Engaging Your Employees With Pulse Surveys

With 13 locations in southwest Florida, Sunshine Ace Hardware has made a concerted effort to engage with employees across each of the operation’s locations. The company has created an employee engagement team with one to two associates at each store who are passionate and enthusiastic about the company and serve as that store’s employee engagement champion, said Helena Dabrowski, vice president of employee and customer experience for Sunshine Ace Hardware, during a panel session at the 2024 Independent Home Improvement Conference.

“Each store’s champions know the store’s associates and what is best for that store so they customize their own events so that the majority of the associates in that store can participate,” Dabrowski said. “Each new associate fills out a new hire form that includes their favorite color, beverage, snack and more, and then each champion customizes their new hire kit with those items and gives it to the new hire on  their first day, so that the associate feels welcomed right away on that first day.” 

As part of its employee engagement efforts, Sunshine Ace Hardware conducts employee pulse surveys, which are sent out every other month. Dabrowski says the surveys are completely anonymous and the first three questions are changed each time the survey is sent out based on what’s going on in the business at that time. She says they will also adjust the first three questions if there are specific areas they want to get feedback on. For example, after the team’s Appreciation Week, one of the questions will be, “Which of the items did you like the best?”

The remaining eight questions always stay constant, which is how the team measures the pulse of the score, Dabrowski says. Some examples of these questions include:

• How would you rank your work environment?
• What confidence level do you have in your leadership team?
• What confidence level do you have in our support office?
• How likely are you to recommend Sunshine as a place to work?

“We take all that feedback and the comments and we dissect it. We read every single comment that is written, and we look for trends, whether it’s improvement or declines, and review it as an executive team,” Dabrowski says. “We look at those trends, and if there’s something we need to improve on, we take action right away and work with our operations and district managers to make the changes needed.”

Sunshine Ace sends the pulse surveys every other month, as Dabrowksi says they don’t want employees to feel like they are being surveyed too often. Taking the surveys every other month also allows leadership the time to take the feedback and implement it.

“You don’t want an associate, to say, ‘Well, I just told you last month and you did nothing,’ and then the next month, they don’t provide any feedback,” she says. “I think the consistency of continuing to go and continuing to solve the answers goes a long way.”

Don’t miss the 2025 Independent Home Improvement Conference, which will feature breakout sessions covering topics from technology to employee engagement to marketing.