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45 pulse survey questions for small teams

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Most pulse survey questions you find online were written for a 2,000-person HR rollout. These are written for teams of 15 to 80 people who need an honest signal every month without a survey project. Take what you need — there is nothing to create, connect, or pay for on this page.

How to use these pulse survey questions

Three rules keep a small-team pulse useful instead of ignored:

  • Pick three questions, not thirty. A one-minute check-in gets honest answers; a fifteen-minute form gets polite ones.
  • Keep the same questions for at least three months. You are looking for a trend line, not a single number.
  • Send it privately — a DM, not a public channel — and only share aggregates once at least three people have answered, so nobody can be identified.

If you change the wording every cycle, you lose the only thing that makes a pulse valuable: comparability.

Skills — does the team have what it needs?

Skill gaps rarely arrive as a complaint. They show up as slow reviews, rework, and one person becoming the bottleneck for everything.

  1. I have the skills I need to do my current work well.
  2. When I get stuck, I know who on the team can unblock me.
  3. The tools we use help me do my job instead of slowing me down.
  4. I have had enough time to learn what this role actually requires.
  5. Work is assigned to the people best suited to it.
  6. I am learning something useful in this role right now.
  7. We have enough coverage that one person leaving would not stall the work.
  8. Feedback on my work is specific enough to act on.
  9. I would feel confident picking up an unfamiliar part of our system.

Collaboration — is working together productive or draining?

This is where most teams quietly lose speed. Ask about friction, not about whether people "like each other".

  1. Working with this team is productive rather than draining.
  2. I can disagree with a decision here without it costing me.
  3. Handoffs between people or teams happen cleanly.
  4. Our meetings are worth the time they take.
  5. I know what my teammates are working on this week.
  6. When something goes wrong, we fix the cause instead of looking for blame.
  7. I get responses fast enough to keep moving.
  8. Decisions are made by the people close to the work.
  9. Someone new joining this team would get up to speed quickly.

Impact — is the work landing where it should?

Busy is not the same as effective. These questions catch the "we shipped a lot and nothing changed" pattern early.

  1. I understand how my work connects to what the company is trying to do.
  2. The work I finished this month mattered to someone outside my team.
  3. We ship what we plan to ship.
  4. Priorities stay stable long enough for us to finish things.
  5. I can see the result of the work I do.
  6. We stop projects that are clearly not working.
  7. I know what a good month looks like for my role.
  8. The last thing I shipped was worth the effort it took.
  9. I would be proud to show an outsider what this team built.

Manager and 1:1 — what to ask before a score drops

Use these in a 1:1, not in the anonymous pulse. A pulse tells you something moved; a 1:1 tells you what to do about it.

  1. What slowed you down most in the last two weeks?
  2. What is one thing I could stop doing that would help you?
  3. Which part of your work feels pointless right now?
  4. Who did you learn something from this month?
  5. What would you change about how we run this team?
  6. Is anything unclear about what success looks like for you?
  7. What is the one decision you are waiting on?
  8. If you could hand off one responsibility, which would it be?
  9. What would make next month better than this one?

Remote and hybrid — the questions co-located teams skip

Hybrid teams fail quietly: people stop knowing what is going on and nobody reports it as a problem.

  1. I have the information I need without having to be in the office.
  2. Office days are worth the commute.
  3. I know where my teammates will be working this week.
  4. Important decisions are written down, not only spoken in a room.
  5. I can find a desk or a quiet spot when I come in.
  6. Remote teammates get the same say as people in the room.
  7. I can switch off at the end of my working day.
  8. The current office and remote setup works for how I do my job.
  9. I feel connected to this team even on days I do not see anyone.

What scale to use

Use one scale for the whole pulse and never mix formats in the same round:

  • 1–5 agreement (strongly disagree to strongly agree) for the statement-style questions in the first three groups.
  • One open text box, optional, at the end. Cap it at one — more free text means fewer completed answers.
  • Avoid a 1–10 scale. People cluster at 7 and 8, and you lose resolution exactly where you need it.

Average the three groups separately before you average them together. A healthy overall score can hide a collapsing collaboration score.

How often to send it

Monthly is the cadence small teams actually sustain. Annual engagement surveys report friction months after it cost you someone, and weekly mood bots train people to click without reading.

  • Monthly: the default for a 15–80 person team. Frequent enough to catch a trend, light enough to stay honest.
  • Quarterly: fine if your team is under ten people and you already talk constantly.
  • Weekly: only for a short, bounded stretch — a crunch, a reorg, a migration — then go back to monthly.

Whatever you pick, put it on the calendar. Pulses die from irregularity, not from bad questions.

Start free

Tired of copying questions every month? Wolfloyee sends three of them as a private Slack DM and gives you one harmony score.