Pulse surveys are an effective way to measure employee engagement, especially for companies with a remote workforce. With a pulse survey tool it’s easy to make surveys a regular part of your internal communications and build a culture of feedback.
Conducting pulse surveys should always be a priority for internal communicators. Not only do you collect valuable employee feedback, but employees will feel more engaged seeing their suggestions materialized as real change.
But like any internal communication, inundating your employees with pulse surveys can turn people away from participating. How can you walk the line of regularly collecting feedback while not overwhelming your employees? Make your surveys feel organic and fun.
Using a pulse survey tool like ContactMonkey—compared to a free pulse survey tool—you can easily build beautiful emails that feature a variety of pulse surveys. Sending fresh, great-looking content to your employees and asking pointed, relevant questions in your surveys is exactly what a pulse survey tool is designed to do.
What Is A Pulse Survey?
Pulse surveys are short questions pointed around a particular topic and asked to employees. A subset of the more comprehensive employee survey, pulse surveys are meant to do what their name implies: take a pulse check of your employees about a certain issue.
How you create and present your pulse surveys will depend on your employees, your company brand, and many other factors. There is much more to be said about how to build effective pulse surveys for your employees, but that advice is much better applied via a pulse survey tool.
What Are The Benefits Of Using A Pulse Survey Tool?
Employee pulse survey tools are innovative employee communications software that transform static emails into vehicles for two-way dialogue. They offer users unique advantages over others who build surveys from scratch or use templates taken from external sources.
Pro Tip: Increase survey response rates by segmenting your audience using ContactMonkey’s HRIS integration.
Super-easy design process
With email builders like ContactMonkey, embedding a pulse survey in your emails takes a matter of seconds. Simply drag-and-drop the survey tile onto your email template, select the type of survey, and attach a question to it.
Using ContactMonkey’s new pulse survey tool, you can easily resize your surveys to fit into any email design. Save time and effort on your pulse surveys and create a strong internal brand voice with consistently great-looking emails.
Centralized employee feedback
Pulse surveys are great for gathering short but frequent bits of employee feedback. But because of this volume it can be tricky keeping track of all the valuable feedback you’ve gathered!
A pulse survey tool like ContactMonkey visualizes your survey data within your own analytics dashboard. Here you can track employee survey results from your various email campaigns and view anonymous employee comments:
The faster you can collect and analyze your employees’ feedback, the sooner you can act on it. The best employee pulse survey tools speed up the feedback process while showing your employees that you take their suggestions seriously.
This cycle is what nurtures and solidifies a feedback culture in your workplace. And with a pulse survey software, it’s easier than ever to cultivate consistent two-way communication.
Data-based internal communications
Employee feedback is an important part of a data-based internal communications plan.
Not only do employee pulse survey tools enable you to inform your decisions by real employee feedback and email metrics, but you can track how your decisions affect things like employee engagement.
We don’t need to tell you how much more convincing your suggestions to leadership are when you can point to real data that supports your conclusions:
And pulse survey data isn’t limited to proving the effectiveness of your internal communications: gather employee feedback around all kinds of important topics to show a true picture of how your organization feels.
Like everything in business you get out what you put in, and internal communications is no different. Using ContactMonkey to create pulse surveys and employee surveys helps you minimize the time you spend creating your email content so you can focus on maximizing its benefit for your internal communications for your small business or large corporation.
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What Insights Can You Get From A Pulse Survey Tool?
Emoji reactions
Emoji are great for gathering feedback from your employees super quickly. A scale of emoji reactions let’s your employees indicate differing levels of appreciation or criticism. Emoji reactions catch your employees’ eye and lets them respond with ease:
Yes/No
For super quick feedback, ContactMonkey’s yes/no or thumbs up/down pulse survey content is your best bet. No need to make things difficult; regularly ask simple questions requiring yes/no answers to get your employees in the habit of providing feedback.
Star ratings
Not a fan of emojis? With star ratings, employees can respond beyond a simple yes/no to emphasize their feelings around a topic. Make sure you link your question with your survey method to ensure the question is included on the analytics dashboard:
eNPS
What is eNPS? Your Employee Net Promoter Score tells you how likely your employees are to promote your product or recommend your business to their friends and family. Internal communicators can determine eNPS using specific questions and a 1–10 scale for responses.
Employee responses are calculated on a scale and you’re shown—within your analytics dashboard—your eNPS score and any comments your employees left.
Employee feedback using anonymous comments
Both emoji reactions and eNPS-based surveys can include the option for employees to leave anonymous comments with their survey responses. By simply turning commenting “on” within your email template your employees are free to voice their unique opinions.
Commenting is always anonymous so your employees can feel safe sharing their true feelings. This kind of candid feedback is invaluable for an organization, as employees are often best at diagnosing lack of productivity or unnecessary policies or procedures. Productivity is an organization-wide effort and employee commenting helps your employees contribute to this.
10 Best Pulse Survey Tools in 2022
Pulse surveys take the work out of gathering and analyzing employee feedback. They also make it easy to get qualitative data for your internal communications audit and inform positive change in your employee messaging.
To help you choose the right tool for the job, we’ve compiled a shortlist of the 10 best employee pulse survey software. Let’s dive in!
Pro Tip: Organize and segment employee sending lists to target the right employees with the right questions using ContactMonkey’s list management tool.
1. ContactMonkey
ContactMonkey is the only employee pulse survey tool of its kind. With email-embedded feedback and detailed survey analytics, the software enables users to measure and improve employee engagement directly from their email inbox.
