What Should Happen After an Employee Survey?

You’ve administered the employee survey across the business, interpreted results with comparisons to external benchmarks and historic trends, and presented findings with the executive team. You have given managers access to reports and you thanked employees for their input. What happens next? You know that good things won’t just happen because of the survey itself, but have you really set anything into action? Responsibility may have been cascaded to other managers, perhaps as part of balanced scorecards. The HR team probably provided training about the importance of employee engagement and communicated that the line and functional leaders have to “own” their data. Some managers might be planning to run focus groups, but often these are complaining sessions. Indeed, some managers will plot action in isolation from employees. Still other managers will rationalize their results or point the finger at vague concepts like culture or morale. All of these post-survey activities, intentions, and musings will likely be forgotten in a month or so when the next crisis emerges and “real work” draws management’s attention. If that happens, then the promise of organizational change will disappear into the file drawer along with the PowerPoint presentations and action plans until it is time to survey again. There has to be a better way. If the employee survey is to improve business results, what should happen? Here are three emerging best practices that may turn your current understanding of surveying on its head.

1. Focus on business outcomes instead of survey scores. With all the graphs, tables, and comparisons created to analyze survey results, what gets lost is the fact that there’s a business to run. No matter how many scores are below benchmark or how many concerns the employees raise, the actions that will endure long enough to spur behavioral change are the ones that are most associated with business opportunities and threats. Anything else will be cast aside eventually as a distraction. Some will argue that the survey calls for work-life balance committees or recognition programs or pay increases, but do other metrics suggest that these are adversely affecting business performance? Are you losing impactful talent in impactful roles, like the software engineers in R&D who are supposed to roll out a critical new product? If that’s the case, then some or all of these “gaps” should become goals. However, if no other metric validates what the employees say in the survey, then the need for action is low. (Note there still could be a need for reaction, such as explaining the circumstances and/or sharing the metrics that tell a different story.)

 Once the survey results have been analyzed with survey benchmarks and organization trending, put those data aside for a short while and bring out the strategic goals for the business. Then, ask “Are there scores and cuts of data from the employee survey that will provide me with the employees’ point of view for how we will achieve these goals?” For example, if releasing game-changing products is the way your business is going to differentiate itself, then what are the R&D employees saying about staffing, resources, and the link between goals and day-to-day work? What are the customer-facing employees saying about the relationship with customers, the ability to solve their problems, and the prevalence of a customer service attitude throughout the organization? Do these two groups have similar patterns of survey scores, or do they see the organization quite differently? Do prior sales numbers and customer feedback help explain the pattern of employee survey data?

 2. Focus on a targeted set of employees to affect the whole instead of using everyone to affect parts. The employee survey usually involves feedback from all parts of the organization, and analyses often start with the aggregated scores that represent everyone. This holistic approach can help diagnose the organizational health, but to accomplish a strategic change, you will need people who perform different roles to change in different, but coordinated ways. It is great to hear the president of the organization communicate a broad vision and goal for the organization, but rarely is there a process for coordinating how different functions will cooperate to achieve that outcome. Typically, functional heads will treat the employee survey as a reason to set function-specific goals, often pertaining to engagement levels and communication (perennial favorites). Yet, it would be better to prioritize a cross-functional action planning session before moving to siloed actions. In theory the functional heads should be able to accomplish this coordinated planning, but often people in the trenches have a better understanding of problems and some novel ideas about solutions. So let the functional heads develop coordinated goals designed to attain the holistic outcome, and then have a separate and targeted set of employees across levels and functions determine how to accomplish these coordinated goals. As general Patton once said, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

 One paradox of organizational change is that leaders want to lead it while followers (the engaged ones) want to be involved with it, and yet change initiatives are rarely successful. A remedy to this situation is to assure that the leader works with the right team of employees. A surprisingly simple and effective technique is to have this team nominated by their peers, much like the arrangement between a democratic leader working with the representatives of the citizens. This nominated team need not be a permanent fixture, but it should be maintained long enough for members to understand root causes that need to be overcome and to create methods of achieving the goal. This team need not be the ones to implement the actions, but they should be working closely with those who are executing, and they should use their relationships with those who nominated them to explain how and why the actions are designed to take effect. Likewise, these relationships with other employees allow team members to get honest feedback about what is working and what is not. A peer-nominated team is designed to assemble respected, knowledgeable employees pertaining to the desired outcome—a team whom a leader can trust and collaborate with. Note that the coordinated actions that are most strategic need not affect all employees – sometimes changes among a small set of employees can impact the entire organization. Nevertheless, all employees can be involved in the nomination process, and all employees should be kept up to date on goals and progress.



3. Focus on accomplishments instead of activities. Progressive organizations monitor progress on action plans to sustain change efforts long after the survey was administered. This is a great concept, but sometimes the process leads to “checking the box” rather than continuously focusing on improvement. Managers, most of whom have a shortage of time and resources, typically design one and only one action to achieve a goal, and they are typically held accountable for accomplishing that action rather than achieving the goal. Even when managers are held accountable for reaching the goal, it is usually based on a survey metric (e.g., raising the survey scores by 5 percentage points). Thus, if a manager makes an attempt but does not move the needle, there is evidence of effort and the unreached goal is not seen as the crucial work. This situation would change drastically if the goals were business oriented with a monetary value (e.g., reducing the number of product updates within three months of a new release in order to save $700,000 in staff hours and customer returns). In this scenario there would be multiple action plans executed until the goal was reached, and failure would be difficult to excuse.



Expecting multiple action plans may seem like additional work, but when the focus is on business metrics, the plans should be seen as necessary and existing work that is laid out as a series of experimental actions designed to attain a desired outcome with the least amount of resources invested. One very successful pharmaceutical sales leader worked with employees to create actions according to three timeframes. Initially, plans described 3 minute actions, which required no budget or coordination, but just agreement to make the easy “low hanging fruit” changes. Because these changes were likely to be superficial, they were followed up by 3 month actions, which required more coordination and time to execute. The idea was to use the 3 minute actions as a means to communicate commitment to solving the business problem and to build support for the 3 month actions. If the goal is still not achieved, then plans may require 3 year actions, which are more systemic and far-reaching across functions and levels in the organization. Throughout the entire process, employees are kept informed of successes and failures, lessons learned and remaining questions. This “experiment until it works” approach, involving leaders and nominated employees, demonstrates a relentless focus on achieving the goal that was raised by employees through the survey. Continuous post-survey actions build a high performing organization that produces business results, and the employee involvement creates engagement as a byproduct. Leaders, employees, and the survey director all notch wins on their belts.




This content is protected by the 1976 Copyright Protection Act of the United States of America. The proper citation for this blog is as follows: Mastrangelo, P. M. (date posted). Title of Post. The First Domino, available at http://the-first-domino.blogspot.com. This post is not intended to represent any person or organization other than Paul M. Mastrangelo.