7 Best Practices for Designing Workforce & Organizational Surveys
Before you launch your organization-wide assessment program, make sure you’re aligned with these best practices.
Organizing Your Organizational Survey
Several weeks ago, a human resources executive asked me, “Assessment? Isn’t that just an excuse to charge us more money?” Smiling, I replied, “Actually, it’s an opportunity to deliver value.”
Few would argue that the dominant driver of organizational performance in the 21st century will be -- indeed, already is -- human capital. Globally, competition to find and retain talent is fierce, and the imperative to make that talent productive is no less daunting. As a result, assessments have proliferated the workplace, but few of them are thoughtful.
A thoughtful organizational assessment program is much more than an employee survey. It systematically measures critical business challenges, delivers a range of metrics that describe the situation, and provides powerful insight and tools to drive enhanced organizational performance.
The mechanics of survey execution are well-documented. The table stakes are 100 percent data integrity and timely delivery of results. Internet technologies have made surveying easier. With a credit card and some set up time, anyone can be collecting data online in no time. Too often, however, the survey itself becomes the main event rather than a component of the bigger assessment program. Irrespective of their specific focus, scale or scope, effective assessment programs share a common set of characteristics.
[1] A Clear Business Objective
Every assessment program should be based on a sharp articulation of its objectives. For the newly installed Chief Operating Officer of a world-renowned health care institution, it was clear: She wanted to drive increased organizational alignment in an institution split along lines of clinical care, research and administrative support/services. She sought information to drive actions, and she understood that to be accepted by physicians, nurses, researchers, facility planners, financial staff and more, the process and resultant data would have to be as rigorous as the processes that guide patient care, research protocols and audit procedures. In her words, “I needed a regular checkup on our organization’s health.”
Challenge:
What are we trying to accomplish?
Example:
A hospital COO needs regular check-up for organizational health.
Approach:
Define the overarching goal and expected outcomes of the program.
[2] Sound Content
Translating business objectives into things that can be accurately measured requires thoughtful structure. Too often the first step in an assessment effort is to dive into writing survey questions. An individual or small team goes off to draft the survey for review, approval and launch. In the end, it only produces a huge organizational yawn -- answers to reams of questions but no context, no way to relate results to the business and no ability to act on them. Having established a clear business objective (organizational health), the health care institution took the time to define what that actually meant. Chiefs of service and key stakeholders were fully engaged in the assessment development process. The result was a thoughtful, three-tiered model of organizational health aligned to the work environment. It included:
Strategic Direction: Are we headed in the right direction?
Operational Effectiveness: Do we have the capabilities to get us there?
Work Environment: Are our people on board for the journey?
Each dimension was further defined by a set of factors that encompass its critical elements. For example, the health care institution work environment dimension included the following factors: diversity, leadership, personal development, recognition, respect and values.
Only after this model was established and vetted did the team draft survey questions. In creating actual items, the focus was on articulating observable statements of health such as the organizational value, “Different points of view are welcomed in discussions,” which employees could consider and rate based on their personal experiences.
The model’s structure (items explaining factors, factors explaining dimensions) provided context that greatly assisted the communication of results later in the process.
Challenge:
How do we describe the desired outcomes?
Example:
A chief operating officer engages hospital leadership to define “checkup.”
Approach:
Start with a thoughtful model of the key factors; then, write the questions that describe those factors.
[3] A Balanced Effort
Administering an assessment program can be a draining experience, often leaving too few resources (time, budget or emotional energy) to drive back-end results. The survey team members apply brute force and persuasion to overcome limited budgets. They take in balky HR information systems to wrestle with organizational hierarchies. They enroll field support for survey implementation, which often requires coordination of web, paper and other collection methods.
Once data is collected, an often tedious process begins: crunching numbers (massaged in Excel, processed in a statistical package such as SPSS, exported back to Excel for charting), moving charts and metrics into dozens or hundreds of PowerPoint slides, and looping the process to correct errors and make never-ending changes. Then, the real work -- understanding and acting on results -- begins.
As the director of HR research for telecommunications carrier explained, “We used to spend months preparing, almost a month fielding the survey itself and more than a month getting results out after that. We expended 90 percent of our effort on the process and only 10 percent on the substance. Our team was totally spent by the time the organization first saw results, and we still hadn’t gotten to the open-ended comments or action plans.”
The next year was different. The director launched a “request for proposal” process, challenging survey vendors to cut report delivery from months to weeks, expand the range of report options and provide action planning and comment analysis tools.
He got more than he dreamed: “We literally shifted the paradigm. We’re getting results much faster in formats that actually make sense and with tools that make our HR managers heroes in the field.”
Challenge:
How do you marshal resources to exploit the results?
Example:
A firm spends 90% of its budget (time, money, emotional energy) fielding survey and is left with just 10% to do anything about it.
Approach:
Consult survey experts like us to help re-envision the process and invert the pain-to-gain ratio.
[4] Actionable Insight
The critical link between content and insight is survey data, both item-response data and demographic data that is self-reported or linked behind the scenes. And the language of data is statistics, making most people uncomfortable at this point in the process. As a result, they tend to focus on summary results at the risk of missing insight that sits just below the surface. The ability to cut the survey data by meaningful demographic categories such as length of service, level, function or gender is critically important.
