Engagement
7
min read
Any HR leader would agree that the conventional approach to annual engagement surveys is not enough to understand and improve organizational health. Since the business expectations as well as employee needs are so dynamic today with the uncertain market conditions, waiting a year to gauge employee pulse is too long.
As a result, most organizations today are adopting a variety of custom pulse surveys, which are shorter, more frequent and directly address specific employee needs; thus, more effective for enhancing employee experience.
However, if you run custom pulse surveys without a strategy, clear objective and the right approach, you will have limited success.
Through this article, we seek to help growing organizations like yours understand the various aspects of custom pulse surveys, including the different types and best practices to run them.
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Impact of custom pulse surveys on employee experience
Before we discuss the different types of custom pulse surveys you can leverage for your organization, let’s quickly understand why custom pulses are crucial to your organization’s success:
1. Preempt risks
By conducting custom pulse surveys on a regular basis, you can identify risks and challenges to employee experience in real time. This can help you address turnover, lack of motivation, etc. challenges before they surface, contributing to enhanced satisfaction and engagement.
SUPER TIP — If you are interested in learning more about learning what drives employee motivation — check out our guide on the science of workplace motivation
2. Ensure alignment
Custom pulse surveys can also help you in ensuring that the expectations and goals of your employees are well aligned with your organizational goals and objectives. A misalignment here can lead to detrimental outcomes for the organization as well as cause a poor employee experience. Fortunately, surveys can help you mitigate this challenge by helping you understand and manage expectations effectively.
3. Employee empowerment and engagement
Finally, custom pulse surveys are an effective way of augmenting employee engagement. Implemented in the right manner, these surveys can also give your employees voice on things that matter and make them feel included in organizational decisions. Engagement and empowerment both play a critical role in fostering a pleasant employee experience.
SUPER TIP — Here’s how to use employee feedback to maximize engagement
Different types of custom pulse surveys
Limiting yourself to only one or two types of custom pulse surveys will seldom give you a complete picture. Contrarily, if you try to fit in all aspects of employee experience in a single survey, it might become confusing for your employees, and you will be unable to gauge pulse on any of the parameters.
Therefore, it is best to incorporate different types of custom pulse surveys to your process throughout the year to achieve the best outcomes.
1. eNPS surveys
eNPS or employee net promoter score is one of the best custom pulse surveys to help you measure how your employees feel about the company and how likely they are to recommend the same to those in their network.
Advantages of eNPS
- Great starting point to gauge employee sentiment on key organizational attributes
- Easy to translate results into insights
- Effective and efficient as it is quick to implement, higher completion and low in cost
Top eNPS survey questions
- On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
- What is the top reason for the score you gave?
- How likely are you to recommend our key product/service to those in your network?
- Would anything prevent you from referring our company to your peers?
SUPER TIP — Asking a few qualitative questions can help you get a deeper understanding of your people. Else, encourage your employees to leave open ended comments after their answers. To learn how to use survey comments for better employee experience, read this
2. Annual surveys
Annual employee surveys are conducted at the end of the year and seek to bring a comprehensive picture of employee performance across different aspects throughout the year. They are important to help you create a plan of action and define priorities for the next year.
Advantages of annual surveys
- Get a complete picture of different stakeholders in the organization and their contribution to organizational success
- Gauge employee pulse at the end of the year after different interventions have been implemented to enhance performance and engagement to measure the effectiveness of the people initiatives
- Set goals and objectives for the next year backed with data
Top annual survey questions
- Are you satisfied with your performance over the last year?
- How do you think the company can support you better?
- Are you satisfied with the way your organization has managed both its business and people?
- Do you have a good understanding of the processes and structures in the organization?
SUPER TIP — Check out the guided custom pulse survey templates provided by SuperBeings across all these categories. Book a free demo here
3. M&A surveys
This is one of the types of custom pulse surveys that most organizations tend to overlook, but one which has a considerable impact on your culture. M&A or mergers and acquisitions have a direct impact on employee experience. Your employees might be confused or overwhelmed about their new roles or if there is a change in leadership. Therefore, M&A surveys are important to ensure productivity and retention during the merger/acquisition period.
Advantages of M&A surveys
- Check uncertainty and ambiguity for employees and give them reassurance to prevent turnover
- Gauge employee sentiment about the merger and address misconceptions
- Facilitate smooth transition with consistent productivity, job satisfaction and morale
Top M&A survey questions for fast growing organizations
- Would you agree that the merger/acquisition is a good step for the organization?
- Are you clear and comfortable with your new role after the merger?
- Did you receive support during the transition?
- Has there been a change in the workload after the merger?
- Are you excited about the new opportunities the merger will bring along?
4. Onboarding check-in
Employee onboarding, especially the first 30, 60 and 90 days are critical to a pleasant employee experience as this is the time when perceptions are made, belongingness established and much more. Therefore, custom pulse surveys that focus on onboarding check-in to gauge how well your employees are settling in, how well they understand their roles and how well they blend into the culture are important.
Advantages of onboarding check-in
- Reduce new hire turnover due to poor experience
- Influence the overall perception of new hires and impact future engagement, motivation
- Set up your employees for success by early expectation setting
Top onboarding check-in questions for fast growing organizations
I) First 30 days
- Do you feel welcomed by the organization?
- How well do you understand your job responsibilities?
- What do you think about the company’s culture?
- Do you have any suggestions for us to improve the recruitment process?
II) 30-60 days
- Would you recommend your peers to join the organization?
- Do you have a clarity of expectations from your role?
- Have you been able to identify areas of learning and development for your current role?
- How well do you understand your work goals?
