The template

How this month has gone

My workload has been manageable this month12345
I have been able to do my best work12345
I finished most weeks feeling like I got somewhere12345

Support

I got the support I needed from my manager12345
When I got stuck, I knew who to ask12345
I have had at least one useful conversation about my work this month12345

Growth

I learned something this month12345
I can see how I progress from here12345

The two open ones

Keep both. The ratings tell you something changed; these tell you what.

What got in your way this month?
What should we keep doing?

What this one assumes

There is more than one way to run this. Here is what we assumed, so you can tell quickly whether it fits — and what to change if it does not.

It runs monthly or fortnightly — a pulse that runs quarterly is just a small engagement survey

Someone has committed to act on it, and to say publicly what changed

It stays under two minutes, which is why there are ten questions and not thirty

Results are read by team, not by individual

What a pulse check is for

A pulse check is not a small engagement survey. It answers a different question: not how do people feel about working here, but what changed since last month, and what is in the way right now.

That difference drives everything about the design. It has to be short enough to answer honestly in two minutes, repeated often enough that the trend means something, and acted on visibly enough that people keep answering.

How the template is built

How this month has gone covers workload, quality and whether the month added up to anything. Three statements, because this is the group most likely to move and the one that most often moves first.

Support separates the manager from the system. Someone can have a supportive manager and still not know who to ask about anything outside that relationship, and the two have different fixes.

Growth is only two statements, deliberately. Monthly is too often to meaningfully re-measure development, but leaving it out entirely means you miss the slow decline that precedes someone resigning.

The two open questions are the ones people actually answer at length, and the reason to keep the rated section short. "What got in your way" produces specific, fixable things. "What should we keep doing" stops the survey being purely a complaints channel, and tells you what not to break.

How to read it

Single months are noise. Three runs is the minimum before a trend means anything, and a single bad month usually reflects something that happened that month rather than anything structural.

Read the open answers first and the ratings second. The ratings tell you a group moved; only the open text tells you why, and that is what you can act on.

The fastest way to kill a pulse survey is to run it and say nothing. Publishing two things you are changing — and one thing you are not, with the reason — does more for the response rate than any reminder.

What we would change, and when

If your teams are distributed across time zones, add a statement about whether people felt included in decisions this month. Distributed teams lose that first, and none of the ten above will catch it.

If you are running this during a period of change — a restructure, a merger, a return-to-office push — swap the growth group for two statements about whether people understand what is happening and what it means for them. Growth questions during upheaval read as tone-deaf.

If response rates fall below about half, cut to the two open questions alone for a few months. A short survey people answer beats a complete one they ignore.

Pulse check template