Measure What Drives Performance in Your Team

Measure What Drives Performance in Your Team

It’s hard enough when you're co-located, but when your team is remote how do you get a sense of how people are really doing?

Alongside your 1:1s, retros, and team sessions, running a pulse survey is a way to run a health check on your team. Merissa Silk, Head of Product at Fundingport shares her experience. Here’s how to get started 👉

🗒️ The setup

Consider which elements of your team’s culture are most relevant to measure – Merissa went for things like psychological safety, purpose, and recognition. You can use these to create targeted survey questions.

Consider: • Tools: Google Forms or Typeform for a simple solution, Officevibe or CultureAmp for deeper analysis. • Anonymity: Giving people this option can encourage more honest answers. • Frequency: Quarterly = fresh learnings + enough time to act on previous insights.

Now to create your survey, here are 3 parts Merissa used 👉

Part 1: Company recommendations 💌

Ask: “On a scale from 1-10, how likely are you to recommend working at this company to a friend?"

This is a useful north star 🌟 metric that can tell you how you're doing overall.

Part 2: Cultural Scales ⚖️

Ask your team to rate how strongly you agree or disagree with a set of statements - stick to less than 10. Here are a few suggestions:

• I’m encouraged to take initiative, share my opinion, and suggest improvements • I receive appropriate recognition for my contributions and accomplishments • My work gives me a sense of purpose

Part 3: Open feedback 👐

Give your team an open text box to answer: “Are there any areas of improvement you'd like to bring to our attention?”

The responses here will give you important context and help you implement meaningful changes.

The results are in...what’s next!

💡 Run a 60-minute brainstorming session

Center the session around two questions:

1. What makes us strong in X? (1 area that scored the highest)
2. How can we improve Y? (2 areas that scored the lowest)

Once you’ve shared all your ideas, vote for your favorites. Identify a clear owner for each initiative during the session, but keep in mind that some ideas might need management-level sponsorship.

🗣️ Follow up on initiatives

Set up monthly check-ins to see how everyone’s doing with their action items. If you really want to see meaningful progress, add them to your project management tool and plan it into the weekly priorities.

Next quarter, run the survey again. If the results aren’t quite as good as you hoped, don’t be discouraged, at least your team was honest and you can take action. Remember, what gets measured, gets managed.