How Coder uses AI for pulse surveys

author avatar
Camilla Lever
Β on March 7th, 2023

At our last team offsite we held a Hackathon. Here is my project: Pulse surveys that use AI to summarize anonymous feedback.

What is a pulse survey?

A pulse survey is intended to help a business understand the organizational health and obstacles that employees may be facing. Separate from a performance review, pulse surveys are shorter (usually three to five questions) and are sent on a more frequent cadence, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

Should pulse surveys be anonymous?

The age-old debate is whether or not pulse surveys should be anonymous. We chose to make ours anonymous to increase the response rate and we feel that anonymity encourages employees to be more honest about issues and not sugarcoat things.

Why not use an employee engagement platform?

TLDR: We are cheap mindful of spend, and have tool fatigue

I have spent years testing various HR tools that promise to help with engagement, metric tracking, and automation and will assist in organically building a feedback culture. While these tools are impressive and sound great, our employees are tired of having another tool, another login, and another distraction to their day. Not to mention, they cost a lot of money!

How does Coder conduct pulse surveys?

We communicate through Gmail, Slack, and Notion. Our goal was to find a way to make a quick, anonymous, and painless pulse survey using our existing tools. We also wanted to ensure that everyone in the company would have complete access to the results at all times, in real-time.

The set-up:

Monthly, employees are sent this pulse survey through Google forms to complete.

Using Zapier, we connected OpenAI to summarize the feedback and omit any names mentioned. Our prompt to OpenAI was:

*The last action in Zapier is to take the OpenAI summary and send it to our Pulse Survey Hub database in Notion.

How are results shared?

Results are openly shared in our Notion main hub teamspace for everyone to review.

  • Note that only the summary and timestamp are shared
  • Our Google Form setting does not collect email addresses

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