Pulse Check Survey in the Home Office

Insights from Dennis – 01/21

If you were only allowed to ask 3 questions in a pulse check survey, which would you choose?

The current situation surrounding the Corona pandemic presents us all with challenges. Our everyday working lives have also changed significantly since last year. Meetings via Skype, working from home and social distance present both employees and companies with completely new tasks.

Personal contact is now only possible to a very limited extent. Some supervisors have not met their employees in person for months. How do you still manage to keep an eye on the workload of your employees and find out the general mood when the, “Hey, how are you?” on the office corridor no longer works?

In our “Insights from Dennis” series, we looked at these issues, among others, and the topics of home office and digitization in general, and considered how we can support you in the current situation.

A good option for a brief mood survey of your employees in the home office is a pulse check survey. This is a survey instrument that can be used to rate the satisfaction of your employees on the basis of a maximum of 10 specific questions. The survey is repeated at regular intervals to provide continuous feedback on the workload, stress and satisfaction of your employees.

In this video we asked Dennis – the CEO of easyfeedback – which questions he would choose if he was only allowed to ask three questions in a pulse check survey.

The result are the following three questions:

1. How du you feel right now – how are you doing (since last survey)?

For the first question, Dennis recommends focusing on employees and their well-being. How are the employees doing in the home office? Has anything changed in the mood since the last survey? If you conduct the survey regularly, you will quickly identify mood trends and have the opportunity to react to negative changes early on. Using the free text field below the question, your employees also have the opportunity to state the reasons for their rating.

2. What kind of thoughts usually follow you on the way home from work?

As the next important question, Dennis refers to the topics of productivity in the home office and work-life balance. As an example, he mentions the question of how employees feel when they go home from work. Is the employee still mentally occupied with his tasks after work or can he switch off well? A possible over- or underload can also be identified. This question gives you a good insight into your employee’s daily work routine in the home office.

3. What is the intensity of your tasks?

As a third question, Dennis recommends covering the area of personnel development and personnel planning. Here, a possible question could, for example, be aimed at the work intensity of the tasks. If an employee states here that the tasks cannot be completed in the agreed timeframe or that the task area has become more demanding, then there may be a need for personnel here. A regular pulse check gives you the opportunity to react at an early stage so that stressful situations can be avoided in advance.

Summary

A pulse check survey consisting of these three questions already gives you a good initial insight into the current workload and mood of your employees in the home office. This way, you don’t lose track of the situation and show your employees that you are still listening to them. If repeated regularly – Dennis recommends a rhythm of four weeks – trends can also be identified quickly and give you the opportunity to intervene. Your employees benefit from this, and so does your company.

We hope that we have been able to provide you with a few tips for more transparency in the home office. Feel free to use the questions selected by Dennis as inspiration for your next pulse check survey, and feel free to add any other questions that are important to you. At easyfeedback, you can easily create a pulse check survey yourself or you can use our exclusive survey template.

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