Skip to main content
Pulse Survey

Pulse Survey is a communication and feedback tool that empowers HR departments and managers to boost engagement among employees and teams.

Natalia Ponomareva avatar
Written by Natalia Ponomareva
Updated over a month ago

Estimated time to read: 9 - 10 minutes


What is Pulse Survey?

Whether your employees are situated in different locations nationwide or are spread in different countries around the world, their sentiment and happiness at work are vital to your organization.

Pulse Survey is a tool that provides exactly these insights on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis and can extent the annual employee appraisals. They're automated and frequent feedback loops between managers and their employees.

This means that each manager will get the insights and real-time snapshots of employee sentiment in a dashboard format directly on their phone. This will extend knowledge about how they're doing and what you can do to increase engagement among the people that form the culture of your company, ensuring their happiness.

We hosted a webinar about Pulse Surveys. You can watch it here.


How to create a Pulse?


How does it work?

  • Categorize content into sections for easy visualization.

  • Control intervals and pause when needed.

  • Build trust and increase engagement with anonymous feedback.

Pulse Surveys are set up to run in weekly, monthly, or quarterly loops. Questions in these surveys are mapped in meaningful categories that enable managers to easily understand the feedback they get and take action as needed. It's a prerequisite for running Pulse Surveys to have managers mapped on contacts in Actimo.

Ensure trust with anonymous feedback and data

Feedback from Pulse Surveys is anonymous and replies at an individual level will never be accessible. Data will be available in aggregated form when three or more respondents have submitted their answers. If fewer than three people have submitted their answers, no data will be available.


Configure and start a Pulse Survey (Admin rights required)

Configure pulse survey

  1. Go to Editor section and click and navigate to the lead section and select Pulse.

  2. Add a name and click on create Pulse.

  3. In Design, we have prepared the first two pages of the survey to inspire you and get you started. Buttons to start and submit the survey are added automatically.

Add more questions and categories

When you start a new Pulse Survey, a number of questions and categories will be available in the default setup. If you need other questions or categories, you can easily add them in your admin settings:

  1. Go to Admin.

  2. Click on the Pulse tab.

  3. Add the categories and questions you need and hit Save.

You can for instance ask “Are you motivated at work?” and “Do you have a close colleague at work?” and map these two questions into the category “Churn risk”.

One or more categories

You can set up your Pulse Survey as a simple measurement of the mood among the employees - Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), or with more questions and categories.


For example, you can ask eight questions each month, where questions 1 to 3 adds up in a category “Motivation”, 4-6 adds up in “Guidance” and 7 and 8 adds up in “Direction”. The average of the categories is the overall score, which you can name “Leadership”, “Pulse Index” or whatever suits your program.

Start Pulse Survey

  1. Navigate from Design to Publish.

  2. First set your Frequency settings. Select a start date, whether you want the loop to be weekly, monthly or quarterly, and restrict the send out time to deliver on weekdays and within office hours.

  3. Now add the target employees in the contact's field.

  4. Check your preferred delivery method.

  5. Activate.

Add more employees to a running Pulse Survey

If you wish to add more employees or groups of employees to a Pulse Survey that is already running, you can do so by:

  1. Clicking on 3 dots next to the ongoing published Pulse

  2. Clicking on Publish

  3. Adding the contacts to the Pulse

Note: Make sure the Pulse has a category selected. The contacts will not receive the notifications to complete the ongoing Pulse (due to it already being published).
Once the category is added, the Pulse will appear on the feed which includes messages with this category.


Note: Make sure to also add the contacts to the template Pulse on the publish page of the template Pulse. They will then be in the loop from the next sendout.

Put your Pulse Survey on pause

There might be times around a year, where you'll find it appropriate to pause your Pulse Surveys, especially if the frequency is set to weekly or monthly.

In order to pause a Pulse Survey, click on the Three dots and then "Set to inactive". The Pulse status will change to Inactive. If you wish to reactivate it again, click the Three dots and then "Set to active".


Reporting: Get the data

The Analytics generated from your Pulse Surveys is aggregated, based on three or more respondents, and anonymous. Data will be sorted according to the categories you've set up.

It's available in a dashboard on the respective managers' phones, where they can follow progression in scores by category, as well as a three months rolling average. Also, data is available in an Excel export that you can download from the platform.

Please note:

  • Reporting is based on Manager relationships

    To ensure that an employee’s answers are included in the Pulse Survey reporting, it's important that the employee is assigned to a Manager in the system. Without a Manager assignment, the responses will not appear in the report.

  • Category-level reporting

    In the Pulse Survey reporting, results are presented at the category level rather than the question level. For example, if a category contains two questions, the report will show the overall results for the category, without breaking it down by individual questions.

  • Categories set to match the questions being asked

    Since reporting shows results at the category level rather than the question level, you can create a separate category that would match each question. When you assign one question to each category, in the report the results will be displayed for each question individually, providing detailed insights into all answers.


Tags: Data, pulse, survey, one-on-one, 1-on-1, eNPS, leadership, anonymous, happiness, feedback

Contact: [email protected]

Did this answer your question?