Here’s the TLDR: We paused Pulse Surveys, but now they’re back, and they’re improved! Get your organization started with a Pulse Survey today.

What if you were trying to get your blood pressure down, but you only had access to a blood pressure cuff to measure it once per year?

Doesn’t sound like the best setup to me. And the same is true if by “your” you mean “your organization’s,” and by “blood pressure” you mean “employee engagement,” and by “down” you mean “up.”

Pulse Surveys from Leading Edge are short and fully customizable surveys you can use to get a quick sense of how your employees are doing, or to ask some specific question about their experience in the moment. It’s a much quicker, more nimble tool compared to our best-known survey, the Employee Experience Survey (EES), which Leading Edge has been offering once per year since 2016 (except for 2020; we’ll get to that below).

The EES is a long, comprehensive (and amazing!) people analytics tool that gives you the complete workup of your people’s experiences at work. It’s like a full-body MRI for your workplace culture. It’s incredibly powerful, but it’s intense, and you can’t feasibly do it every weekday morning after breakfast. Pulse Surveys are like that quick home blood pressure check — focused, simple, and easy to repeat over and over again.

We first introduced Pulse Surveys in 2020 as a replacement for the EES that didn’t happen that year. In the midst of the crisis atmosphere of the onset of COVID-19, running the EES would have been too much of an administrative burden to both Leading Edge and the participating organizations, as we all scrambled to adjust to a whole new way of working. And, even leaving the administrative burden aside, the EES was a tool unsuited to the needs of that particular moment. Everything was in flux, different organizations had different immediate needs, and everyone’s needs were urgent and rapidly changing.

So we created Pulse Surveys, and they were a better fit for 2020 — but they have also complemented the larger survey as a parallel offering as time has gone by. When we reintroduced the EES in 2021, the Pulse Survey remained an active option. Organizations have often used them as interim check-ups in between EES cycles, to gauge their progress in addressing the most important issues that their EES revealed. Others have used it in one-off ways, to check in with their employees just before or just after some major change, like going all-remote, going back to the office, declaring no-meeting Wednesdays, or instituting a new policy where everyone must refer to each other by a cryptic spy-movie-style nickname at work.

Last year, we paused Pulse Surveys so we could find ways to improve our process of administering them. And now, I’m so excited to report that they’re back!

What’s new about Pulse Surveys since we paused them? Well, many small tweaks, but here are the two big pieces of news:

• You’ll receive more and better sample questions to help you design your Pulse Survey.
• Pulse Surveys now run on Culture Amp, the same platform we use for the EES. This makes it much easier to run more powerful analyses and compare your Pulse Survey results to your EES results.

Here’s what’s not new, and still great, about Pulse Surveys:

• Still free of any cost to your organization;
• Still includes tech support from our team to empower you to administer your survey with ease;
• Still available up to four times per year;
• Still helps you measure your organizational health in an ongoing way, like some kind of super-easy, pocket-sized sphygmomanometer. (And yes, that’s right, “sphygmomanometer” is the official fancy medical name of a blood pressure cuff.)

So that’s my pitch — if your organization has never done a Pulse Survey, or if you haven’t done one in a while, click yourself over to this page and check them out! We’re back, we’re even better, and my pulse is racing just thinking about it.