Why is Having a Weekly Pulse Survey So Important?

Not being able to see each other at the office every day can make managers feel like they don’t have control over their employees’ degree of satisfaction. Yet, the employees’ happiness and engagement should be a top priority for any business. Not only it helps with employee retention, but it boosts productivity as well.

As a matter of fact, 87% of employees worldwide are not engaged at work, and companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share. 

When at a distance, it is even more important for management to show they value their staff. 

But how to do that, you ask?

At Starred, we’ve been using the Weekly Pulse Survey for about two years. It consists of a respondent-friendly form that’s sent out at a weekly frequency. 

A staff pulse survey consists of no more than 3-5 questions that are used to check in with the employees.

It’s, therefore, a quick survey to fill that gets sent out on a regular basis. It provides management with a way to take the temperature of the organization on various topics such as job roles, work environment, communication, employee satisfaction, and more.

Our own Pulse Survey only includes a question rating the level of satisfaction of the staff on a scale from one to ten, with a possible additional comment.

For what concerns the frequency, we would recommend to send your Pulse survey out every week if you’re a smaller organization or if you lead a dynamic business, such as a tech scale-up. Our advice to larger companies is to send out the form on a monthly basis. Alternatively, you could split your workforce into four batches and address one a week. This way, the respondents would fill in your survey once a month, but you’d be able to get part of the feedback on a weekly basis.

Delivering these surveys often sends a message to your employees: you place importance on what they have to say, and you go the extra mile to listen to them. Yet, currently, whereas 90% of organizations roll out traditional large-scale engagement surveys, only 19% use informal pulse surveys throughout the year.

Tenure is a particularly delicate subject for those businesses employing younger talent, as there seems to be a correlation between youth and the number of years spent with one company. 

Thus, for the more dynamic and agile companies out there, such as the typical Silicon Valley tech businesses, it seems to be particularly relevant to make sure that their employees are satisfied.

If you don’t believe that devoting attention to your staff matters, just think that 53% of more than 2,000 surveyed U.S. adults reported that they’d remain with their current employers for a longer time if they felt like they were more appreciated by their bosses.

The Pulse Survey’s weekly frequency is crucial to our process. One big survey per quarter or even per year won’t cut it, as it won’t give the employer any time to make the necessary changes to ensure a positive Employee Experience. Sending out forms often, lets the managers address potential issues before the situation takes a dramatic turn.

This does not mean that you should use the Weekly Pulse Survey instead of your traditional annual survey. It’s an additional element in your feedback gathering that gives a certain consistency to the process. This way, your quarterly or bi-yearly Engagement Survey won’t come as a surprise to your talent. 

Sending out Pulse Surveys so frequently can also help you save costs. There are hidden financial benefits to this. It takes a few minutes for your employees to fill in a survey, and that’s not that expensive for your business. Now, compare this cost to the time and money you’d have to devote to putting out metaphorical fires, in case there was a big problem and you only realized it too late!

What easier way for a CEO of taking the temperature of their organization? 

The segmentation of the Weekly Pulse Survey results lets you drill down on the most affected departments and take the appropriate actions to mend what’s broken. 

The data we get from these surveys is precious information to be shared during the Weekly CEO Update - another initiative that here at Starred we warmly recommend for you to apply. Afterward, address those problems directly through tailored initiatives. 

Such outreach shows your employees that you devote your attention to their happiness and you have the willingness it takes to do something to address the issues they encountered.
Sadly, at the moment, 27% of managers never review survey results, and 52% of them do but then take no action whatsoever.

The message that the Weekly Pulse Survey implicitly sends is one that promotes open communication. Your employees’  freedom of- and comfort in expressing their thoughts, concerns, and motivations is important for your business.

This means that the survey’s anonymity is fundamental to help your employees feel comfortable in sharing their concerns with the current management, or their role in the organization. It’s your only way of making sure that the comments you receive are brutally honest. 

To reassure your employees that their answers won’t be connected to their name, you can utilize a third-party tool.

Furthermore, remember that if a culture of open communication is established, your talent’s morale will benefit from it accompanied by a boost in engagement.

Why Do We Cherish Our Weekly Pulse Survey So Much?

The absence of non-verbal communication is mostly missing, these days, and it can hardly be replaced by video messaging or conferencing. It’s harder to feel if people are still happy and engaged without asking them directly, and these stressful days make it even more important for your employees to feel heard.

Pulse surveys are a great tool for evaluating reactions to the changes that have been implemented inside an organization. Most companies are probably fine-tuning their processes, these days, and they’d benefit from checking their employees’ reactions to them.

The Weekly Pulse Survey can monitor if the engagement and happiness of your workforce are still at the same level. In case of sudden drops, it’s time for your managers to take action and change the current way of working.

How Does the Weekly Pulse Survey Help You Improve Your Employee Experience?

Below we’ll list some things you can do to take full advantage of your new Weekly Pulse Survey:

1. Make sure it comes at the exact same time - at Starred, we do it every Friday afternoon at 14:00. In order to maintain this timely consistency, automation is key.
   
2. Make the filling of the survey feel effortless for your employees. Once they open the email, one click should be sufficient for them to complete it - and will only cost them around 3 seconds of their time. 
   
3. If your people had a bad week, ask them to provide a comment for context. Of course, the survey is anonymous and the comments don’t have to be indicative of who they are, but their specificity can help you unveil issues. 
   
4. Take actions on the Weekly Pulse Survey every week by bundling the comments in a couple of clusters and communicating the insights you gained from their content to the team,  and then by crafting tailored responses and checking your talent’s reaction to the latter in the following cycle.

TL;DR

Trying to maintain your staff happy and engaged is even harder than usual when at a distance.
We keep the situation under control through our Weekly Pulse Survey. 

A pulse survey is an informal and short survey, with usually less than 5 questions, that gets sent with a higher frequency than you would for your annual, bi-annual or quarterly feedback forms. The Weekly Pulse Survey that we use at Starred, gets sent to the staff every Friday at 2 PM and includes just one question in the form of a query concerning their satisfaction in the workplace, graded from 1 to 10, offering them to write down comments if they feel like it. 

This, first of all, makes our staff feel heard, which increases their happiness and engagement. It also helps us reduce some costs: we spot problems early on and can address them before we need to put out any fires. 

The weekly frequency adds consistency to your feedback process. The employees will share the issues they noticed during the previous week, and they will have the opportunity to go in-depth in their comments. The anonymity of our feedback forms encourages them to share their concerns, thus promoting a culture of open communication and constructive feedback.

Once we collect the data, we then share the insights in our weekly CEO update. This shows the talent that their results are looked at and actually taken into consideration. We then follow up with action plans to address and resolve those issues and test the employees’ reactions to such plans in the following cycle. 

As you can’t rely on face-to-face interactions, these days, what better way to make sure that your employees are doing alright than to ask them through a Weekly Pulse Survey? 

Let your employees’ voices be heard!