Reinventing Employee Engagement with Keka’s Pulse Surveys

Gallup reports that only 34% of employees are engaged in the workplace. And HRs are struggling to bring up this percentage.

Why?

Because engaged employees are more motivated, productive and action-oriented. This directly affects the overall organizational success and brand positioning.

However, most companies aren’t focusing on the first step towards boosting the engagement figures- Listening to your employees. It doesn’t mean walking up to an employee and asking them how they are, or what issues they are facing. Most employees won’t openly talk about their problems. Some even get scared of how their worries will be perceived by the manager or senior leaders- Which is exactly why we need Pulse surveys.

What are Pulse Surveys?

Modern-day employee engagement trackers or pulse surveys are the shorter, more effective versions of the annual feedback surveys, which are mostly kept anonymous. By short, not more than 4-8 questions. These are kept brief, simple, plain, and easy to understand and answer accordingly by the employees. They contain both open-ended and close-ended questions, allowing them to break free of the blunt Yes/No answers.

Why are pulse surveys conducted?

Unlike regular feedback surveys that are conducted annually or semi-annually, pulse surveys are sent out numerous times a year. And the reasons are plenty. Their aim might be to get a clearer picture of your engagement metrics at a certain point in time, or to delve deeper into specific aspects (such as diversity, inclusion or employee wellbeing), to gather feedback on organizational changes, to evaluate the effectiveness of implemented engagement strategies, or basically anything else that demands specialized feedback.

How is Pulse different from regular feedback?

To conduct a temperature check or understand the current well-being of their employees, most leaders look for a poll or a survey. However, many of such initiatives don’t seem to work. Why?

Because traditional feedback is:

• long
• conducted much after the issue has occurred
• not anonymous
• not relevant to the current objectives

On the other hand, Pulse gives real-time insights into the problems employees are facing and the chance to solve existing issues before they become irreversible.

Pulse makes employees feel heard and shows that the organization cares for them and their opinions. No one wants to work under a manager who doesn’t listen to them. It’s in your best interest to understand how to keep employees invested and performing at their best. A Deloitte study has shown that employees prefer culture over compensation and benefits, and value a listening-based culture. This increases the importance of pulse multifold.

Apart from the promise of a paycheck, employees crave meaning and want to know if their work is leaving an impact. Things like work-life balance, good colleagues, work satisfaction, recognition, and much more. When employees don’t get these, they lose motivation and engage less- which becomes evident with their decreased performance, measurable in performance management systems like Keka.

How do Keka’s Pulse surveys help?

Keka’s Pulse surveys help companies dig deeper and discover the motivational triggers of the workforce and gauge the overall mood over time or via organizational change. Armed with this data, leaders can successfully bring out required changes in the company. Pulse surveys need to be conducted at least every month to deliver value, though we recommend doing it once every other week. With this, you can confidently measure the percentage at which employee engagement –for instance- increased during a specific quarter, with real data to drill down into the reasons that caused the change.

What type of questions are included in Pulse surveys?

Companies that use Pulse for targeted questions are winners. These should focus on drivers that relate to employee happiness and motivation at work, support, opinions on leadership, wellness programs and even open-ended questions that can be the cause for discussion. This might also uncover issues you might not have even realized existed. Some great questions include:

• I am enthusiastic about my job.
• I look forward to going to work every morning
• I am proud to tell others that I am part of this company.
• My performance could improve with more feedback
• I talk about this company to my friends as a great company to work for.
• I trust the decisions of the senior leadership in the company.

Conclusion:

Frequent tracking and analysis of data through Pulse surveys offered by Keka can enable your leadership to link certain improvements to actions taken. It turns insights into action and helps realize the impact your strategies are creating in real-time. Observe how new initiatives and changes affect employee experience so you can course-correct or double-down. Conduct surveys, record answers, analyze results and take informed decisions with Keka!

They are sort of sentences, which the employee has to either agree or disagree with. The ones that have agree, neutral, strongly agree, disagree, etc etc as answer choices.