Mood-o-Meter

Run a daily one-tap emoji check-in to track real-time team sentiment, then read mood scores, question trends, and a sentiment heatmap that drills down to teams.

Mood-o-Meter is a one-question, emoji-based check-in that runs on a recurring schedule — daily by default — so you always have a fresh read on how your workforce is feeling. Employees tap one of five emojis (from 😍 to 😞) and optionally add a comment. The results aggregate into a mood score, a per-question breakdown, and a sentiment heatmap you can slice by team, department, or location.

Use Mood-o-Meter alongside (not instead of) eNPS and Pulse surveys — Mood-o-Meter captures today’s vibe, eNPS captures loyalty, and Pulse digs into specific themes.

To open Mood-o-Meter, navigate to Admin Hub → Surveys → Mood-o-Meter, or open it directly in your tenant at https://<your-empuls-url>/home/surveys/mood-o-meter.

Before you start

• You must be a Super Admin or have the Manage Surveys permission.
• Mood-o-Meter is a separate survey type; you don’t need to create a regular survey first.
• Decide the cadence before launch. Daily catches reactions to events; weekly or monthly reduces survey fatigue.

How Mood-o-Meter differs from Pulse and eNPS

Survey	Question count	Cadence	What it answers
Mood-o-Meter	1 emoji-scale question	Daily, weekly, or monthly	”How is the team feeling right now?”
Pulse	Multi-question, themed	Weekly / bi-weekly	”What’s driving engagement this period?“
eNPS	1 NPS question + optional follow-up	Quarterly	”How loyal is our workforce?”

See Create surveys and eNPS and Pulse surveys for the other types.

Set up Mood-o-Meter

1. Open Mood-o-Meter

   From the Admin Hub, navigate to Surveys → Mood-o-Meter. If you haven’t run it before, you see a get-started landing page with a “How it works” explainer.

2. Click Create

   The create wizard opens with the question step first.

3. Write the question

   Enter your check-in question — for example, “How was your workday today?” or “How are you feeling about this week?” Keep it short — employees tap and move on.

4. Customize the emoji scale

   The default 5-point scale uses 😍 (5) → 😊 (4) → 😐 (3) → 😕 (2) → 😞 (1) with labels like “Strongly agree”, “Agree”, “Neutral”, etc. You can:

   • Pick a different emoji for each row from the emoji picker.
   • Rename each label (e.g., “Energized”, “Good”, “Meh”, “Drained”, “Bad”).
   • Reorder the rows.
5. Choose settings

   On the Settings step, configure:

   • Audience — Default is Everyone. Filter to specific departments, locations, or business units if needed.
   • Frequency — Daily (default), weekly, or monthly.
   • Schedule — For weekly or monthly, pick the day(s) of week or dates of month the prompt fires.
6. Set anonymity

   On the Anonymity step, choose whether responses are anonymous. Anonymous surveys aggregate scores but never show individual responses; non-anonymous lets you see who answered what (useful for follow-ups but reduces candor).

7. Set notifications

   On the Notification Settings step, pick how the prompt reaches employees — in-app, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams. Configure reminder cadence for non-responders.

8. Save and launch

   Save the configuration. The first prompt fires on the next scheduled trigger.

What employees see

When the prompt fires, employees see a small card with the question and the five emoji buttons. They tap one and (optionally) add a comment, then submit. The whole interaction takes seconds.

If they miss a prompt and answer later from the survey list, the response is recorded against the date the prompt was issued, not when they answered.

Read the results

The Mood-o-Meter detail page has three result views:

1. Mood score

   A headline number aggregated across all responses for the selected date range. Higher is better. Use the date filter to track day-over-day shifts.

2. Question score

   The breakdown of responses across each emoji (% choosing 😍, % choosing 😊, etc.). Useful for spotting bimodal distributions — when scores look fine on average but the team is split.

3. Sentiment heatmap

   A grid that slices mood by department, location, business unit, or team — color-coded green (positive) to red (negative). Click a cell to drill into that slice’s response distribution.

Archives

After a survey cycle ends (for example, after a week of daily Mood-o-Meter), the cycle moves to Archives. Open an archived survey to revisit its results without affecting the live survey. Archives keep historical mood data even if you change the live question or cadence.

Tips

Run a daily Mood-o-Meter for two to three weeks around a major event — a reorg, a launch, an office reopening — to spot real-time impact. Pause it the rest of the year to avoid fatigue.

Pair Mood-o-Meter with action plans — when the heatmap surfaces a low-scoring team, create an action plan tied to that team to follow up concretely.

Limits and gotchas

• Mood-o-Meter is single-question by design. If you need multi-question themed surveys, use Pulse.
• Anonymous Mood-o-Meter responses cannot be exported with employee identifiers. The heatmap still shows aggregate scores per slice.
• Comments are stored with the response — they’re anonymous when the survey is anonymous, identified when it isn’t.
• Daily cadence can fatigue employees fast. Watch the response rate; if it drops below 50%, switch to weekly.

Related

• Create surveys — Other survey types (Custom, Lifecycle, Engagement).
• eNPS and Pulse surveys — Loyalty and engagement-driver surveys.
• Survey analytics — Cross-survey trends and AI summaries.
• Action plan — Turn survey insights into trackable actions.