The most important part about your pulse questionnaire is your ability to take action based on the results. That requires first understanding the results and facilitating a discussion on the most important insights. You can access pulse results anytime at app.teamspective.com/pulse.
Checking pulse results is an easy 5-minute routine once you get familiar with reports.
Contents of this article:
What should you pay attention to?
We recommend to first identify interesting insights, and then choose 1-2 topics to focus on with your team.
Addressing too many topics at once may result in the discussion jumping back and forth, never getting deep into details.
Look for these to identify interesting themes:
1. A low score
This signals that there are clearly some challenges in the specific area. Compare the score against your company level result and the benchmark. How much lower is the score in your team?
2. A declining trend.
This signals that something has changed over time and you should correct the course. Trends can also decline slowly so look at a longer timeframe if possible.
3. A wide spread between responses of people.
This may happen even in themes where overall score is high. A wide spread indicates that people’s experiences are at different extremes, and that you should try to find alignment. There might be a few individuals who have big problems even though the overall score is high.
Automated Insights and Suggestions
Teamspective's algorithm automatically identifies interesting results and trends, which are highlighted on the top of the Overview page. These are always a good starting point for browsing the results. You can click the suggestions to see more detailed results and tips for taking action.
For Slack and Teams users we also provide an automated summary of Pulse insights and suggested action tips. You can read more on Pulse Snapshots below:
KPIs, Themes and Questions
Pulse surveys follow a structure where you have 3 KPIs which are measured by several themes. Each theme consists of multiple questions that are designed to measure the different drivers of that theme score. For example Motivation theme contains questions about Learning, Autonomy, Accomplishment and so on.
You can follow this structure to identify concrete topics for a team discussion. In the example below the user:
Starts from the KPI: They notice a declining trend in Engagement.
Then proceeds to check how the different themes are scoring under that KPI.
Questions under themes offer more details. Inside the Teamwork theme it's clear that many questions score quite well, but for example Clarity of Goals and Help and Support score lower.
Finally the question page has the most detailed insights about what open comments people have shared about that topic, and the answer distribution to understand how differently people in the group feel about this topic.
In the answer distribution look for two things:
first, are there too many "bad" responses, and
second, are the experiences very different between team members.
Trends over time
The Heatmaps page is an easy way to look at trends and changes in your pulse results. You can view the results over Months or Quarters.
Comparing to company and benchmark
In most reports you can see benchmark values for Themes and Questions. Benchmarks are based on a pool of companies using these same questions in Teamspective.
Comparing your scores to benchmark values helps you understand what is a "normal" score for a certain theme. People perceive each theme and question slightly differently, so you'll see that in some themes the benchmark will be much higher than in others.
Another comparison point is comparing your team to the whole organization's results. You can see the group All in any report and compare your team's results to them to identify are you alone with the good or bad scores in a certain theme. If your results differ from others, it's especially important to address them in your team.
Open comments
If your team members have added comments to their answers, you can see them on the comments tab or under each question report page.
It's recommended to encourage adding these comments, because they often provide valuable insights that complement the pulse scores. You can always reply to the comments to thank the person for their feedback, or to ask questions to learn more about the topic.
When to look at the score, or at the answer distribution
We recommend that you browse through both of these every now and then to see if you spot anything interesting. Even if the overall score is high, the distribution may reveal something requiring attention.
The score graph is great for understanding how your team is doing with that theme, and if there are any major changes or trends to take note of.
The distribution graph helps you understand if some team members have very extreme or differing experiences. If individuals are differing from the majority, you can address that via 1-1 discussions. If team members' experiences are from different ends of the scale, you can discuss with the team how to balance the experience (for example workload).