III) 60-90 days
- Do you align with the organizational values?
- How has your experience been in collaboration and communication with your team?
- How challenging is your current role?
5. DEI pulse
Amongst the custom pulse surveys, the DEI survey requires a special mention. It can help you understand how your employees feel about the diversity, equity and inclusion aspects of your organization, as well as gauge sentiments of diverse team members on whether they have a sense of belongingness or not.
DEI custom pulse surveys can help you facilitate high levels of engagement, promote creativity, create an inclusive workplace and promote pleasant employee experience.
Advantages of DEI surveys
- Create the right diversity and inclusion goals to attract top talent
- Understand how different employee groups perceive your culture and address blockers to a feeling of inclusion
- Create a more engaged and motivated workforce with a sense of fairness and justice for all
Top DEI survey questions
- Do you agree that the organization values diversity and it is critical when it comes to key decisions?
- Are you satisfied with the level of diversity in your team?
- Do you feel included in key decisions of your team where you have a role to play?
- Are your unique background and opinions given due importance?
- Do you think different opportunities are available to all?
- Would you agree that the organization promotes transparency and respect for all?
6. Professional development survey
Finally, the last of the many custom pulse surveys you should include in your organization is the professional development survey. These surveys seek to help you understand if your workforce is satisfied with the professional development opportunities and support provided by the organization and how their long term goals align with organizational success.
Advantages of professional development surveys
- Meet the upskilling and reskilling needs of your workforce to bridge the skills gap
- Reduce voluntary turnover due to poor satisfaction with professional development programs
- Increase the level of satisfaction and engagement among employees
Top professional development survey questions
- Do you feel you are presented with adequate professional growth opportunities?
- Do you foresee achieving them in this organization?
- Do you have enough training and development opportunities to refine your skills?
- Have you received adequate mentorship support from your manager for your professional development?
- Do you receive constructive feedback to improve your professional performance?
How to create your own custom pulse surveys?
Now that you have an understanding of different types of custom pulse surveys you can run, it’s time for you to get started with creating your own surveys. While getting the questions correct is important, it is also important to identify the right audience for each survey, the best time to run the same, how long you should run the survey and how you should collect responses and benefit from the results.
SUPER TIP — Check our detailed step-by-step article to create your own custom pulse surveys
However, here's a quick guide for you:
Creating and conducting custom pulse surveys
The first important aspect is to create the survey which captures every aspect you wish to gauge about the sentiment of your employees. There are several steps at play here:
- Identify the right questions. You can take reference from the above mentioned illustrative list and build on those. Or you can use SuperBeings templates for creating specific surveys.
- You can also create a custom pulse survey template from scratch and save it for later. As seen in the image above, SuperBeings allows you to add your own questions to the guided templates in addition to recommended questions from SuperBeings library. Whether you use a template suggested by your employee pulse survey tool or choose to create your own, just ensure that your template has an excellent user experience to facilitate greater completion rate.
- Identify the audience. Select who you will roll out the survey to. For instance, the onboarding check-in survey will be exclusive to the new hires, while a few others can be rolled out for the entire organization. SuperBeings lets you create and save your own dynamic lists to use later. Thus, reducing redundant effort.
- Define the length and frequency. The general trend is moving towards shorter and more frequent surveys to facilitate greater engagement and preempt risks in real time.
For a deeper understanding, you can refer to our comprehensive guide on creating and conducting custom pulse surveys. Furthermore, you can also leverage a pulse survey tool like SuperBeings to not only conduct the survey but also drive results and share insights, but leveraging automation, artificial intelligence and industry experience. Book a free demo today!
Timelines and duration of the survey
You need to make a conscious effort into determining what is the ideal time for you to run your custom pulse surveys and for how long you should be running them. For the former, that is on the timelines, there are three factors that need to be taken into consideration.
First, when do you need to present the results? This suggests that you need to determine when you wish to discuss the insights from the survey to create a plan of action. If you are adopting a more regular approach for real-time interventions, your timelines should be regular too.Unlike many other employee survey tools, SuperBeings allows you to set different frequencies for primary and sub driver questions — helping you to customize the survey even further.
Second, you need to gauge the best time for the survey when your employees will ensure a high completion rate. For instance, a busy period or festivals may not be the best time to run a survey as it might get missed. However, if you are running surveys on a regular basis, you need to encourage your employees to set aside time in their calendar every day/ week based on the survey frequency to complete the same.
SuperBeings provides regular nudges to your employees to complete the survey on collaboration platforms you already use like Slack or Gchat without disrupting their flow of work. Thus, ensuring more participation.
Third, you need to be cognizant of the type of survey you are conducting. For instance, the onboarding check-in has to be conducted in the first 30, 60 and 90 days of the employee joining. Similarly, annual surveys will be conducted at the end of the year.
The duration of your custom pulse surveys will also depend on the frequency you wish to choose.
- On one hand, surveys which happen once in a while, giving about two weeks is good. However, you can always check with the recipients of the survey on what they think should be the ideal duration to keep the survey open.
- On the other hand, if you are running surveys on a daily basis, like many fast growing organizations, your survey will automatically be available for 24 hours where your employees can participate in it asynchronously.
Making sense of your employee pulse survey responses
You must understand by now that only conducting your custom pulse surveys and collecting responses is not enough. You need to ensure that those responses are translated into insights to create a plan of action to bring change. This involves showing gratitude to the participants, gauging sentiments and trends, sharing a plan and executing the plan. Here is a ready to use guide to help you make the most of your results.
Suggested Reading —
- How to understand organizational climate from engagement survey results
- How to use survey comments to drive employee engagement
