Pulse Surveys Guide

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Pulse surveys are a short set of questions sent to employees on a regular basis. The goal of a pulse survey is to continuously gather feedback and measure sentiment within your company.

In other words, Pulse Surveys are like friendly check-ins with your teammates. They’re generally shorter, more frequent questionnaires that help you understand how everyone is feeling at work. It's a quick and easy way for everyone to safely share their thoughts and feelings.

Pulse Surveys play a vital role in creating a happy and productive workplace. By regularly checking in with surveys, you can catch potential issues before they become big problems.

These surveys act like a compass, helping leadership navigate so you can course-correct or double-down. When employees feel their opinions are valued, they are 93% more likely to feel motivated and engaged at work, as reported by APA.

Pulse Surveys are not just a tool — they are a powerful strategy for creating a workplace where everyone's voice is heard, leading to happier employees and a more successful organization of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

Pulse Surveys are the unsung heroes of cultural feedback. These brief, frequent check-ins continuously gather real-time insights that create a safe environment for people to contribute to the company. Additional benefits include:

We’ve designed Pulse Surveys thoughtfully and intentionally to be best-in-class to help you keep a pulse on your organization. Google Forms can be a good start, but here’s how we help you take it to the next level…

Matter is the only company that has an integrated Rewards platform that allows you to automatically reward survey completions with Matter coins. This has been shown to increase participation rates and response times by 35%. Matter coins can be redeemable for gift cards, donations, custom company rewards, etc.

Matter’s Pulse Surveys have 100 questions and 10 engagement categories, and 26 subcategories, which were researched and built by experts in Human Resources and the world of work. All questions were analyzed and validated for content and wording.

People often become fatigued during the survey or even before. A few ways that Matter’s Pulse Surveys avoids survey fatigue include:

Organizations have a hard enough time getting their employees to log into their HRIS system to view their paychecks. Having Pulse Surveys in Slack or Teams reduces any need to log in to or learn a separate tool, subsequently increasing the survey visibility and completion rate.

Launching Pulse Surveys is as simple as a click of a button, but first, you’ll want to confirm the settings. The majority of companies use the default Pulse Survey settings, but you may want to exclude a specific team member from the survey or add additional team members to get notified of new feedback or the weekly digest.

No need to research or create any questions! Pulse Surveys leverage real-time data to pull from our 100-question library, comprised of 10 engagement categories and 26 subcategories, to ensure you get insights on each cultural category. Our Pulse Survey questions were researched and built by experts in Human Resources and the world of work.

The more effort required, the less participation. That’s why the Pulse Survey experience is seamlessly delivered and responded to right where you work — in Slack or Teams. Admins set survey settings in the Web App, and the rest is done in Slack or Teams.

It’s no surprise, the point of Pulse Surveys notifications is to have a “pulse” on your organization. Select Matter members can get notified in real-time anonymous feedback. Additionally, receive a weekly digest of company statistics, all delivered privately in Slack or Teams.

All scores are calculated on a 30-day rolling time window. This means that the score is continually updated based on data from the most recent 30 days. Instead of calculating the score once for a fixed period, the window "rolls" forward as time progresses, always considering only the last 30 days of data. For example:

This method ensures that the score reflects recent performance, trends, or behaviors, keeping the data current by discarding older data and focusing on the most recent activity within the set time window.

Your Engagement Score reveals invaluable insights into the overall health of your organization's culture and the extent to which your employees thrive. Having this simple, yet effective score allows you to observe how new initiatives and changes impact the employee experience in real time.

Dive deeper into cultural insights with Engagement Categories and Subcategories. Each question in the Pulse Survey is linked to one of the 10 themes identified as having the highest impact on team engagement.

Get to the core of your employee experience with one question. With the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) question, understand how likely people are to recommend your organization as a place to work.

A high participation rate is crucial for the reliability and validity of Pulse Surveys. While a simple calculation of the percentage of the people who complete the survey, the Participation Rate allows organizations to make informed decisions based on comprehensive and inclusive feedback.

Have additional questions? Here’s a list of resources: