Five questions every month beats fifty questions once a year, every time.
A pulse survey is short, repeated, and always asks the same core questions so you can watch a line move. The point is not the score in any single month. The point is the shape over six of them.
A pulse survey asks a handful of the same questions on a fixed schedule. Because it is short it gets answered, and because it repeats it produces a trend rather than a snapshot. Most teams keep three or four questions fixed and rotate one.
Monthly or every two weeks, on the same day, forever. The rhythm is the method. A pulse survey that arrives whenever somebody remembers is just a short survey.
The questions, in full
Every one of them is on this page before you sign up for anything. The line under each question says what it is for, and what it is deliberately not asking.
The chart that suits the question, and a paragraph under it.
Numbers get the widget built for them. Written answers get grouped into the things people kept saying, with a count on each and every original answer still readable underneath, word for word.
Everything a results page holdsWhat goes wrong with a pulse survey
- Collecting it and never saying what changed. Month two's response rate is decided by whether anything visibly happened after month one.
- Changing question wording between runs, which quietly destroys the trend you were building.
- Running it and never reporting back. Two silent months is usually all it takes for people to stop answering.
- Reading a single month's dip as a signal. Two points make a line and three make a trend.
How often should a pulse survey go out?
Monthly suits most teams. Every two weeks works if something is actively changing. Weekly is almost always too often and the response rate falls away.
Can I run this alongside a longer survey?
Most teams do. The pulse tracks the trend month to month, and a longer engagement survey goes deep once a year wherever the pulse showed movement.
Can I change a question later?
Keep the core two or three fixed and rotate the last one. That way you keep the trend and still get to ask about whatever is live this month.
Often run alongside this one
eNPS survey
Employee Net Promoter Score borrows the NPS® question and points it at the people who work for you. It is a good measure and an easy one to ruin, because the moment somebody suspects their answer is traceable, you stop measuring morale and start measuring caution.
Employee engagement survey
An engagement survey is the long one, run once or twice a year. Its job is not to produce a number, because eNPS already does that in one question and does it more often. Its job is to tell you which specific parts of working here are holding the number down.