Over half (52%) of all UK employees admit that the cost-of-living crisis is influencing how they are feeling and performing at work. This ranges from a drop in productivity, creativity, and concentration to more serious issues, such as burnout. In our latest blog we’ll be covering what an employee pulse survey is, and how – if you use the right financial wellbeing pulse questions – they can be a simple way to improve the cost-of-living support you’re providing for employees.
Employee pulse surveys are short, quick surveys that are sent to employees on a more regular basis than annual surveys – this could be weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or quarterly. Generally, they are much shorter than annual or employee lifecycle surveys, using between 1 and 10 questions which means they are much quicker for employees to complete than more traditional annual employee surveys.
They’re also not tied to a specific topic e.g Onboarding, Exit or eNPS which means their focus can change from one survey to the next. This means they’re great for organisations who want to take an employee focused approach to their employee engagement and explore topics such as mental health, wellbeing, job roles, personal development or organisation values.
You wouldn’t check your bank account once a year, so why are you happy only checking in on employees with surveys once a year? Employee pulse surveys are great for providing data on factors that may be influencing how your employees are thinking and feeling.
They’re simple, flexible, and adaptable which means that they are easy to create and send to employees more regularly than in-depth annual surveys. This gives you the ability to have your finger on the pulse of things that are impacting your employees’ engagement before it’s too late. The feedback from employee pulse surveys will help you decide which areas need improvement, and creates a good foundation to regularly measure changes in employee engagement within your team.
Measuring financial wellbeing isn’t an exact science, but there are many indicators that can help you build a picture of how your employees are doing. For example, monitoring changes in productivity and performance, and absenteeism and satisfaction will help you understand how employees are feeling about their financial wellbeing.
The way employees engage with financial wellness programmes and benefits such as your company’s EAP also change as employee wellbeing changes too, including these usage stats in your monthly reporting will give you great insights into any changes within your employees.
Pulse surveys are also a great way to understand financial wellbeing further. You can use questions to delve into topics such as the ones identified above or understand more about how your employees feel about financial wellbeing in general. Using the right questions will help you understand how you can support employees exactly where they need it and make changes that benefit your whole team.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ rule for pulse surveys, every organisation is different and will benefit from a different cadence. What we’ve found from working with organisations is that your pulse survey frequency should be in line with how quickly you can communicate the results and create change based on employees’ feedback. Doing this will help build confidence and engagement in the surveys which will serve you well for the future! For example, aligning your employee pulse surveys to your management or board meetings will ensure that results can be discussed and actions agreed in a timely manner so that you can feed back to employees quickly after the survey ends.
Measuring and supporting employee financial wellbeing – especially during this cost-of-living crisis – can feel daunting. The best place to start is by adding questions to your employee pulse survey that will give you data to help you build (or adapt!) your strategy.
To help you get started, here are seven of our favourite financial wellbeing questions that you can incorporate into your next employee pulse survey. These questions will give you the insights you need to build a financial wellbeing plan that really supports your employees:
Free text follow-up question: Which element of your finances impacts your mental wellbeing the most?
Free text follow-up question: Please share detail to expand on why you scored this way
Follow-up question: Please share more detail
Follow-up question: What types of support would help you?
Follow-up question: What else could we do to support you?
Follow-up question: Please share detail to help us understand your answer
Follow-up question: Please share more thoughts and ideas
By using these employee pulse survey questions – and being smart about the tools you use to collect your insights – you will ensure that the support and resources you put in place for your employees is tailored and relevant to their needs, saving time and money for your organisation but most importantly, ensuring that it is effective in supporting their financial wellbeing during this cost of living crisis.
At Stribe, we give you the flexibility to ask the right pulse survey questions for your organisation, and will work with you to make sure they give you the insights to create real change. The right software can make or break your pulse survey strategy, using a tool that gives you true flexibility – and is powerful enough to give you confidence in your results – is key.
Find out more about how the team at Stribe can help you get your financial wellbeing strategy right. Book a call with one of the team here.
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