Pulse surveys for shift staff: the staff survey that reaches the floor

The annual staff survey goes out at 9am on a Tuesday: a link in an email from head office, open for a fortnight. By lunch, the office has filled it in, and HR is pleased with the employee survey.

Chloe works the bar four evenings a week. She doesn’t have a work email address, so the link never reaches her. Sam, her GM, means to show her on her next shift, but Chloe’s away for two weeks, and the survey closes the day before she’s back. Nobody on the floor without an inbox makes it into the results.

This guide is about the pulse survey that does reach her: on her phone, during a shift.

What is a pulse survey?

A pulse survey is a short staff survey of a few questions, repeated every few weeks to track how the team is doing over time. Because you repeat questions on the same scale each round, you see a change within weeks, while you can still act on it.

For shift teams, our recommendation is five questions, under two minutes, answered on a phone during a shift, every two to four weeks, for everyone on the rota.

Pulse survey or employee engagement survey?

	Annual engagement survey	Pulse survey for a shift team
Length	Long, covering the whole year	Five statements, under two minutes
How often	Once a year	Every two to four weeks
How it reaches people	Usually a link to a work email address	Their phone, where shift news already goes
Who actually answers	Mostly people with a work inbox	Anyone who works a shift while it’s open
How fast results come back	Often weeks after it closes	Within days
What you do with them	An action plan for the year	One change at the next briefing, and dips taken to one-to-ones

The right-hand column is our recommendation. We’re not claiming a pulse survey is better than an annual one: the difference is who it reaches. What the evidence supports is acting visibly on what you hear.

Staff survey, pulse survey, eNPS: which is which

• Staff survey or employee survey: any survey of your team, though “the staff survey” often means the annual engagement survey.
• eNPS: one question, how likely you’d be to recommend working here, answered from 0 to 10. The score is the share answering 9 or 10, minus the share answering 0 to 6. It can’t tell you why, and on a team of eight, one person moving from 6 to 7 shifts it by 12.5 points.

Why the annual staff survey misses the floor

It goes to a work inbox your team may not have

If your team doesn’t have work email addresses, an emailed survey reaches head office and hardly anyone on the floor. The usual workaround, a link in the staff group chat, scrolls out of sight. More on running work through a WhatsApp group.

It closes before your casuals are back on

If a survey’s open for a fortnight, a part-timer might work two shifts in that time and a casual none. The Work Foundation’s August 2026 report counted a record 1.24 million people on zero-hours contracts in March 2026, and its analysis of ONS data finds them concentrated in sectors including accommodation and food.

Even the UK’s biggest staff survey hears least from its casual staff. 49% of the staff invited to the 2025 NHS Staff Survey answered it, but the separate survey for bank-only workers, the NHS’s casual pool, heard from 17%, even though they were invited by email or by letter. It’s healthcare, and two separate surveys, so it can’t tell you why. Some employers leave casuals out, and even in the NHS, only trusts with at least 200 bank-only workers have to survey them.

The results land after people have left

CIPD’s analysis of ONS data for 2022 and 2023 puts hospitality’s staff turnover at 52% a year, against a UK average of 34%, so a once-a-year survey misses everyone who joins and leaves in between.

The people who don’t answer aren’t a random sample. In a 2000 study of 194 employees from a wide range of organisations, those who turned down a staff survey were more likely to intend to quit, and to believe their organisation doesn’t act on survey data.

On a site of twelve, anonymous is hard to believe

Split results by site, role and shift, and “front of house, Tuesday lates” is one person. Gallup, a consultancy, warns that response rates drop when people don’t believe their answers are anonymous.

How to run a pulse survey with shift staff

1. Pick five questions and keep the same scale

Use five statements on one five-point agree scale, and keep the scale the same every round so the results compare. Start with the five in bold in our free template below, then keep one or two to track and rotate the rest.

2. Send it to their phone, not an inbox

Send the survey to people’s phones, not a work inbox they may not have. Put it in the app your team already opens for shift news, and mention it at the pre-shift briefing on each site.

