All You Need To Know About Conducting Employee Pulse Survey in Pandemic

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All you need to know about conducting employee pulse surveys during the pandemic survey software
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With the COVID-19 outbreak, most businesses are embracing big changes in their organizational structure and functioning. While there’s no quick fix to this uncertainty, companies must focus on improving their employee experience for consistent work culture.    

As every touchpoint in the employee journey (recruitment, on-boarding, day-to-day activities) has gone virtual, collecting employee feedback via online surveys on an annual or quarterly basis is not frequent enough. That’s where the need for employee pulse surveys arises.

In this remote or hybrid work culture, it has become harder to keep employees engaged, productivity high, and attract top talents. HR has always used annual employee engagement surveys to measure and understand employees. But in this fast-moving world, such surveys give you an outdated picture of your current workplace culture. 

Employee pulse surveys are the savviest tool your HR can adapt to collect real-time employee feedback and paint a comprehensive picture of employee health.

What is an Employee Pulse Survey?

An employee pulse survey is a quick and short survey conducted frequently to gather employee feedback. It gives you the freedom to gauge important metrics whenever you want. 

As an employee listening tool, pulse surveys can help you understand employee experience and gain actionable insights into your company’s health in real-time. Due to quick feedback cycles and rapid response rates, employee pulse surveys empower you to make informed decisions before it gets too late.

Keynote: Employee pulse surveys should not be used to replace annual surveys. 

Employee pulse surveys should be used as a complement to yearly surveys. Pulse surveys are an effective strategy to follow up on annual surveys or track progress on initiatives after making discoveries using annual surveys.

Put your people first.

Collect employee feedback to strengthen engagement in these uncertain times. 

Why should you adopt an employee pulse survey?

To ensure employee experience stays on track during these uncertain times, pulse surveys play a significant role in identifying and resolving employee issues in a company. Here’s why you should adopt pulse surveys for your business:

Employee engagement matters the most

With the pandemic’s impact, it has become essential for companies to focus on their employee engagement strategy. Ensuring employees feel heard and empowered to share their concerns is crucial. 

As engaged employees are more productive, they perform their duties more enthusiastically, leading to an innovative workplace environment. Brands like Apple, Airbnb, Amazon, and Microsoft rely on employee pulse surveys to measure their team engagement levels effectively.

Foster positivity in the work environment

There’s no doubt that the pandemic’s threat and the newly adopted virtual work culture have entirely transformed how people work. Due to this, it has become even more important to build a transparent and trust-fostering culture among the employees. 

Using an employee pulse survey can help you gain actionable insights into the employee journey, which enables you to create a positive corporate culture.

High response rates make all the difference

During unprecedented times, it becomes crucial for an organization to solicit employee feedback. As employee pulse surveys are simple and quick to complete, they have a higher response rate than traditional employee surveys. 

→ 77% of employees say they want to provide feedback more than once a year. The more insights you get, the better you’ll be able to serve your employees. Pulse surveys allow you to gather feedback frequently & thus take action more frequently.

Types of employee pulse surveys to fight this pandemic

Pulse surveys are short and focused on specific topics. Being subject-focused, you can use an employee pulse survey to gather immediate feedback for various purposes. 

In this blog, we will focus on aspects of work culture that took the most hit due to the pandemic and how you can use an employee pulse survey for these use cases. 

#1. Work-life balance: 

Employees working remotely have no hard-and-fast 9 to 5 office hours. The work schedule has taken over their personal life. But a proper work-life balance is important for your employee’s health and productivity. 

You can use an employee pulse survey to assess their current work-life balance. 

Q1. Do you think our company offers a reasonable leave policy to help you with your personal time?

Q2. Have you missed any private events because of office work?

Q3. How many times have you over-worked?

Q4. Do you feel comfortable asking for allotted leaves without fear of being judged?

#2. Remote work: 

Working remotely with no face-to-face interaction with colleagues or discussion & meetings can lead to decreased productivity. Employees often find themselves in a slump. 

You can ask your employees about their experience working remotely to understand how you can help them improve productivity. 

Q1. How would you say remote work has affected your productivity?

Q2. Do you think our company should permanently adopt a remote work arrangement?

Q3. How do you think remote work has affected your relationship with your colleagues?

Q4. Do you think our company has provided you with every piece of equipment you need to transition into remote work?

#3. Employee well-being: 

The pandemic has impacted people’s health in many ways. Working remotely from home, unable to meet others has led to more stress and anxiety. It is essential to have frequent check-ins with employees. 

