Make sure your schedule works

You can set Friday Pulse to open on a Thursday or Friday between 4am and 11pm, and close on a Monday or Tuesday between 4am and 11pm. This means you can set up your account to make sure you have your questions open at times that suit all of your teams.

For instance, if you have shift workers who work over Thursday night, make sure questions open on a Thursday afternoon or early Friday morning during their shift so they can respond. Or if you have teams who are out and about most of the day, have questions open early in the day so they can respond before they go out on their jobs.

Ask people to set aside some time to answer the Friday Pulse questions

It only takes a few minutes each week to do, but when you’re not on a computer, tablet or smart phone most of the day, it can be easier to miss responding to Friday Pulse. That’s why it’s a good idea to ask colleagues to be organized about when they are going to answer the questions.

Encourage people to make sure they have set aside a specific five minutes each week to respond. This could be at the beginning of the workday, before or after a break, or at the very end of their day.

Ask managers of teams to ensure everyone on their team has a time when they can respond to Friday Pulse, so that everyone knows to dedicate a little bit of time to answering.

Prioritize conversations too

Response rates often suffer when people don’t talk about their results. They might start off well but if they then don’t see anything happening with their results, they can become disillusioned with it and feel that no one is listening.

Friday Pulse helps share the responsibility of happiness with everyone – and everyone talking about what went well and what didn’t go well during the previous week with their team is a big part of that. Team conversations will also get everyone engaged and excited to post new things in the weekly flow every week when they receive their invite from Friday Pulse.

It’s when teams talk about their Friday Pulse results together each week that they can really maximize the value of each person taking time to reflect individually. And because these conversations take place weekly, they don’t have to take a lot of time – 10 to 15 minutes is enough.

If there’s already a team meeting in the diary, ask teams to make Friday Pulse part of that conversation. If there isn’t a meeting in place, teams should set aside some specific time each week to have that conversation.

Work around shift patterns

If you have teams where people work shifts, it can mean they can never have a team meeting where everyone is together. You can work around this with mini team meetings. This could take two forms:

1. If everyone tends to work the same shifts, set up mini meetings with smaller groups so everyone is part of one meeting with the same people each week. You could even have sub-teams for these smaller groups in Friday Pulse too, so they have their own specific results to discuss.

2. If shift patterns tend to change each week, ask team leads to have some specific times set aside for Friday Pulse results conversations so everyone has the chance to join one each week. This helps everyone know they will have a conversation about results even if it’s not with the whole team or same people each week.

Have conversations even if response rates are low

With desk-based and non-desk-based teams, there can be a tendency to want to wait until there is a high response rate before discussing results. However, it’s more effective to start with the results conversation, even if you don’t have any scores showing at all.

By regularly having a conversation about results, everyone can see the point in responding to Friday Pulse – they know what will happen with their responses.

The Presentation, accessed via the Dashboard, can be used to guide the results conversation without results too. Each slide prompts the team to discuss the team building question, what’s going well, who they want to thank, as well any frustrations and ideas they want to share.