Should We Run a Full Employee Engagement Survey or a Pulse Survey?

If you want a comprehensive understanding of employee engagement and the factors driving it, a full employee engagement survey is usually the better choice. If you want to check progress on a smaller number of issues, track changes or assess whether actions are having an impact, a pulse survey may be more appropriate.

For many organisations, the best approach is not choosing one or the other permanently. Pulse surveys can be particularly useful between full engagement surveys, providing focused feedback while giving the organisation enough time to act on the more comprehensive findings.

What is the difference between an employee engagement survey and a pulse survey?

A full employee engagement survey is designed to provide a broad and detailed understanding of engagement across an organisation. It should measure not only whether employees are engaged, but also the factors that may be influencing engagement, such as management, communication, employee voice, development opportunities and working conditions. Protostar use a rigorously researched two-part model called the MOVIE model, which lists both the characteristics of an engaged employee and the conditions that create one. You can read more about that model here.

A pulse survey is normally shorter and more focused. Rather than attempting to diagnose engagement across the whole organisation, it can explore a smaller number of issues or monitor whether something has changed.

	Full engagement survey	Pulse survey
Purpose	Comprehensive understanding of engagement and its drivers	Focused check on selected issues
Coverage	Broad	Narrower and more targeted
Length	More comprehensive	Usually shorter
Best used for	Establishing a baseline, identifying priorities and understanding what drives engagement	Monitoring specific issues, changes or progress
Follow-up	Creates priorities for action	Can assess whether those actions are making a difference

The important question is therefore not simply which survey is better. It is what does your organisation need to understand?

When should you run a full employee engagement survey?

A full survey is usually appropriate when you need to understand the overall employee experience rather than investigate one particular issue.

For example, you may want to establish the organisation’s current level of engagement, understand why some teams are more engaged than others, identify the factors having the greatest influence on engagement or establish priorities for the year ahead.

A well-designed engagement survey should provide enough breadth to distinguish between symptoms and underlying causes.

For example, discovering that employees feel less positive about the organisation is useful, but understanding whether this is associated with leadership, communication, management, development opportunities, workload or another factor is much more valuable.

This is why a full employee engagement survey should measure both engagement itself and the factors that are likely to influence it.

When should you use a pulse survey?

A pulse survey works particularly well when you already know what you want to investigate.

Imagine, for example, that your main engagement survey identifies internal communication as an important area for improvement. The organisation develops an action plan, introduces new communication channels and changes the way senior leaders communicate with employees.

Several months later, you may not need another comprehensive engagement survey. Instead, a short pulse survey can help establish whether employees have noticed the changes and whether perceptions of communication are improving.

Pulse surveys can also be useful following organisational change, when exploring a specific emerging issue or when an organisation wants feedback on a particular initiative.

The key is having a clear reason for asking the questions.

Can a pulse survey replace an annual employee engagement survey?

Usually, we wouldn’t recommend using pulse surveys as a permanent replacement for a comprehensive employee engagement survey. Pulse surveys are useful precisely because they are focused. But that strength can also be a limitation.

If you repeatedly ask a small number of questions, you may be able to see whether those particular measures are changing without understanding what else is happening across the organisation or what is driving the results.

A full engagement survey provides an opportunity to step back and look at the bigger picture.

For many organisations, a more effective approach is therefore to use full engagement surveys and pulse surveys for different purposes rather than treating them as competing alternatives.

Should you run a pulse survey after an employee engagement survey?

Often, yes.

A full employee engagement survey can identify the organisation’s priorities. Leaders and managers can then agree and implement appropriate actions. A subsequent pulse survey can focus specifically on those priorities and help determine whether employees are seeing meaningful change.

This also helps create a clearer connection between feedback, action and follow-up.

Employees are more likely to see the purpose of another survey when they can understand why particular questions are being asked and how they relate to previous feedback.

How long after an employee engagement survey should you run a pulse survey?

There isn’t a single timetable that is right for every organisation.

The organisation needs enough time to analyse the original results, communicate them, agree actions and implement meaningful changes before asking employees whether things have improved. For many organisations, a pulse survey around six months after the main engagement survey can provide a useful midpoint check.

However, timing should ultimately be determined by what you are trying to measure rather than by the calendar alone.

There is little value in asking employees whether something has improved before the organisation has had a realistic opportunity to improve it.

How many questions should a pulse survey have?

There is no ideal number.

A pulse survey should be short enough to remain focused but long enough to answer the question the organisation is trying to investigate.

If a pulse survey gradually expands until it covers leadership, communication, wellbeing, development, culture, management, reward and every other aspect of working life, it is no longer really functioning as a pulse survey.

The better principle is to ask only the questions needed to fulfil the purpose of that particular pulse. Also, remember that any survey taking more than 10 minutes to complete leads to significant drop-off rates.

Can you run pulse surveys too often?

Yes.

Modern survey technology makes it possible to ask employees for feedback extremely frequently. That doesn’t necessarily mean doing so will produce better insight. Every survey creates an expectation that somebody will consider the results and, where appropriate, take action.

If employees are continually asked for feedback but see little evidence that anything happens as a result, frequent listening can become counterproductive.

A useful principle is:

Don’t ask employees for feedback more frequently than your organisation can meaningfully respond to it.

Survey frequency should therefore reflect both the organisation’s need for information and its capacity to act on what employees say.

What should a pulse survey measure?

A pulse survey should normally have a specific purpose.

That might be to check progress against priorities identified in the main engagement survey, understand employee reactions to organisational change, monitor a particular aspect of the employee experience or investigate an issue that has recently emerged.

It should not simply be a shortened collection of generic engagement questions because the technology makes frequent surveying easy.

Start with the decision you are trying to make or the issue you need to understand. Then design the pulse around that objective.

So, should you choose a full engagement survey or a pulse survey?

Choose a full employee engagement survey when you need a comprehensive understanding of engagement, its underlying drivers and the organisation’s priorities.

Choose a pulse survey when you have a more focused question, want to monitor a particular issue or need to assess progress following previous feedback and action.

In many organisations, the strongest employee listening approach combines the two: a comprehensive engagement survey establishes the bigger picture, meaningful action follows, and focused pulse surveys help monitor progress between full surveys.

The objective shouldn’t be to survey employees as frequently as possible. It should be to collect the right feedback at the right time and then do something useful with it.

Protostar designs and manages employee engagement and pulse surveys for organisations internationally, from survey design and communications through to analysis, reporting and action planning. If you’re unsure which approach is most appropriate for your organisation, contact us for a no-obligation discussion.

Learn more about our Employee Survey services or contact Protostar for an informal, no-obligation conversation about your requirements.