mobile-logo

Within the modern leadership best practices, gathering employee feedback is considered as one of the most powerful ways to ensure that employees feel engaged, valued, and stay motivated overall. Prominent scholars on employee relations attribute direct financial benefits to the ability to proactively and effectively listen to employees as a means to create and maintain employee engagement. 

 

Employee pulse surveys are one of the tools that allows organizations to get a sense on how their employees are feeling, checking-in with the topics that are important for them and for the company. Understanding the employees’ engagement and gathering actionable feedback will allow the organization to take action proactively and face potential conflicts even before they arise.

Benefits of regularly doing employee pulse surveys​

 

As stated before, employee pulse surveys are very effective tools to carry out organizational listening and gaining actionable feedback on topics such as employee satisfaction, job role, communication, relationships, and work environment.

 

Furthermore, since these surveys are sent out regularly, companies can get a better sense of how things are going in an organization rather than waiting for problems to appear.

 

The quick completion time needed to fill in one of the surveys, when those are kept short and simple, promotes higher response rates among employees, as well as an open communication mindset that encourages employees to give honest input in a timely manner, increasing their feeling of being valued and listened to. As employees feel valued, they will become more engaged with the organization, and therefore more invested in working towards its success.

 

While a recent study on workplace engagement in the U.S, determined that disengaged employees cost organizations around $450-550 billion each year, highly engaged employees can make a company be up to 21% more profitable.

 

However, it is important to consider that an excessive frequency of pulse surveys and the lack of a clear purpose for the feedback gathered can have a detrimental effect on the general benefits of pulse surveys and actually cause a decrease in the response rate and engagement of the employees. Here, as with everything, moderation and careful planning are key to success.

Engaged employees see the connection between their everyday work and the organization's mission

What should a good employee pulse survey tool include?

In order to reach that delicate balance of frequency and purpose that actually increases response rates and contributes towards a more engaged workforce, the pulse survey software that you choose must be customizable in terms of content and frequency, provide meaningful insights that can be acted upon and, still, be simple enough to configure and use. The best possible solution is one that integrates into the software that is already in use in the company, so no extra steps are necessary.

 

Therefore, when checking the different employee pulse survey options available in the market you should ask for the following characteristics:

 

1. Simple and intuitive use

 

As a general rule of thumb, the best possible software for any occasion will be one that is both easy to install and easy to manage for both your IT personnel as well as the rest of the employees. In that sense, a software that automatically integrates on top of a program that is already widely spread and used in your organization, like for instance Microsoft Teams, is an excellent option. 

 

According to the State of Sotfware 2019 report, more than half of the employees questioned in the U.S are unhappy at work as a result of the troublesome software they use, and a quarter of them have considered quitting their job for that same reason. 

 

2. Scalable and customizable

 
The chosen pulse survey software should offer you the possibility to adapt the questionnaire length, frequency, response range, and type of feedback (open or closed answers) to the particular needs of your organization and the goals of the survey at any given time. 
 
Besides, the pulse survey solution must be able to scale up and down in sync with the company, without the need for big changes or restructuring of the software’s architecture to do so. 
 
 

3. Real-time and historic insights 

 
Since one of the desired outcomes of employee pulse surveys is gaining a fast and accurate understanding of the organization thanks to immediate feedback free from bias and the delivery of insights that can be acted upon quickly, it is only logical to assume that the chosen tool must be capable of offering immediate access to the stored results from the survey.
 
On top of that, the possibility of accessing an analytics and reporting software will give you the ability to keep a repository of the historical results that can be consulted to study the trends on employee-related metrics. 
 

4. Automated BI integration 

 
Exceptionally good software would integrate all the answers into a business intelligence program, creating a repository of insights for each of the surveys or employees that can be accessed at any time. 
 
Here again, being able to integrate the answers of the survey into an analytics tool that is already known and used within the company, like Power BI, would make the use of the tool much more simpler and efficient. 
 

5. Mobile ready

 
It goes without saying that in the current state of business, where remote working and the use of mobile devices is just business as usual, a good employee pulse survey software must be not only mobile-ready, but developed with a mobile-first attitude, so the use on any mobile device is as smooth and efficient as with a more traditional setup. 
 
In that respect, the simplicity of the surveys must be maximized, whereas the need for typing lengthy responses or having to read long texts should be reduced to the minimum to guarantee a satisfactory user experience.  
 
 

6. Actionable alerts and notifications

 

Timing is another relevant aspect to consider when it comes to choosing a good employee survey tool. Since an excessive frequency of the surveys can actually be counterproductive, scheduling the questionnaires is a very important step in the process.

In that sense, being able to set a determined frequency for each one of the surveys, and having those automatically triggered for your employees via a personal notification is a very desirable feature to look for.

 
Employees who are reminded of the survey tend to display higher response rates and are likely to answer more truthfully and openly to the questions posed. 
 
The access to real-time and historic insights from the surveys will help you take action more proactively

How to choose an employee pulse survey tool?

As with any other business software tool that becomes the buzzword of the moment, employee pulse survey solutions are being offered by a myriad of providers and under a great variety of formats. However, for any organization that wants to acquire a high-end product that offers the best functionality for a fair price, it is very important to carefully consider all the options available and make sure that they comply with all the characteristics that we have listed before.

 

In Supervise, we provide companies with our comprehensive business solution SuperCards, the only software that you will ever need, built on top of the robust and safe environment of Microsoft Teams. Within SuperCards, you can find our very own employee pulse survey solution, SC Pulse, or you can just acquire it as a stand-alone plug-in.

Receive Our Posts In Your Email

Do you want to keep up to date with our blog without having to come and check what’s new? Let’s us help you!