TINYpulse is a sound solution to for staying connected to the pulse of your employees !
April 11, 2018

TINYpulse is a sound solution to for staying connected to the pulse of your employees !

Brad Holliday, PHR, SHRM-CP, CBM, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with TINYpulse

As a start-up company, we knew we wanted and needed to get our employees accustomed to employee engagement surveys early-on. Although it is important to talk about how much we care about and want to hear the thoughts and opinions of employees at all levels at any time it's another to back it up with a legitimate and documented process. Having used everything from the old pencil-and-paper method back in the days of employee satisfaction surveys to leveraging the use of outside firms who specialize in employee surveys, we knew we wanted to find a technology resource, but as a start-up with no PE or VC money behind us, recognized the budget was somewhat limited.

TINYpulse proved to be a great find for Caravan Health. With a tremendously-diverse employee population which includes a large number of highly tech-savvy (and tech-preferred!) folks of younger generations, we were concerned with how well we could sell them all on the concept of a survey completed once every twelve or eighteen months, and so the TINYpulse concept of asking just one question every week or every other week seemed compelling as we contemplated our employee demographics. While it has taken us a bit to settle into the "right" cadence which works best for our employees and organization, TINYpulse allows us to (as the name of the platform infers!) keep our finger on the general pulse of the company and our staff by utilizing enterprise-wide.
  • TINYpulse provides a nice, prepackaged survey platform with a library of suggested questions to use and hard-coded timelines and processes... so it is truly a "plug and play" tool.
  • The platform produces some graphics and other methodology for assisting HR in delivering survey results to the rest of the executive team and/or to share with employees.
  • TINYpulse does a DYNAMIC job in selling the message that the employee's responses are anonymous. Not sure if it is a generational issue or the result of younger generations watching a parent go thru a RIF or other job elimination, but the notion of radically-candid feedback is not one which I've found to be present with many Millennials (here or in past organizations), so this is a big selling point for TINYpulse.
  • The TINYpulse platform offers a "Cheers for Peers" program, allowing the company to promote another form of peer-to-peer recognition which can even be linked to Slack (or nearly any business-based instant messaging system) to create a constant feed for all to see those receiving recognition for going above-and-beyond.
  • Reporting in TINYpulse is quite limited. While we recognize - and support - the concept of anonymous feedback, it can be abused, and sadly, we have experienced this with a small group of employees who know they can hide behind this "wall of anonymity" and take aim at a manager they don't care for because the manager holds them accountable for their performance or behaviors. As with most such platforms, if the N is <5, the group can't be tracked at all; if the N is >5, it does allow us to track to a job family and even a location code, but still lacking enough detail to take action when there is reasonable cause to believe the tool is being misused.
  • Reporting of employee comments and suggestions cannot be produced in the middle of a "cycle". And since these cycles always run from precisely one survey question to the next, this means HR must wait until the prior survey has completely closed before any reports can be extracted. This inefficiency can't be explained by anyone at TINYpulse beyond "that is how we set it up", which is not a great response. If I or anyone else on the C-team sees something of concern within the first few days of a particular survey question's release, we want to be able to dig in and try to assess where the greatest "bleeding" may be coming from so that we can take action... but this is not allowed by the system.
  • Some of the suggested questions from the TINYpulse question library are simply silly (which results in employees questioning just how seriously we take the use of the program). As one recent example, the scheduled question was to the effect of "You just opened a fortune cookie about your company. What does it say?" With no context at all around such a question, most of the responses/comments we received were along the lines of "are you kidding me?" !! (and I'd have to agree; not certain what business context such a question can address) We attempted to explain it away by suggesting it was a creative way for the company to ask the employee to consider how they would want the company to be perceived by those outside and inside the organization in the future... but the response wasn't well-received. Most still felt it was just silly.
  • The use of TINYpulse has allowed us to uncover a number of employee interests related to our benefit plans which was used in our 2018 benefit plan offerings.
  • TINYpulse has been instrumental in helping the executive team identify a number of policy/process issues which needed to be addressed or updated to better meet both employee and operational needs.
  • TINYpulse comments have been helpful in identifying a couple of managers exhibiting unacceptable behaviors, yet were flying just enough below the radar that no one at the executive of Sr. management level were aware of these behaviors. We were able to initiate investigations based on allegations or concerns raised by survey comments submitted and deal appropriately with each.
  • TalentKeeper, Employera and Waggl
TINYpulse provided the most-competitive pricing of all vendors considered, with the greatest flexibility of use with desktop, mobile app, and operating system. While customer support proposed by others appeared to be closer to "live" or real-time, with closer to the 24/7 kind of environment in which we live/work in today, budget was a driving factor for us.
TINYpulse is likely best-suited for smaller and less corporately-mature organizations... but I could also see keeping this in place even as we triple and quadruple in size. A question which remains open for me is whether we rely solely on TINYpulse for our employee engagement survey, or do we also conduct a larger, broader survey once each year or so in an effort to get to deeper, more-meaningful topics.

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