Keep It Short, Keep It Simple

How a new series of pulse assessments are paving the way for more frequent, less intense culture surveys.

by EMILIE ANDERSON

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Keep It Short, Keep It Simple

A new approach of running shorter, targeted and more frequent assessments offers organizations a new, lightweight way to see how their culture is really doing.

by EMILIE ANDERSON | Culture Analyst, Ethisphere

Running a survey dedicated to measuring your organization’s culture can offer insights into important ethics and compliance topics. Surveys like these provide employees a way to reflect on and communicate their perceptions of trainings, tools, and resources. In turn, your team can learn how effective those are in establishing an ethical culture. According to the 2024 updates to the Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs guidance, measuring ethical culture is not only helpful to those internally, but a standard by which organizations will be measured by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Culture surveys offer opportunities to gather information on the inner workings of your informal and formal structures (e.g., policies, trainings, etc.), or how formal structures lend themselves to the reality of your organization’s culture. A robust ethical culture survey should evaluate a range of topics, including speak-up culture, organizational justice, and perceptions of management.

EMLIE ANDERSON is a Culture Analyst with Ethisphere's Data & Services team where she helps evaluate organizations’ Ethics and Compliance measures.

Culture surveys produce a lot of data, and it can be tricky to know how to use that to develop next steps based on your findings. In some cases, the data collected in a survey will be enough to determine an action plan; in other cases, the data may leave you with more questions.

One example from Ethisphere’s data set comes from a global pharmaceutical company who learned that their organization had minimally increased their perceptions of organizational justice compared to the previous years’ survey results and yet still meaningfully underperformed against their benchmark. It may be the case that their allocation of resources to organizational justice is working in some places but not in others.

Alternatively, their resource allocation may be working, but not enough to move the needle as powerfully as they had hoped. These types of results can be hard to anticipate and will likely require some more digging to understand the full picture. In cases like this, pulse surveying can help to fill in the gaps.

Pulse Survey Use Cases

Full culture surveys are great for gathering high-level information about your organization. They can give you a sense of employee perceptions of culture and the effectiveness of your tools and resources. Because of the amount of information they gather and the number of stakeholders often involved in rolling out such a project, culture surveying may be too much for some organizations to conduct.

Pulse surveys, however, are much more focused in their topics, and often are received by a smaller population. They tend to be much shorter in length, requiring only a minute or two from those who have been asked to take them. Importantly, focusing on an area of opportunity in your organization’s culture communicates to employees that you have heard their feedback and are addressing their concerns.

A pulse survey may serve as a follow-up to a full culture assessment, a temperature read on employees’ responses to new trainings or materials, or a measurement of employee perceptions of organizational change. Like any survey, a pulse survey captures a moment in time, telling us the story of employee perceptions as they are responding to the survey. Because of their brevity and topical focus, these “snapshots” can be taken more frequently, for a number of different

The CCO should be confident enough to go to the board directly when needed, know which issues need the board’s attention, and when to take them to the board.

purposes, and with a variety of respondent populations. Cast in point: administering a pulse survey to people leaders after rolling out a new manager training to better understand manager preparedness for conversations about ethics. Or, surveying a specific team when a department policy changes to gauge relevant changes in employee perceptions of ethics. Pulse survey use cases are numerous and flexible, lending themselves well to supplementing data your organization already has.

When to Run Pulse Surveys

Because they tend to be less resource intensive, pulse surveys likely require less planning for you and your team and can be executed based on need. They could be used to gauge perceptions of a facet of organizational culture after the rollout of new policies or trainings, in response to feedback from other surveys or focus groups, or to measure a part of your organization’s culture that has not been previously measured.

At Ethisphere, we often see organizations run pulse surveys between their full culture surveys to focus on areas of opportunity. While pulse surveys are often administered on a more frequent basis than full culture surveys, the way they specifically target certain topics or cohorts within your organization means that they do not contribute to the kind of survey fatigue that challenges lengthier, company-wide surveys.

In a 2024 episode of the Ethicast, Ethisphere’s Curtis Leicht discusses key considerations for determining the best time to run a survey: “There may not be a perfect time, but there’s a good time.” He recommends considering both internal factors like other organization surveys or changes in the organization, and external factors, such as major holidays, when establishing the best time to launch a survey.

Who Should Receive a Pulse Survey?

Pulse surveys are meant to provide more detail on a particular topic or demographic. To make the most of a pulse survey effort, it’s important to think through the most effective way to launch the survey to receive as much insight as you can without casting your net too wide. The respondent base for your pulse survey should reflect both the topical and demographic purposes of administering a pulse survey.

Consider the survey’s content and the respondent base in tandem. Could your team use more detailed data about a specific topic from a particular team, demographic, or employee level? If recent culture measurements have shown pockets of opportunity, use them to identify both the topic and the respondent base for your survey.

For example, Ethisphere recently worked with an organization based in the United States whose culture survey results indicated a lack of employee faith in their non-retaliation policy. Ethisphere recommended that the organization develop a standalone non-retaliation policy to be rolled out alongside trainings for both individual employees and managers on how the policy is executed and the organization’s stance on retaliation.

Once the policy and trainings have been administered throughout the organization, following up with a pulse survey would allow the team to gauge which areas of the organization would benefit from additional messaging about speak-up culture and non-retaliation. Results of this survey would allow the organization to be selective in how their resources are prioritized and allocated to make sure that those who most need information about non-retaliation are receiving it effectively.

How Do I Design
a Pulse Survey?

Once you’ve determined the topic and respondent base for your pulse survey, the next step is to determine what information you are hoping to receive. Maybe you want to gauge one team’s awareness of speak-up resources in light of unfavorable perceptions of organizational justice. Alternatively, you may want to focus on individual employee perceptions of management after organizational restructuring. Gathering an idea of the information that you need in order to create actionable plans will help direct your survey development.

A defining quality of a pulse survey is that it is meant only to be a temperature read. To prevent survey fatigue and preserve employee engagement, pulse surveys should only take employees a few minutes to complete. Design questions that target the information you need while keeping the number of questions – and cognitive demand of taking the survey – to a minimum. For example, rather than using pulse survey space to repeat questions you have designed for full-length surveys, engagement surveys, or focus groups, determine what information those sources of input are not able to provide. If respondents report that they have not reported observed misconduct, are they able to determine what types of behavior qualify as misconduct? Are they aware of the number of ways your organization provides for reporting? Pulse surveys should be short and specific – targeting a distinct set of information. ■

To learn more about how measuring culture can help your organization become more productive, innovative, and profitable, visit the Ethisphere Culture Accelerator today.

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