Pulse surveys on Windmill are short, focused questions delivered directly in Slack by Windy. They’re designed to surface how your team is feeling (about their work, their blockers, all hands feedback, etc) without the overhead of a formal survey tool or a long email chain. Anyone in Windmill can create a Pulse: managers, HR teams, or individual contributors. The results appear in real time on the Windmill platform, and help you spot issues before they become problems.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.gowindmill.com/llms.txt
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What You Can Use Pulses For
Pulses are flexible. Some common uses include:- Team health checks — How is morale? Are people feeling motivated or burnt out?
- Post-launch or project feedback — Collect feedback from the people involved after a launch or cross-team project, while the work is still fresh.
- Post-meeting or event feedback — How did the all-hands land? What did people take away from the off-site?
- Blockers — What’s slowing your team down right now?
- Ongoing check-ins — Recurring weekly or monthly pulses to track trends over time.
How to Send a Pulse
- Go to Pulses in the Windmill dashboard.
- Click Create Pulse and describe your goal.
- Choose a template or customize your questions.
- Select your audience: specific people, groups, or an entire team.
- Choose whether responses will be named or anonymous.
- Send now, schedule for later, or set up a recurring cadence.
Viewing Responses
Pulse responses appear in real time on the Pulse results page in the Windmill Dashboard. For named Pulses, you can filter responses by group, department, start date, or job title on the results page, and ask Windy to analyze responses by any of those segments. For anonymous Pulses, responses can’t be filtered or exported by employee metadata — use the Duplicate button on the Pulse to run per-department copies if you need department-level breakdowns. For real-time visibility in Slack, turn on live response streaming (named Pulses only): as people respond, their answers post to a Slack channel thread with a running tally. When your Pulse closes, responses automatically flow into a report that surfaces themes and patterns across your team. This report can be sent automatically to recipients via Slack, exported, or viewed directly in the platform. This context feeds into 1:1s, recaps, and performance reviews, so insights don’t just sit in a report…they show up when you actually need them. See Response Anonymity and Response Sharing for how named/anonymous and result visibility work.
For Managers: Best Practices
- Start simple. A 2–3 question pulse on blockers or motivation is more likely to get responses than a lengthy questionnaire. Shorter is better.
- Be consistent. Recurring pulses (weekly or monthly) are more valuable than one-off surveys because they let you track trends over time. Set one up with a recurring schedule and let Windy handle the rest.
- Close the loop. When you get results, share a summary with your team. Employees are more likely to respond to future pulses if they believe their input is heard and acted on.
- Use anonymous mode thoughtfully. Anonymous pulses can surface honest feedback that people wouldn’t share otherwise — especially on sensitive topics like team dynamics or manager feedback. For more straightforward topics, named responses are fine.
- Check results in the dashboard. Pulse responses feed into recaps and 1:1 context, so you’ll see them resurface in Windmill naturally — but reviewing the dedicated Pulse results page gives you the full picture.
For ICs: What to Expect
- Windy will message you in Slack when a Pulse is sent to you. Just reply in the thread.
- It takes 2–5 minutes. Pulses are intentionally short. If it feels long, let your manager or admin know — that’s useful feedback.
- Anonymous means anonymous. If a Pulse is marked anonymous, your individual responses won’t be attributed to you. Windy will tell you before you begin whether responses are named or anonymous.
- Your responses matter. Pulse results feed directly into your manager’s view of how the team is doing. Thoughtful responses help your team improve.