Teamspective works with dozens of types of organizations, and each of them with a unique culture. There's no one-way-fits-all recommendation we can offer to you, but there are many best practices we recommend you to consider.

We'll leave it to you to think what is your organization's culture like, to find the sweet spot between rules vs guidelines, team independence vs hands-on HR involvement, on-demand learning vs big group trainings etc. Our expert team is always available if you want to discuss these topics with an experienced HR professional.

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The pulse response rate is important because a high enough level ensures good data quality, enabling smart future decisions and behaviour. 100% monthly response rate would be fantastic, but you can achieve good enough data quality with less. We suggest to optimize for 75 - 85 % of employees to answer each month.

Teamspective is constantly improving the Pulse Surveys to help keep response rates high over time. The Slack / Teams integration helps make the responding as easy as it gets. Also weekly / bi-weekly cadence builds a routine or habit of responding.

However, based on our experience the companies who achieve a sustained high response rate are also doing certain supportive actions.

Below you can see examples of supportive actions which are being taken in the organizations with consistently high response rates. A combination of tools, education, communication and self-leadership is the winning recipe to using this people data for your advantage.

You can use the actions above as a road map for implementing supportive actions. Start from the left and gradually make your way to the right to ensure you are not trying to make everything happen at once.

Below you can find the supportive actions grouped into themes.

Using pulse results for continuous improvement is a skill which develops over time, and can be improved via education and training. Here are some best practices:

The desired end-state is having employees, team leaders and management actively reviewing results, discussing about the arising issues and working together to come up with solutions. Those actions demonstrate that people data is actively being used to support continuous improvement at the workplace.

Members of each group are also the people that have the context and ability to find the best solutions to fix issues and tensions preventing effective work. This is important because 80-90% of problems are local, and thus should also be tackled locally in each team.

Here are some examples of activities which we have encountered when working with our customer organizations:

Building these routines creates a positive, self-reinforcing cycle which supports the organization on all levels when trying to succeed in a constantly changing environment. Activities on the top level show example for activities on lower level. However, each activity reinforces and supports the others.

In tree-like, hierarchically structured organizations it should be fairly easy to assign every leader of a team, department, business unit etc. the responsibility of monitoring and improving their groups' wellbeing and effectiveness.

Challenge of this org type is that there is higher natural tendency to delegate responsibility to others if the expectations are not set clearly enough. Teams might expect their higher-ups to show example and remind when and how to process the results. Managers might expect their teams to act independently and reach out if any issues emerge.

So, set expectations and communicate them clearly. Make every team or group responsible of their results and actions and every manager responsible of leading by example and checking on their teams' progress.

In flat organizations where teams or groups may not have any official reporting lines the best ways of assigning responsibility and enforcing use of pulses is highly dependent on your culture.

If your teams are very independent and self-directing, you're probably very used to emphasizing 'the what and the why' whenever implementing anything new. That is our recommendation for pulses as well. Communicate the benefits for a team, show examples and as a cherry on top tell how everyone's input will also help the company as a whole to better understand what could be improved.

One benefit of flat structure is that there are no layers behind which teams could hide. It should be perfectly clear that each group working together is responsible of checking, discussing and taking action on their own results. Here it's especially important to set up scalable and on-demand support content, as there are no fixed owners for team development.