Are pulse checks anonymous?

The Curious Engineer
4 min readApr 1, 2021

Most of the companies and founders out there talk a lot about building a great place to work to motivate their employees to perform and stay connected with the company. There are plenty of tools out there in the market do provide features like engagement surveys, sentiment analysis, and anonymous feedback and conversations. Most of these tools claim to be anonymous(which is true to an extent!) to guarantee psychological safety for their employees and the employees don’t have to worry about the after-effects of giving a bad pulse check score.

I am here to share a few of my experiences with the tool CultureAmp. CultureAmp is a tool that we used at my previous organization, where we do monthly pulse checks and force everyone to fill pulse checks. The HR and the senior leadership team used to always talk a lot about building a great place to work and have set goals to achieve certain pulse check scores by end of the year. As they have mentioned that the pulse check survey sent out on CultureAmp is anonymous and have asked to give very honest and brutal feedback. As a person who had people reporting, I had many of my directs asking me this question too and I used to tell them it's 100% anonymous. But one fine day on a weekend, my CTO send me a message reminding me to fill pulse checks and also pointed me to a specific person in the team who hasn’t filled pulse check. That's where I started to take a look at this tool to find out how did he figure this out when everyone else claims this to be anonymous.

So, these are my findings so far. Yes, pulse checks are anonymous to an extent, but based on the different cohorts you create in CultureAmp you can figure out who has written certain feedback and what scores/ratings did they provide. CultureAmp has some mechanism to make it look anonymous like only if 3 people in a cohort fill-up the pulse check only then the results are shared. But this doesn’t guarantee that your feedback and rating are anonymous. So if you are working in a mid-size organization (~200 employees) that has a lot of churn/attrition, then there is a high chance that your pulse checks are not anonymous. Using basic set theory and creating smart cohorts the leadership team can actually figure out who is giving them a bad pulse check score.

Sharing how different cohorts were created to give you a sense of what was happening. The basic logic of grouping is based on whom the person is reporting to. Then we have different groups for gender, months spent in the company, workplace location, etc. Also had an operating model which was based on grouping engineers into different tracks like Growth, Platform, CX, Data, and Enablement. Interestingly this place had a high attrition rate and people on the notice period were not included on pulse checks thereby reducing the total number of people taking the pulse check.

Org chart

To understand the cohorts better, we will use characters inside the red box. But the same logic can be applied to other people in the organization and at different levels. Also note that the employees are part of multiple cohorts, for example, an engineer will be a part of his own team (based on whom he is reporting), also a part of the tracks (a bigger division within the engineering org), and then classified in different groups based on the time spent in the company(0 to 6m, 6m to 1yr, etc) and also gender. Now anyone in the management team has access to all the pulse checks and comments which can be filtered based on the different cohorts. The colorful shapes indicate the obvious cohorts based on people reporting. For the sake of this example, let's assume there is a head who fosters bad politics in the org and has clear intentions to bring and grow his own people and leading the organization to a different strategy. Since this would be visible to some people in the org and would want to stop this from happening decides to bring this up in the pulse checks. Let’s say, one of the Sr. EM takes the courage and points this out in the pulse check. The head who takes a look at his direct reports (navy blue rectangle, the Sr. EMs reporting to the head) pulse check will find this comment and will now try to find more info. Next by selecting the yellow or green triangles(The org, which reports to the Sr. EMs, which includes the Sr. EMs too), the head can check for the exact same comment and the score. And the head will be able to find out who exactly has given this pulse check score and comment even though the tool has claimed to be anonymous.

Such tools help to build great places to work when used the right way with the right leadership team(with the right intentions). Else these tools will not reflect the right morale of the team. People who understand how these tools work will be forced to give false pulse check scores because they don’t feel psychologically safe to point out the right things.

So, Do you think your pulse checks are anonymous?

This is my first post on Medium, I will be writing more from my experiences. Next, I will be sharing my experiences on Outcome v/s Output and how different leadership teams show progress without any actual progress.

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The Curious Engineer

Software engineer at heart. Believes in common sense and expects the world to be more genuine and caring. Here to share the good and bad experiences.