ContactMonkey offers a wider range of qualitative and quantitative response options than traditional pulse survey platforms. These include eNPS, emojis, and anonymous comments:
Not to mention, ContactMonkey makes surveys more engaging and twice as easy to complete. Employees never have to leave their inbox and jump to a third-party platform—they can complete their surveys from the same place where they get their company news. This leads to an increased response rate and better engagement insights for you!
And if you ever run out of survey content, ContactMonkey’s OpenAI integration lets you generate customized messages straight from your email builder.
2. Empuls
Empuls is an intranet platform that automates employee rewards and incentives while also offering pulse surveys. Users can take advantage of real-time feedback and a wide range of survey templates.
While the platform offers some quality survey features, its number one focus is employee rewards. As a result, it’s not a great fit for those who want a tool that specializes in surveys.
3. OfficeVibe
OfficeVibe is an employee engagement solution and peer recognition platform. It offers science-backed pulse survey designs and easy reports.
While the in-app feedback option is great, companies whose primary communications channel is email, may find the app lacking.
4. WorkTango
WorkTango‘s employee engagement platform offers pulse survey action plans, real-time feedback, and dynamic data visualization.
For those looking for a simpler pulse survey tool, the comprehensive data breakdown may feel overwhelming. But those searching for detailed analytics will find the platform useful.
5. Workvivo
An app-based tool, Workvivo focuses on creating virtual communities to cultivate employee engagement and team collaboration. It features pulse surveys on an interactive activity feed and offers ready-made questions.
The downside of this tool is that it requires asking employees to download another workplace and set push notifications. This may be a bit overwhelming for teams who already use a variety of employee survey tools.
6. TINYPulse
Pulse surveys are TINYPulse‘s specialty. The platform even provides automated question queues so users don’t have to come up with their own survey ideas.
However, there are some drawbacks with using a third-party site vs. Gmail and Outlook email-embedded pulse surveys. Some users complain that when they click a response to a question in the automated emails, it brings them back to the website where they have to respond again. The need for this sort of repetitive action can discourage employee participation.
7. BetterWorks
BetterWorks has some unique features, like allowing users to conduct pulse surveys in multiple languages and across different platforms. However, the downsides include a confusing user interface (UI) experience and poor technical support, according to GetApp reviews.
8. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is a user-friendly employee engagement platform that lets you measure fluctuations in engagement through frequent, real-time feedback.
The downsides include slow customer support and a lack of integration capabilities.
9. Leapsome
Leapsome is a performance management and communications tool with quality pulse survey feature. Their employee survey software lets you take stock of company culture and employee engagement with easy-to-set-up surveys.
However, if you’re looking for a straightforward survey tool, Leapsome’s employee survey software can feel a bit overwhelming. Users complain about underused features such as “Goals,” “Surveys,” and “Meetings,” which can add to a confusing experience.
10. SurveyMonkey Engage
SurveyMonkey is a household name when it comes to employee survey tools. With a good amount of free features, the platform is straightforward and helps you create simple surveys that are tailored to specific topics.
That being said, the key downside with SurveyMonkey’s employee survey software is the lack of customization and unique survey response options. Moreover, as a third-party site, this employee survey tool doesn’t allow you to respond quickly from the comfort of your email, as you can with ContactMonkey.
Learn how to build a business case for new internal communications tools and initiatives with our step-by-step guide.
How Do You Create A Pulse Survey With Contact Monkey?
We’ve talked about how easy pulse surveys are to create with ContactMonkey. But in this section, we’ll show you just how easy our drag-and-drop email template builder is to use.
First, create your email template. We go into detail on building email templates in this blog, so if you’re new to email design we suggest taking a look at it. Whether you’re creating a template from scratch or using one of ContactMonkey’s pre-built templates, ensure you leave a reasonable amount of space for your pulse survey.
Once you’ve allocated space for your survey, drag the Survey tile where you want to feature your survey. After the tile is placed, click “Select Surveys” on the tile and choose the survey you want to use:
Now, you can add your pulse survey question and any associated materials with your survey. We’ve shown you how to link comments with your survey earlier in the blog, but you can also add photos along with your survey if your question requires a reference image:
Every template you build in ContactMonkey is responsive, meaning that your employees viewing their emails via mobile devices will have no problem completing your survey or leaving comments. You can change the view within the email template builder to preview and edit your template for mobile devices:
Ultimately you want your surveys to be prominently featured, your questions specific and concise, and your email to look sleek and professional. With ContactMonkey, you can accomplish all of these criteria with little to no design experience.
How To Develop An Effective Communication Calendar
Congrats! You’ve built your very own pulse survey. Now make it a habit.
Regular pulse surveys conducted at predetermined intervals can encourage a feedback culture while avoiding information overload. Using ContactMonkey’s email scheduling, you can set your pulse surveys to be sent at certain times and days to maximize employee engagement:
Like everything with your internal communications, it’s best to collect input from your employees about how often they’d like to receive surveys. Remember, no one knows your employees better than they know themselves; collect their feedback using an employee survey software and let it inform your internal communications strategy!
Choose ContactMonkey As Your Pulse Survey Tool
We’ve hoped to underscore the importance of not only pulse surveys for your internal communications, but pulse survey tools themselves. The best pulse survey tools can optimize your email design and sending process, and help you better understand how your employees are feeling.
Not only is ContactMonkey great for pulse surveys, but our internal communications software is perfect for creating, sending, and tracking all of your employee emails. With easy to use functions and Outlook and Gmail integration, make ContactMonkey a part of your internal communications approach and reap the benefits.