3. Let people answer on shift

Let people answer during a shift, not on their day off or in their break. Someone paid by the hour has the lull after lunch, or five minutes before doors, and two minutes is enough. Keep it open until everyone on the rota has worked a shift, so casuals get a fair chance.

4. Set a minimum group size before you launch

Decide how many people need to answer before anyone sees a result. There’s no legal number: the Civil Service People Survey and the NHS Staff Survey only report groups of 10 or more, and Gallup mentions five.

We recommend 10 different people answering the same statement in the same round, because in a smaller group it’s easier to guess who said what. Don’t reach 10 by adding rounds together: the same five people twice is still five people. On a site of twelve, that means ten of the twelve have to answer before you see anything, so expect to merge two nearby sites, or the whole area, rather than lower the number. Never split a small site by role or shift.

5. Tell them what changed at the next pre-shift briefing

Within a week of closing, tell the team one thing you heard and one thing you’re changing: “You said the rota comes out too late. From next month, it’s up by Wednesday.” More in team communication across several sites.

How often should you survey staff?

There’s no rule. Here’s our recommendation:

Situation	What to run	When
The regular pulse	Five statements from the set below	Every two to four weeks
After a new menu, till system or refit	Three or four statements about that change	Two to four weeks after it lands
End of peak season or a seasonal contract	A short survey before people leave	The last fortnight of the contract
New starters	A conversation, not a survey	One-to-ones in weeks one and four

Staff survey questions that work on the floor

Good statements sound like the floor, not an HR form. Keep each to one thing (“fair and supportive” is two questions), and ask about recent shifts. Leave out personal details such as age, nationality, health, pregnancy, religion or union membership: on a small team they point to people, and some, like health, are special category data.

Add one for your sector:

• In a restaurant kitchen: “Prep is done when I start my shift.”
• In hotels: “I know what happened overnight before the first guest asks.”
• In retail: “There are enough of us on the floor at peak times.”

If training scores low, start with training that sticks on a busy floor.

On wellbeing and safety, employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by assessing the risk and acting on it, but no UK law requires a staff survey. HSE calls a survey a useful source, but not the only one, and its Stress Indicator Tool is a 35-question stress survey, free for 10 to 50 workers.

The same goes for harassment. Acas suggests anonymous surveys as one way to understand experiences of sexual harassment, and from 30 October 2026 the duty to prevent it becomes “all reasonable steps”, including harassment by customers. A survey can show you a problem, but it doesn’t meet that duty on its own.

Free staff pulse survey questions

Print the set we’d start with: download the staff pulse survey questions (PDF). The PDF adds a page for the manager: when the survey’s open, how many people must answer before results show, who reminds people, and what you’ll do about it.

Every statement uses one five-point scale: 1 strongly disagree, 2 disagree, 3 neither, 4 agree, 5 strongly agree. Keep it the same every round. The five statements in bold make a good first pulse.

A survey isn’t how anyone reports an incident, an injury or harassment: those go straight to a manager, through your usual reporting route. If a comment describes one anyway, don’t try to work out who wrote it. Remind everyone how to report, and look into what the comment describes.

The shift

• I had what I needed to do my job on my last few shifts.
• The workload on my shifts is manageable.
• Handovers between shifts tell me what I need to know.
• The equipment I use on shift works when I need it.

Your manager and the team

• My manager listens when I raise something.
• I feel part of the team, whichever shifts I work.
• I hear about changes before they affect my shift.
• When I do a good job, someone notices.

Training and knowing what to do

• I got the training I needed for my role.
• I know what to do if something goes wrong on a shift.
• I know where to find out how something should be done.
• I’ve learned something useful at work in the last month.

Hours and the rota

• I get my rota early enough to plan my life.
• I’m happy with the number of hours I’m getting.
• I can swap a shift without hassle when I need to.
• I get my breaks, even on a busy shift.

Wellbeing and safety

• I feel safe at work.
• I could raise a problem here without worrying about what happens to me.
• I can switch off from work on my days off.
• I know who to talk to if something at work is getting to me.

Two more questions

• On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend working here to a friend?
• What’s one thing that would make your next shift easier?

