Managers serious about talent need to stop paying lip service to employee engagement and use more agile pulse surveys

There is very little doubt that driving employee engagement leads to success—it drives productivity, which, according to research, ultimately means happy customers and even better profits. Disengaged employees cost companies money, which makes knowing your employees’ feeling at the company a business-critical piece of data. The traditional annual or biannual survey that ticks the box and doesn’t genuinely seek to understand just won’t cut it. It is time to migrate to leaner, more agile pulse surveys. Organizations must learn to harness the power of immediate feedback, and for this, they need to find the right vendor.

Employees expect real-time actions that reflect the reality of the organization—enterprises must hasten how they interact with their team.  

Unlike Google, most organizations don’t have a team of behavioral scientists on-hand to produce surveys and quickly analyze the results. They have relied on a laborious—usually annual—process supported by engagement vendors that provide the survey, online platform, and results. This approach takes up resources and has a long turnaround time. By the time leaders can act, the results often no longer reflect the reality of the organization. It is also ineffective and erodes employees’ trust that their voice matters, appearing to many employees that the organization is paying lip service to engagement. This can have a depleting effect on employee productivity and cost the enterprise money in the long term. 

Employees now work through live collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack, and they expect the same immediacy across their work experience. It’s also true for engagement surveys; people want to share their opinions and want to see the change soon rather than a year later. Who knows, by the time you act on an issue, your best-performing employees might be long gone! 

It’s time to harness the benefits of pulse surveys and skip long-winded annual surveys 

Laszlo Bock, the former SVP of People Operations at Google, argues that leaders need to allow employees to share their experiences quickly and frequently. Long surveys are not only expensive but also take up precious time. He, therefore, favors shorter, more frequent surveys to find the most pressing issues and address them promptly while keeping an annual survey for more general trends. 

Traditional surveys are out of date. The era of long-winded, time-consuming surveys has finally come to an end. It’s time to harness the benefits of pulse surveys! Pulse surveys are designed to gather feedback from your employees weekly or biweekly. They provide insight into the current morale of the company and allow you to act quicker—the opposite of traditional employee engagement surveys that are only deployed once a year and give little indication on how employees feel day–to–day. Companies that are focusing on employee engagement for the long-term and short-term have a significant return on investment. Adobe, for example, is investing in real-time employee feedback programs. As a result, it can better understand its employees’ reactions to company announcements, organizational milestones, and so on. If leaders take a wrong turn, they will find out sooner rather than later. 

Pulse surveys are here to stay, so you need the right tools to enable them 

In the last couple of years, a new breed of vendors has appeared on the market, offering real-time employee feedback to organizations. SAP’s 2019 acquisition of Qualtrics, the market leader in employee engagement and experience management, is noteworthy. The companies’ combined expertise allows them to enable everyone to impact the employee experience. Their range includes engagement surveys, 360 development tools, and, most importantly, pulse surveys. Their ongoing pulse programs give constant and actionable insights with role-based dashboards that help managers act on employee feedback more frequently. 

A year earlier, in 2018, another major player in the industry acquired a start-up. This time it was LinkedIn acquiring Glint, a start-up that provides employment engagement services for different organizations. The company’s services are replacing traditional 360-view tools with short, anonymous surveys, which measure confidential data based on 18 key drivers of employee engagement and take about two minutes to complete. As the software also supports multiple question formats, leaders can format the surveys themselves and create one they feel best suits their agenda. 

Another big player in the game is Willis Tower Watson. The Willis Towers Watson Pulse Software delivers automated invitations and reminders to employees. It allows leaders to develop an agile employee listening strategy and, with that, drive change and monitor its effects. One of its main strengths is executive quality reporting, where it offers PowerPoint reporting templates as a standard with the software. 

The Bottom Line: Understanding employee engagement is vital to success, businesses must implement pulse survey technology to allow agile change management 

From understanding employee engagement and satisfaction on a day to day basis, to getting to grips with the impact of change initiatives, executives must build pulse surveys into the employee experience roadmap. The market is full of example of successful implementation, with a variety of innovative firms offering services and solutions. Executives must move away from traditional survey methods – and embrace more agile approaches to keep pace with shifting employee demands.