What better way to have gauge their well-being if not by using employee pulse surveys. 

Q1. Do you believe that your health is the top priority of our company?

Q2. How beneficial is the wellness program for your health?

Q3. My employer provides good help to help relieve my stress. 

    • 1. Strongly disagree 
    • 2. Disagree 
    • 3. Neither agree nor disagree 
    • 4. Agree 
    • 5. Strongly agree 
    • 6. Not applicable 

#4. Internal communication: 

Internal communication is an important factor that helps bridge any gap among your employees. It is important to bring employees together, motivate them, boost collaboration, and learn and grow. 

However, the pandemic has caused a lack of communication on everyone’s part. Get employees’ opinions on how they feel about the current situation of internal communication

Q1. Do you think the managers keep you updated on every major decision?

Q2. Have you ever felt out of the loop on any major official event?

Q3. Are the communication tools easy to use?

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How to make the most of your employee pulse surveys?

While pulse surveys can help you measure any aspect of your company, it’s imperative to include relevant questions to improve the overall employee experience. Here’s what you need to consider:

  • Define your goals before creating a survey: It’s great to value your employees’ feedback, but you shouldn’t survey them without any purpose. Formulate a plan and set the goals that you want to accomplish through that survey.
  • Add questions appropriate for the employees: If you add irrelevant questions to your pulse survey, your employees might skip it or select answers randomly. This will fetch you inaccurate results.
  • Keep it short and crisp: Since employee pulse surveys are short and easy to answer, they have higher response rates. Make sure your survey length ranges between 5-10 questions only.
  • Protect anonymity in all cases: Most respondents prefer to participate in surveys where personal anonymity is ensured. To make your employees stay honest and truthful with their feedback, you must ensure their responses remain anonymous. 

[Related read: 40 Employee engagement ideas]

Set up the pace for the employee pulse survey

 It is important to decide the best pulse survey cadence to ensure it complements annual engagement surveys perfectly. 

The annual survey is your starting point, from there on, you can conduct quarterly or monthly employee pulse surveys. 

Quarterly surveys will give you enough time to plan and take action on the insights. It will also help you benchmark and track improvement.

There are certain factors to consider when you plan the frequency of your pulse surveys. 

Frequency of fluctuations: 

What are you trying to measure? How frequently can the result fluctuate? – these are two things you need to consider. 

Things like employee opinions on well-being, inclusion, or relationship can change frequently. So, conducting daily or weekly surveys is enough. 

But, things like employee engagement or satisfaction are unlikely to change frequently. To gauge such metrics, you can conduct monthly surveys. 

Time to take action: 

Employees expect you to take action after they share their feedback with you. So, it’s also essential to consider the time you need to review, plan, and take action following every survey. 

You can’t pile survey results upon survey results, or you will fall behind in your actions. This will only create distrust in your organization.

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Communicate employee pulse survey results 

Always staying in sync with employee experience is important for companies with remote work arrangements in these uncertain times. A lot can happen in a week or month. Waiting to collect employee opinions at the end of the year can cause you to miss out on clear signs of stress and exhaustion your employees may feel. 

While it is important to conduct pulse surveys frequently, it is equally important to take proper action. Use the survey result to drive organizational change and remind employees that you are listening to them. 

Thank them for participation: 

Tell your employees you appreciate their effort and value their feedback. Encourage them to share their opinions freely without any fear. 

Share your plan: 

Let the respondents know what you will do with the collected data. Keep the employee in the loop. Tell them when the results will be evaluated, and insights will be shared. 

Also, tell them about the possibility of the next employee pulse survey. 

Share key discoveries: 

Once you generate insights, share them with your employees. Communicate with them the areas of concern. Nurture trust and confidence to show employees that they are heard. 

Invite them to develop an action plan: 

Create a culture of collective brainstorming to create action plans to improve the organization’s health and make positive work culture. 

Create small groups to address different issues and encourage employees to share their ideas on how you can tackle various concerns.

Wrapping up;

Employee pulse survey is instrumental in nurturing a healthy workplace and building an organization with top talent. Employee pulse surveys help you gather their opinion in minutes. It allows you to improve your engagement, experience, and productivity. 

 

Conducting a pulse survey will help you better understand your employee’s current condition. It is a good time for companies to evaluate employees’ needs to respond to the challenges of working in isolation and expand a positive work environment.

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