The management team of a consumer finance company reviewed its assessment results, which were generally favorable, but the team saw large swings in its survey scores. Drilling into the results, team members observed significant differences in average scores based on sex. Women appeared to be markedly less favorable in their responses, particularly in factors measuring compensation, benefits, and the physical environment. An uncomfortable conversation ensued, and several executives wondered whether the company’s women’s initiative was failing. With an active effort to promote women and almost half of senior management positions filled by women, how could this be happening?
One of the executives suggested further segmenting the data by level. Results instantly revealed almost no gender- based differences in scores at supervisor, manager and executive levels. As the management team members drilled further into the data (something they could do on the fly during the meeting using a web-based analysis and reporting tool), they pinpointed the problem. Hourly staff in call center operations, heavily staffed by women, scored these factors very low. Rather than a company-wide problem, the management team uncovered specific and solvable issues.
The team examined automated word frequency counts on comments from this group (something it also could do on the spot), and two interesting words appeared high on the list: “chair” and “bathroom.” Most women in the call center were using old and broken chairs. This left them with aching backs. It got even worse when they took a break. To save money, call center managers had cut bathroom cleaning from once per shift to once per day -- the bathrooms were filthy. Based on the precision offered by the assessment program, the management team was able to dissect findings and act quickly. It evaluated whether compensation could be adjusted, made sure the bathrooms were clean and bought new, ergonomically designed chairs for all staff members.
Challenge:
Do you really understand what you’ve got?
Example:
A finance company pinpoints call center problems: uneven pay scale, broken chairs and dirty bathrooms on the evening shift.
Approach:
Use analytic tools and expertise to tap into the “gems” in the data.
[5] Powerful Narratives
Not all problems are so easily resolved. Some require long-term efforts and organizational change. Telling a compelling story and telling it repeatedly can help. Remember that health care institution? In its first organizational health assessment, nursing staff scored high on all factors, except personal development and recognition. Nurses didn’t object to the hard work, the high-pressure situations or even the menial tasks that doctors left behind for them to do. In fact, they loved it. They took pride in their critical role in delivering world-class create a world-renowned hospital. Unfortunately, they felt they didn’t get any recognition for the job they did. They also felt there was little time left for them to learn skills or advance their own careers. This insight was crystallized into action when a senior staff member observed, “Our nurses seem to love what they do. They love where they do it. They just wonder if we love them.” The institution drove this home to supervisors, physicians and managers, which resulted in greater recognition and more learning opportunities in the nurses’ everyday work schedule.
Challenge:
How do you bring findings to life so people get it?
Example:
A hospital finds its story: “Nurses love their work and the hospital where they work, but they wonder if management loves them.”
Approach:
Look for moving stories and keep telling them until you get movement.
[6] Targeted Actions
Acting on assessment results is a lot easier when the survey questions are actionable. A major financial services firm, noted for entrepreneurial culture and innovation, recently developed and deployed a global workforce assessment program. Results were refreshing and informative. After years suffering through a standardized opinion survey, the organization responded in force. Participation jumped by 10 percent, and feedback to the survey team repeated a common refrain: “Finally, you’re asking questions worth answering.”
Of course, not all the scores the firm got were outstanding. The COO was particularly concerned by low scores on this item: “I feel safe taking reasonable risks to improve how things get done in my area.” Within the month, an Innovation Award Program was established and funded to the tune of several million dollars.
Challenge:
What few things can drive value?
Example:
A bad item score prompts a chief operating officer to fund a multimillion-dollar innovation award program. A costly mistake.
Answer:
Make survey items actionable so people understand how to act on them.
[7] Organizational Engagement
Senior management support is critical to maximize the impact of any organizational assessment program. The best way to do this is to get senior managers involved upfront. Tap into their expertise and experience to add value to the program. A hotel chain rolling out a new branding strategy expended significant effort on educating employees about the brand message and ways they could craft lasting impressions for their guests. The survey team picked up on this initiative and incorporated it into the assessment model. Linked to property level performance, customer satisfaction and other operational metrics, the survey program is now helping to support the brand strategy.
Getting the rest of the organization onboard to embrace assessment results takes effort. But here’s the payoff: Thoughtful content within a well-structured model and powerful narratives from the data, combined with honest communication, will limber up the stiffest organizational resistance. Sharing the few things that management is prepared to act on is critically important. Equally important, sharing the bad news -- particularly low scores that aren’t going to get attention this time — is the kind of open and honest feedback that builds trust. And if you really want to hold feet to the fire, try this survey question: “Have issues raised in the last employee survey been addressed?”
Challenge:
Are your people really on board or just going along for the ride?
Example:
A senior vice president of HR integrates a branding campaign into assessment content to get executive attention.
Approach:
Share all the results (good and bad) to build trust. And if you really want to hold feet to the fire, try this survey item: “In my area, we’ve addressed issues raised in the last employee survey.”
Finally, a Seat at the Table
An enterprise software firm recently overhauled its long-standing employee survey. The resulting assessment program, modeled using key drivers of success, provided hard data linking employees to organizational outcomes. Not surprisingly, management sat up and took notice. The senior vice president of HR summed it up this way: “Finally, I feel like I’ve got a seat at the table.” She also said her management committee colleagues regularly show up with hard numbers (sales with sales data, marketing with research data, operations with production data, etc.). Now, she has her own data to support her positions and actions. More exciting still, her HR team can engage its line manager counterparts in more powerful dialogue based on a simple and clear model of organizational performance that was supported by data and cutting-edge analysis and planning tools.
