Often when we can see challenging times ahead we want to react quickly. Why wouldn't we? It’ll give our employees confidence that we’re there to support them. On the flip side, moving quickly means that we risk making changes that aren’t aligned with our employees’ needs.
Whilst employees will be looking for reassurance that you're thinking about challenges such as cost of living. They will want that support in their own way, not in the way we - as business leaders - decide works for them. The best way to understand how to provide this support during challenging times? Hear what your employees are saying they need and act on it.
Many businesses introduced employee surveys or pulse surveys during the Covid-19 pandemic, and whilst they may have seen some success, there are many nuances to consider to guarantee they create positive change for your employees.
At Stribe, we’ve learned a lot in the years we’ve been supporting businesses with their own employee voice and pulse survey strategies. Below we’re sharing 10 top tips that will help you get the most out of your employee pulse surveys as you move through a new set of challenging times.
1. Guarantee anonymity
It’s important that your employees know they won't be singled out for any constructive feedback they share with you. Pulse surveys exist to get honest feedback from your employees, both the good and the bad. Making it clear that your employees will not have their names attached to any of their comments allows them to speak freely. It also helps you get honest information on how they’re feeling at work. Guaranteeing anonymity has the added benefit of motivating employees to give more detailed and insightful responses. Win, win!
2. Ensure your tools reach everyone
Workforces are more dispersed than ever before. With less face-to-face time, it’s important your pulse survey software is accessible to everyone. Employees should be able to voice their thoughts, ideas and feedback no matter where they are, or their level of access to technology.
You may work in a business where not everyone has regular access to a computer or email address. This makes it even more difficult for managers to check in on these ‘harder-to-reach’ employees. If you’re unable to include these groups in your employee engagement surveys, you won’t have a full picture of how your employees feel over time. When creating your pulse surveys - or purchasing your survey software - consider these hard to reach groups and their access needs. Look for a survey tool that will help you with this. For example, at Stribe we use a mixture of QR codes, apps, and online methods to make sure our surveys reach every employee.
3. Ask the right pulse survey questions
Not all questions are created equal. It can be very easy to fall into the trap of asking a question that seems like it will give you the insight you need. In reality, they will leave you with more questions than answers. To be confident you’re asking the right questions for your organisation consider these two points:
- Think about what the data will look like. This will help you understand if the data the question gives you will be clear and actionable. If you aren’t sure, you should think about an alternative question, or rephrasing the one you have.
- Think about the outcome. The number one reason that employees don’t respond to pulse surveys is that they don’t believe anything will be done about the answers. Before you send a pulse survey you need to be sure that you are able to act on the feedback, doing this will also help you to act quickly. If you can’t act, don’t ask the question!
4. Use a mixture of proactive and reflective questions
Proactive questions are great to use when you're introducing a new initiative or reviewing your current strategy. They give you a baseline for how employees feel about a particular topic in the moment. These look like:
- How much are financial worries currently affecting your mental wellbeing?
- I feel comfortable talking openly about mental health problems
Reflective questions are useful for understanding changes in employees’ views over time. These questions often prompt employees to consider their overall feelings on a topic. Because they are more reflective they are likely to avoid any ‘in the moment’ feelings in their scores. These might look like:
- How was your week last week?
- In the past two weeks, how often have you felt worried about the rising costs of living?
5. Repeat some questions over time
Repeating questions at regular intervals over the course of a few weeks, months, or even years will help you see how the mood of your employees ebbs and flows. Gathering these trends over time is crucial. Not only does it help you understand the baseline figures for your employees, but these repeating questions are a great way to pick up on changes before they become a problem. Just make sure that your pulse survey software groups these questions into their own report to make it easy for you to spot any changes!
6. Use benchmarking for additional context
Using questions and a survey provider that has benchmarked data will give you additional insights into the data you are collecting and help you prioritise which questions to act on first when asking multi-question pulse surveys. They’re also great for creating a culture of continuous improvement! Learn more about the power of benchmarked questions here.
7. Use open text follow-up questions to get context
Use pulse survey software that gives you quantitative and qualitative data. Having both types of data at your fingertips is the best way for you to really understand the insights you are incorporating into your wellbeing strategy. Gathering quantitative gives you an overall score that can help you measure employee mood around a particular topic, whilst the qualitative element gives you the context and detail you need to create change you can be confident in.
Following this method would give you one question, broken down into two sections that looks something like:
- Quantitative Main Question: How much are financial worries currently affecting your mental wellbeing? 1 (Not At All) to 10 (At All)
- Qualitative Follow-up free text question: Which of the following cause you the most stress?
8. Communicate with employees.
Pulse surveys are only the beginning of the journey to supporting your employees through challenging times. Once you’re armed with insights, you need to ensure that you feed back to employees about how you’ll be using them to create positive changes. After all, they’ve spent time giving you their ideas and opinions - it’s only right you let your employees know what you’re doing with it. When you’re planning your pulse surveys, be sure to create a complimentary communications plan to support the changes you’re making in your business.
9. Analyse your data by key demographics
Make sure you can analyse your pulse survey data using demographics important to your organisation. If you are a medium or large organisation this is crucial. Scores for a whole organisation will give you some insight into how your colleagues are thinking and feeling, but unless you can deep dive into key employee groups such as Team, Location, Hybrid Working Status you won’t be able to understand where the hotspots exist that you need to be focused on.
10. Supplement your surveys with ‘always on’ employee voice features
You aren’t always going to launch a pulse survey at the right time for your employees. And that’s ok. If they aren’t in the right headspace to contribute thoughtful written answers you will miss out on valuable detail. Supplementing your surveys with ‘always on’ employee voice features means that when the time is right for them to share their thoughts and ideas, they have an outlet to do this. This could be as simple as an anonymous online form, or using employee engagement software that can help you achieve this.
For more insights into how you can use pulse surveys in your employee wellbeing strategy to support employees with the cost of living, watch our latest webinar.
For further advice on how to get the most out of your employee pulse surveys during challenging times book a chat with us.
