Best practice: Smart puls

How many questions are actually asked? 

If you've never run a Smart Pulse before, the long list of over 100 questions that appears in the questions included can easily look strange and almost overwhelming. However, there's nothing to worry about — the question bank included in a Smart Pulse simply represents potential questions, of which 1 to 6 may be asked per team to its respondents.

It's therefore worth knowing that the number of follow-up questions asked can vary between teams, depending on, for example, what type of insights a given team has previously received.

Understand the purpose = Have the right expectations! 

The Smart Pulse survey type is designed to follow up on previous results for each team, where the included questions selects follow-up questions linked to each team's most recent insights from employee surveys. The results presented for such a survey — for the follow-up questions asked to each team — will therefore not always be possible to be presented in a meaningful way at a summary level.

The solution is simple: Add additional questions beyond the follow-up questions, which are then asked to all groups included in the survey. This way, there will be results to view even for summaries, since these questions have been asked to all included groups' respondents.

There is also a threshold for what share of employees belonging to an overall summary needs to have participated in a survey for a result to be calculated — read more about this here: 📌 Smart Pulse

Make sure all respondents actually receive questions to answer! 

As mentioned above, it's a good idea to add extra questions/question packages to a Smart Pulse. This also helps ensure that all teams are asked questions at all:

For a team's respondents to receive any follow-up questions in a Smart Pulse, the team in question needs to have previous insights presented from the most recent major survey (a survey that is not a Smart Pulse measurement). There is therefore a certain risk that no follow-up questions are asked at all for:

• Very small teams (1–2 respondents)
• Small teams at risk of low response rates
• Newly created teams (that haven't yet participated in any surveys and therefore have no previous insights on which to base follow-up questions)

Just as mentioned previously, this can easily be prevented by adding extra questions that are asked to all teams regardless.

What are follow-up questions based on? 

A Smart Pulse battery of follow-up questions will always be based on the most recent survey's results (insights) — it is therefore not possible to make a Smart Pulse generate follow-up questions based on another Smart Pulse. This applies regardless of whether the most recent Smart Pulse includes complete indexes and resembles a "regular" employee survey in size.

In short: a Smart Pulse asks follow-up questions based on the most recent measurement that was not a Smart Pulse.

How old can insights be and still generate follow-up questions?

For a Smart Pulse to detect and base follow-up questions on previous insights, the insights from the most recent survey must have been presented/calculated within the past 14 months. If a team's most recent insights are older than that, no follow-up questions will be able to be generated or asked.