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Cardinal Pulse Employee Survey Program

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As an employee of Stanford, your voice provides critical feedback to help university leaders support the satisfaction, well-being, and engagement of our Stanford community. The Cardinal Pulse program supports a key means for hearing your input  - employee engagement surveys.

What is Cardinal Pulse?

This pilot program, launched in the spring of 2024, developed standardized conventions for employee surveys across schools and units, paired with a specialized, secure, and user-friendly platform from our vendor partner, WorkTango. This program will make survey administration, results reporting, and action planning more consistent, efficient, and effective.

Survey Platform & Confidentiality

Survey platform

The Cardinal Pulse program utilizes the survey platform from WorkTango, a specialist in designing and supporting employee surveying. In addition to the actual survey interface, WorkTango provides robust reporting and action-planning tools. See below for more about reporting thresholds in place to protect confidentiality.

Surveys are designed and launched through the joint effort of your school or unit human resources department and the Workplace Experience team, part of UHR’s Employee Support Programs & Services department.  

Survey invitations come from the email address Stanford Workplace Experience (pulse @ worktango.io) and will include the statement “Powered by WorkTango”.

Confidentiality and reporting

Your responses to surveys administered through this program are strictly confidential. Utilizing a third-party helps further safeguard this commitment - no one at Stanford can view individual responses. Only aggregated results with a minimum of five responses in any grouping by a given data point (department, job family, etc.) are visible to Stanford HR survey administrators.

For more about the confidentiality and privacy practices of our vendor partner, WorkTango, please see their Employee Promise webpage.

Use of data and demographics information

The confidential survey platform utilizes both survey responses and demographic information to provide insights into how experiences vary for people in different groups. Personal demographics are based on survey responses - questions about identity related to race, ethnicity, gender, etc. are provided as optional questions that participants can choose to skip if preferred. Work demographics, such as department and job family, are based on data pulled from our HR system and stored securely and confidentially in the survey platform. 

As described in the Confidentiality section above, no individual responses are visible to anyone at Stanford. Results used by leadership for action planning are aggregated with strict minimums enforced for any grouping of results data.  Data from surveys administered through this program are not intended for academic publication.