessary actions you need to keep it on track.

How pulse surveys support business strategy

Employee happiness is an important business metric, so being able to measure it through an employee pulse survey is extremely helpful. However, the ability to see what affect employee happiness and engagement may be having on other business metrics such as your sales revenue, customer retention and Net Promoter Score, is even more valuable.

Given that employee pulse surveys are run more frequently they can allow you to do this. You could run pulse surveys every quarter, to measure employee engagement levels in different departments, and then analyse the feedback insights from each survey to see if they had influenced the performance of a specific business metric during the next quarter.

For example, if you ran a pulse survey of your sales team in Q1 and then looked at the feedback results of this when calculating your sales revenue for Q2, if your figures were better than you expected, you might be able to deduce that this was partly as a result of higher employee engagement levels. Although, unlikely to give you a complete answer, using employee pulse surveys in this way can certainly help provide you with some measurement of how staff happiness and engagement could be affecting performance across different departments.

From restructuring or moving offices, to mergers or acquisition activity, there are many changes that both you and your employees can go through in today’s workplace. So, it’s more important than ever to be able to keep staff happy and motivated. By introducing an employee pulse survey programme into your company, you will be much better equipped to achieve this, keep your business moving forward and maintain your success.