Pulse surveys: Definition, benefits and free templates

It's likely that the issues you care about most are different from this time last year. How do we know that?

Our survey research team asks thousands of people this question in our weekly political polls, where people’s top issues change quarterly, monthly and even weekly. 

It’s no secret that people’s sentiments can shift, but if you’re not hearing from your survey respondents often, you may lose touch with their perspective.

Thankfully, there's a survey strategy that addresses this: the pulse survey. We’ll review how to create a pulse survey and use it to identify your respondents’ feedback and track their changes over time.

Pulse surveys are short questionnaires or feedback tools that organisations use to gather real-time insights from employees, customers or other stakeholders. Usually, these surveys only have a few questions and are designed to be quick and easy to complete. 

Pulse surveys are typically conducted on a regular basis, such as weekly, bi-weekly or monthly; hence the term 'pulse', which reflects the idea of frequently taking the organisational or individual 'pulse'.

The primary purpose of pulse surveys is to collect timely feedback and data about various aspects of an organisation or its operations. This feedback can be related to:

A pulse survey consists of frequent (monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly), short check-ins with the same audience. Pulse surveys often only have between three and six questions.

Have we convinced you to run a pulse survey yet? Read on to learn best practices when writing your pulse survey questions.

Despite the limited number of pulse survey questions, there are several ways in which this type of survey benefits your organisation:

Pulse surveys allow your respondents to identify issues they’re having right now, instead of issues they had six months ago. This allows you to follow up with immediate action or investigate them further.

By surveying at a consistent cadence, you’ll be able to see whether an internal or external event has an impact on your baseline numbers.

Regular dialogue helps your respondents feel appreciated and listened to.

Pulse surveys provide organisations with immediate insights into how employees or customers are feeling or experiencing certain aspects of the organisation.

They allow organisations to quickly identify and respond to emerging issues or trends, enabling them to adapt their strategies or policies in a timely manner.

Because pulse surveys are short and frequent, they tend to have higher participation rates compared to longer, less frequent surveys.

By regularly collecting feedback, organisations can continuously monitor their progress and make incremental improvements over time.

Regularly seeking feedback from employees via pulse surveys can demonstrate to them that their opinions are valued, which can help increase employee engagement and satisfaction.

As you can imagine, getting constant feedback is valuable for many use cases.

Although it may be more practical to start by implementing one or two of the following use cases, your organisation should strive to eventually use pulse surveys in each of the following ways:

Employee pulse surveys are one of the most common ways to use pulse surveys. HR may want to understand how a change in company policy affects morale. You may want to know how employees feel after working on a particular project. Whatever the case may be, asking pulse survey questions will get you closer to the answer.

Failing to conduct an employee pulse survey can prove costly. Small things that have an impact on the employee experience can build up if they’re ignored, which can eventually contribute to an increased trend in employee turnover. The costs of such an event would be significant. For example, replacing and training mid-level employees can cost as much as 150% of their annual salary.

Your customers are often quite different from one another. To make matters more complicated, they may have multiple goals for using your product or service that change over time.

Pulse surveys help your organisation stay on top of your customers’ experiences. They provide your customer support and success teams with more up-to-date information about what each customer is looking to accomplish and reveal your organisation’s performance in different areas. In the long run, understanding your customers better improves their experience and influences your business’ competitive positioning.

To kick-start your use of customer-focused pulse surveys, use our Net Promoter® Score (NPS) survey template.

A brand’s level of awareness and perception can evolve over time. Brand tracking pulse surveys help you understand how specific events affect them. To measure your brand’s awareness, focus on surveying your target market; to measure your brand’s perception, survey your customers and your target market.

If you’d like some direction, check out these questions from our Brand awareness survey template.

Career development pulse survey

Career development pulse surveys help you understand whether employees are satisfied with the amount of training you currently offer and discover other ways in which you can help advance your employees' careers.

Our career development pulse survey template asks important questions, such as:

Try our free career development pulse survey template.

Relationships pulse survey

Relationships management pulse surveys include questions aimed at helping you understand how well employees work together so that you can proactively develop relationship management programmes. 

Our relationships management pulse survey template asks important questions, such as:

Try our free relationship management pulse survey template.

Work engagement pulse survey

Work engagement pulse surveys enable you to gather insights about workplace morale, understand what motivates people and learn how to tailor your team’s training and guidance to your workforce’s needs.

Our work engagement pulse survey template asks important questions, such as:

Try our work engagement pulse survey template.

Culture pulse survey

Culture pulse surveys are short check-ins that can help you learn and respond to what employees at your company think about the work culture. 

Our culture pulse survey template asks important questions related to workplace culture, such as:

Try our free culture pulse survey template.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey

Our Net Promoter Score sample survey template is designed to make it easy to understand your customers' satisfaction. Net Promoter Scores are produced by asking respondents to rate their likelihood of referring your business to someone else, using a scale from 0 to 10. 

Using your customers’ answers, you can identify the percentage of customers who would promote you and use this number to gauge your performance over time. You can also customise our NPS template to suit your product offering or ask additional questions to understand your customers better.

Try our free Net Promoter® Score (NPS) survey template.

Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Our expert-written customer satisfaction template helps you get started with tracking customer satisfaction. Covering factors such as convenience and professionalism, customer satisfaction surveys allow you to build a stronger business strategy.

Try our free Customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey template here. 

Implement pulse surveys to drive change, boost engagement and enhance satisfaction to promote a more informed and agile organisation. Create a survey or get started with an expertly designed template.

NPS®, Net Promoter® and Net Promoter® Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.