Looking for pulse survey examples that actually capture how your employees are feeling? Traditional employee wellbeing surveys often miss the deeper context behind responses.
Conversational AI surveys can probe beneath the surface, uncovering subtle signals of wellbeing and even early signs of burnout.
In this article, I’ll break down the best questions for wellbeing pulse surveys, how AI-driven follow-ups work, and practical tips to set up insightful, low-friction pulses that employees actually want to answer.
The best questions for wellbeing pulse survey with dynamic follow-ups
Great wellbeing questions dig deeper than just a 1-to-5 rating. With modern AI-powered survey tools, each answer becomes an entry point for a live, conversational check-in—helping you spot issues or strengths that generic forms can't surface.
Traditional pulse survey questions | Conversational survey questions (with AI follow-up) |
How do you feel at work this week? (1–5) | What has most affected how you felt at work this week? (AI follows up: "Can you tell me more about that experience?") |
How's your work-life balance? (single choose) | What helps or hurts your work-life balance? (AI probes for specifics and recent changes) |
Do you feel supported by your team? (yes/no) | Who made you feel supported—or left out—this week? (AI digs for examples or patterns) |
Let's look at specific conversational questions and their follow-up logic:
Work-life balance check: A pulse question like, "How manageable did your workload feel this week?" isn't just about a score. The AI can follow up: "What factors contributed to things feeling manageable or overwhelming?"—digging into real pain points or recent changes. This is the difference between a shallow metric and actionable, nuanced feedback. If someone shares an unusually high workload, the AI might ask when the pressure started or if specific deadlines are driving stress.
Burnout risk assessment: "Have you felt close to burnout at any point this week?" If a respondent signals ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’, the AI probes with, "What signs or situations made you feel this way?" This uncovers root causes—a huge advantage, given that recent research found 42% of the workforce experiences burnout[1]. Ongoing conversational check-ins let you surface those dangers before they escalate.
Team support and connection: "Did you feel supported by your team in the past week?" The AI can ask, "Who or what helped you feel supported? Was there anything missing?" Finding trends in these qualitative responses helps strengthen or fix a team’s culture. If a pattern emerges (like specific team members going unrecognized), you have context-rich evidence to act on.
Resource and workload management: "Did you have the right resources and information to do your job well this week?" Now, the AI follows up: "Can you share examples where you felt blocked, or when something made your work easier?" Tracking these interactions lets leaders see not only workflow bottlenecks but what’s helping teams succeed.
I always recommend turning surveys into conversations, not interrogation forms. That’s why dynamic, real-time AI follow-ups are so transformative—they turn bland check-ins into rich dialogues that surface hidden strengths or silent struggles.
Weekly pulse survey frequency without overwhelming employees
Tracking wellbeing with weekly pulses keeps you up to date, unlike annual surveys that only provide a blurry snapshot. When you check in more frequently, you’re more likely to spot sudden dips in employee wellbeing—which is crucial, as just 34% of employees globally are described as "thriving"[1].
You don’t want employees to groan at yet another generic survey. Here’s how I set up frequency controls to keep everyone engaged and avoid survey fatigue:
Smart frequency controls: I use rotation strategies: not every employee gets every question, every week. Instead, themes and question pools are rotated, and individuals have ‘recontact periods’ (like waiting several weeks before asking them to reflect on work-life balance again). Setting a higher threshold for sensitive or demanding topics prevents overexposure, while still protecting mental health check-ins from being ignored.
Timing optimization: The day and time matter. The best days for response rates? Middle of the work week—think Tuesday or Wednesday, between late morning and mid-afternoon. Avoid end-of-day and Fridays, when most are checked out. Reviewing your own company’s rhythms makes a big difference.
The Global Recontact Period allows me to set a hard limit on how often any employee can be surveyed across all topics. This keeps well-intentioned pulse programs from becoming overwhelming.
Crucially, the conversational, chat-style format means employees are more likely to respond, even at a weekly cadence. Responses stay high, and insights stay fresh. Getting set up is simple with the AI survey generator; customizing question rotation and cooldowns is a breeze.
AI summaries and trend tracking across employee segments
Once those conversational check-ins are running, the power of AI truly comes alive when it’s time to analyze mountains of feedback. Instead of endless spreadsheets, AI can slice and summarize results in minutes—giving you clear, actionable insights.
Individual response summaries: For every open-ended answer, AI distills the main factors: who’s burning out, who feels supported, what changed this week. Instead of raw verbatims, I see concise summaries like "Workload overloaded due to project launch; appreciated flexible hours". This saves hours in reading and makes it easy to spot outliers.
Cross-segment trend analysis: With the right setup, AI tracks how patterns shift across teams, locations, seniority, or even gender. Spotting that one group is at higher risk of burnout—or that another reports notable improvement—lets me act where it matters. Recent studies found that only 50% of employees recognize their organization’s increased focus on wellbeing, despite 74% of HR leaders claiming deeper commitment[5]. Real data, per segment, cuts through the noise.
Here are example analysis prompts I use to dig into pulse trends and unlock actionable findings:
Summarize patterns indicating potential burnout in the engineering and product teams over the last quarter.
Compare weekly wellbeing scores and qualitative feedback across the marketing and sales departments. Highlight main sources of stress and support.
Track key improvement signals—are efforts to boost team connection reflected in responses since our last survey launch?
Thanks to AI survey response analysis, I can spin up parallel analysis conversations—one focused on burnout, another on team connection, a third on access to resources—all within the same dashboard. No more siloed, disconnected insights.
Getting started with employee wellbeing pulse surveys
If your organization isn’t running regular wellbeing pulses, you’re almost certainly missing early warning signs of burnout and disengagement—along with opportunities to recognize improvement and celebrate wins.
Choose your delivery method: Decide between a sharable survey page or a seamless, in-product chat widget. Conversational Survey Pages are great for internal emails or Slack, while in-product conversational surveys capture feedback right in your workflow.
Configure your first pulse: Use an AI survey editor to define the right tone (warm, neutral, or professional), set up anonymity to collect candid responses, and select 2–5 core questions to start. Make sure follow-up logic is in place to probe for context without interrogation. You can tweak phrasing and rotation as you go—I recommend starting small and iterating based on real engagement and feedback.
Don’t wait for disengagement or burnout to show up in your exit interviews or annual surveys. Instead, create your own survey and start tracking employee wellbeing with conversational AI that gets to the real story, every week.