Why your Company should Invest in Pulse Surveys
Organisations have realised the benefits of introducing and maintaining an employee engagement strategy. Benefits include greater productivity, increased loyalty to job and company, the acquisition of talent, and most importantly, a rise in sales and revenue, amongst others.
Employee engagement can be established by introducing and maintaining people-centric practises in the workplace, such as encouraging communication, feedback, teamwork, autonomy, socialising and more. However, an organisation still needs a means of acquiring data from the workforce. Without data, high-level decisions pertaining to the workforce/labour is based on management’s idea of employee needs, desires and motivations, rather than on facts.
Decisions made based on facts will allow you to see results in a much shorter time span than would be possible using a different approach. Data never goes to waste; historical data is especially important when evaluating progress and as a means to learn from the past.
Data comes from pulse surveys or employee engagement surveys. They’re fairly similar, although pulse surveys are conducted more regularly and are more focussed than employee engagement surveys. They help to answer the hard questions about your people, who they are, what they want and need, and uncovers what can be done to unleash the full potential of your employees.
Pulse surveys and employee engagement
Pulse surveys are a list of focussed questions that help to extract key data for the improvement of employee engagement. To truly understand, and keep a ‘pulse’ on your workforce, pulse surveys need to be conducted regularly. They need to be drawn up with questions that’ll help you guide your employee engagement strategy. Waiting weeks or even months to check in on your workforce will make it much more challenging to know whether or not your implementations have worked and there will be no way of tracking the success of your employee engagement strategy. There are many advantages to pulse surveys, and they will not only provide you with data on your people but will help you to review and evaluate results.
Pulse survey questions
The questions are critical, because the answers they get, will be the data that drives your decision-making.
Questions will differ from company to company and are crafted with the organization’s mission and vision in mind as well as their employee engagement strategy.
For example, you may want to particularly focus on employee engagement practices which help to improve productivity. In this case, you would craft questions with a direct connection to productivity (perhaps workplace experience, culture, feedback, relationships with management etc). Or you may want to conduct an employee survey with questions on benefits. You may want to know the types of benefits employees value most, or whether company benefits would determine the difference between them choosing one company over another. This data will help you to make sound decisions about your benefit packages and will ensure your decisions benefit the organisation too (e.g through improved retention and acquisition of talent).
HR and Pulse Surveys
Pulse surveys assist every area of the organisation, from management to team leaders and the human resources department. For HR, there are no downsides to knowing more about the workforce. It tells them more about the culture – which is beneficial during recruitment. It helps them understand what motivates people – beneficial during the development of incentives and packages, and helps them to drive change for the improvement of employee engagement.
Advantages of pulse surveys for HR Managers
- Enhanced communication
- Understanding of workforce needs based on fact
- Assists recruitment and retention
- Guides the development of incentives
- Improves workplace culture
- Helps to forge a bond between management and workforce
Team leaders and Pulse Surveys
Team leaders also benefit from the data pulse survey’s generate. They are able to find out intricate details about their team dynamics or of particular individuals that would’ve gone unsaid if the survey was not conducted. This is very important informations which helps team leaders to review and revise their strategies in order to strengthen areas of weakness.
It also helps to know what motivates teams and the factors that play a role in productivity. For example, you may discover that your team feels like they have little creative freedom or autonomy, which is hampering their motivation and productivity. This is something that can be changed quickly and easily, and will generate great rewards for the team. Without the pulse survey, this would’ve gone unnoticed.