Anonymous staff surveys on a small team

Taking names off doesn’t make a survey anonymous. ICO guidance says removing direct identifiers isn’t enough, because people can be singled out or pieced together from other information. On a site where everyone knows who works Tuesday lates, that’s easy.

The same guidance says anonymous information is outside data protection law, but answers stored against a code someone could link back are pseudonymous, and still personal data. The ICO has this guidance under review after the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. Two habits help:

• Don’t slice too finely. Say no when someone asks to “just see the kitchen”.
• Handle free text with care. “The new supervisor on Tuesday lates” names someone in a team of nine. Keep the open question optional, ask people not to name anyone, and summarise comments rather than quoting them.

This is a practical guide, not legal advice: check the specifics with whoever handles data protection.

What to do with the results

Read each statement, not one company score

One company score hides the site that’s struggling. And CIPD’s engagement factsheet warns that composite scores, which bundle different things into one number, “can oversimplify matters dramatically”, so read each statement on its own. Where a site’s too small to reach your minimum, read it with a neighbouring site. Our rule of thumb: act on a drop that holds for two rounds, not on one bad Saturday.

Take a dip to the next one-to-one

A survey tells you what. A conversation tells you why, or as HSE puts it, “If you want to know what is affecting employees, you have to ask them.” If a site’s rota score drops, raise the rota in that site’s next one-to-ones. Ask everyone, and never try to work out who gave the low score. For how, see one-to-one meetings with shift staff.

Say what changed, out loud

Over 11 years of survey data at one multinational, employees who saw results shared and acted on reported more favourable attitudes than those who saw no action, or no results at all. In the UK, CIPD’s Good Work Index 2025 found 54% of employees said their organisation runs employee surveys, but only 37% said managers let them, or their representatives, influence final decisions. If you can’t change something, say so, and say why.

Running staff surveys across several sites

Todolo is one app for the whole shift: communication, training, handbooks and the day’s tasks, in an employee app built for staff without a company email address or a computer. One GM can run a pulse on paper. Ten sites can’t. That’s what pulse surveys and 1-2-1s in Todolo People are for:

• Pulse or targeted surveys. A small rotating set of questions at the cadence you choose, or a fixed survey when you need to ask about one thing.
• Answers without names. Answers are stored without names and only shown once a group has enough of them.
• From score to conversation. A drop in a category surfaces as a suggested talking point in the next 1-2-1.
• Follow-ups from TOD. TOD, Todolo’s AI teammate, can phrase a follow-up question after a low answer.

Surveys aren’t switched on for every Todolo customer, so ask about them in the demo.

Common questions about staff surveys

What is a pulse survey?

A pulse survey is a short staff survey of a few questions, repeated every few weeks to track how the team is doing. For shift teams, we recommend five statements, under two minutes, answered on a phone during a shift.

How often should you run a pulse survey with shift staff?

We recommend every two to four weeks, plus a short survey after a big change. There’s no legal rule, and with hospitality turnover at 52% a year (CIPD, using ONS data for 2022 and 2023), an annual survey misses everyone who joins and leaves in between.

What’s the difference between a pulse survey and an engagement survey?

An employee engagement survey is the long, usually annual staff survey that rolls the answers into one score. A pulse survey is short and repeated every few weeks to show a trend. Neither is proven to beat the other. What the evidence points to is acting visibly on the results.

Are staff surveys anonymous?

Only if they’re set up that way. ICO guidance says removing names isn’t enough, and answers stored against a code that someone could link back to a person are still personal data. There’s no legal minimum group size, but the Civil Service and NHS staff surveys only report groups of 10 or more, and we’d do the same.

How do you get shift staff to answer a staff survey?

Keep it short, send it to their phone rather than a work inbox, and give people two minutes on shift to answer. Keep it open until everyone on the rota, casuals included, has worked a shift, then say what changed and take any dip to the next one-to-one meetings.

Start with this week’s rota

Pick the five statements in bold. Send them to everyone on this week’s rota, casuals included, with two minutes on shift to answer. When it closes, share one change at the next pre-shift briefing.

In thirty minutes we’ll show you how surveys, 1-2-1s and training work together in Todolo, alongside everything else on the shift. There’s no long contract to sign, and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.

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