Why are pulse surveys a great alternative for annual satisfaction surveys?

By now, you probably know that employee engagement is one of the most important metrics that you can measure. Measuring the amount to which your team members feel involved in your organisational outcomes can tell you a lot about the state of your business. The results can let you know how appreciated your employees feel, how motivated they are, and how much they feel a part of your short and long term success.

When it comes to measuring employee engagement, different companies do things in a variety of ways. These include:

• Gut feeling and informal conversations – A lot of managers and owners look around, think they can gauge the feeling in the room. They might speak with a few employees in the break room, see smiling faces and say to themselves, “sure! Everyone seems happy!” This is an extremely unreliable test!
• Annual surveys – These are a little bit more accurate, but still suffer from plenty of inaccuracies. A survey sent out once a year will reflect the situation at that one given time. This could yield many false positives and negatives, and provides a lot of inaccurate data that is impossible to act upon.
• Observation (such as slack usage tracking) – While you might get what looks like effective and robust data from observation, in reality you are getting only part of the puzzle. After all, these results will not tell you what the root problem is and how you can fix it.
• 1 on 1s – We all need to have one on ones with our employees, but when it comes to them feeding back to a authority figure, the results can be skewed. You can only glean accurate information if your staff member truly trusts you – and in that case, you might end up with false positives. This only works in a perfect world!
• Pulse surveys – This is quite possibly the most reliable and effective option on this list. By sending out quick surveys on a quasi regular (or even a sporadic) basis, you can attain precise, real time data that you can truly put to effective use. Think of this as ‘taking the pulse’ of your business.

There’s no denying which option we think is the best for any business out there – we stand firmly on the side of pulse surveys. Pulse surveys are effective and yield high quality and robust data that you can actually use and implement. Don’t mess around with the outdated and inaccurate choices above – take the pulse of your firm instead.