Frequently asked questions

Yes. When you join you get a full year of free access to the platform, no matter when the beta itself ends. No cost, no credit card, no setup fee. We're only taking on a limited number of businesses to begin with, and all we ask in return is your honest feedback.

None. It's completely free for your first year, with no setup fees, no per-employee charges, no add-ons and no card on file. What you see is what you get.

Pulsory will be a paid product, priced per site. You get a full year of full access free from the day you join, regardless of when the beta ends. We're still working out exactly where pricing lands, and whatever we decide, we'll give you plenty of warning well in advance. You'll never be charged by surprise or rolled into something you didn't choose.

Most employee survey tools are built for large organisations with an HR team to run them. Pulsory is built for businesses that don't have one. The differences that matter most day to day: it works from day one with no HR system to connect and no data export; cost estimates are built from your own training and pay figures rather than a rough multiple of salary; anonymity is absolute, with anything under five responses hidden completely; and it doesn't stop at telling you what's wrong, because you can turn any insight into a tracked action and see next cycle whether it actually worked. It's also written to help you rather than to grade you, which sounds like a small thing until you're the person reading it.

Sometimes it'll confirm a hunch, but now with evidence and a number behind it, which makes it far easier to act on. More often it surfaces things you can't see from where you sit: which teams are quietly struggling, what's driving it, and problems building long before they show up in who resigns. And because it's anonymous, people tell you things they'd never say to your face.

No. There's no HR system to plug in, no data export and no consultant needed. Add your team, either by uploading a list or adding people one by one, and your first survey can go out the same day. That said, HR data genuinely does make it better: your real training costs, how long training takes, and your pay figures all feed the financial estimates and make them noticeably sharper. If you don't provide those, we fall back on published UK benchmarks so you still get a usable number, and you can add your own figures whenever you're ready.

Usually around fifteen minutes. A short guided setup walks you through your company details, your sites and your team, then launches your first survey. You can save and pick it back up if you get interrupted.

Very little. You set up once, and Pulsory handles the rest: sending surveys, chasing responses, scoring them and producing insights. After that your job is reading them and deciding what to act on.

No. It's built for owners and managers, not HR specialists. Everything is in plain English and every insight comes with a recommended action, so you always know what a result means and what to do next.

How your people really feel about working for you, across six areas of working life: their day-to-day job (meaningful work, fair pay, the right tools, room to grow), their manager (support, feedback, communication, trust), their team (feeling valued, included and able to be themselves), the company (belief in the direction, pride, walking the talk), trust and fairness (fair decisions, equal pay for equal work, safety to speak up), and wellbeing and future (workload, flexibility, and how they feel about what's ahead). Each is scored out of 100, giving you one headline People Score plus the detail of what's driving it.

All of it. Engagement is only one part. The six areas cover management quality, team belonging, company culture, trust and fairness, and wellbeing, including workload and flexibility, which are the early signs of burnout. You get a rounded picture rather than a single vanity score.

Short. The full survey is 24 quick questions, and the regular check-ins in between are just 8. Most people finish in a few minutes, in one sitting, on whatever device they have to hand.

Yes. Alongside the six core areas you can add your own custom questions to get feedback on things specific to your business. They're scored and reported just like the rest, and kept separate from your People Score.

Answers are stored with no name, email, or anything that could point back to a person. The only link between an employee and a survey is their private invite, which is kept completely separate from their responses. On top of that, any group of fewer than five people is hidden entirely, so individuals can't be worked out by narrowing down.

No, never. You only ever see results grouped together, and only once at least five people have replied. Individual answers aren't visible to anyone: not managers, not you, not us. Managers also never see their own scores, only people above them in the reporting chain do.

No. Any group with fewer than five responses is automatically hidden. You'll see a note explaining it's been withheld to protect anonymity, but never the scores underneath. A team of three never has its results shown, so nobody can reverse-engineer how they answered.

Only if the employee chooses to share it, and you can never see it individually. Optional details like age band or gender are entered by the employee themselves and kept separate, used only for grouped breakdowns with the same five-person minimum, never to identify anyone.

Plain-English findings, not a pile of charts. Each one tells you what's happening, how serious it is, the supporting evidence behind it, what it's likely costing you, how confident we are and why, and one clear thing you can do about it.

They're built from your own figures, like your training costs, pay, and how long people take to get up to speed, combined with published UK research from sources including the ONS Annual Population Survey and CIPD. Where you haven't given us a figure, we use established UK benchmarks rather than guessing, and the insight says so. Every estimate is shown as a range rather than a single false-precision number, and each one shows its reasoning, its evidence and a confidence level so you can see how it was worked out. If we can't calculate something properly, we tell you that instead of inventing a figure.

Straight from an insight you can create a task and assign it to someone, with an owner and a due date, which turns a finding into a concrete action. Pulsory saves where you were starting from, so next cycle it can tell you whether the score actually moved.

Yes. Set goals for your People Score or any single area and track them over time, with a clear view of what improved and what slipped since last cycle. It's a trajectory, not a one-off snapshot.

Yes, and it matters more than people expect. Next time they open a survey, the first thing they see is what happened as a result of the last one. That's the difference between another form to fill in and something people can see the point of, and it's a big part of why response rates hold up.

Then you've found out while you can still do something about it, which is the entire point. Findings are written to help rather than to tell you off, even when a problem points at leadership, and every one comes with a practical next step. You'll also see what's working, and what that's worth.

On a simple yearly rhythm: a full survey each January, shorter check-ins in April, July and October, and a baseline when you first join or add a new site. Enough to keep a real pulse without wearing people out.

The core rhythm runs automatically so you don't have to remember it, and you choose how long each survey stays open, from one to four weeks. You can also launch a baseline for a new site whenever you add one.

No problem. Staff without a work email can take the survey by scanning a QR code, which suits kitchens, floors and shop floors. Either way everyone gets a private, anonymous survey.

No. They open their link or scan a QR code, answer in a few minutes, and they're done. Nothing to install, no account, no password.

A few things are on your side: it's genuinely anonymous so people feel safe being honest, it's short, it works for staff without email, and your team sees what changed after last time. We send reminders while a survey is open and show you your response rate. And because results only appear once at least five people reply, you're never acting on one or two voices.

You can break results down by site, by department, and by groups like age, tenure or employment type, one dimension at a time and always subject to the five-person minimum. So you can see exactly where an issue sits without ever exposing individuals.

Everything is encrypted in transit and at rest, and runs on Google Cloud infrastructure. We only collect what we need, we're clear about why, and your data is handled in line with UK data protection law. We never sell or share it. You can read the full detail in our privacy and cookie policy.