Our Approach
Executives often want to tap into the subjective experience of employees, either to improve working conditions (morale, turnover, employee satisfaction, etc.), as a preamble to major organizational change (introducing TQM, a reorganization, new strategy rollout, etc.), or to understand why a change effort has stumbled (after the merger, when process improvement is fading out, etc.).
As a strategy to understand the organization, the traditional employee opinion survey seldom works as well as we might hope. The flaws in this strategy are easy to list:
- Takes too long; often months from handing out the survey to publishing the results
- Costs too much for the value delivered; surveys can run from $50K to $200K.
- Fails to engage employees in the process; they are "data givers" at best.
- Amount of data is often overwhelming; focusing only on "Top 3 issues" ignores the volume and complexity of issues raised.
The alternative is not to do without employee input, but rather to restructure the process so they can contribute more than their opinion in a one-time survey. A good survey is not a data collection effort; it is a change effort that is informed by data but -- more importantly -- uses the collection of data as a catalyst for employee energy and discussion that extend on into the future.
We would offer 3 alternatives to the common one-time, comprehensive survey:
A way to direct short- and
medium- term change efforts; when you know
the WHAT but not the WHO |
Learning to understand a well-defined
target audience over time; when you know
the WHO but not the WHAT |
When you want to focus on
the work rather than the worker. |