Managers cope. That’s part of the job. Common mistakes in employee surveys seldom cause much personal or organizational pain—low response rates, insufficient pre-survey publicity, ambiguous questions, data overwhelm. But managers, in their haste to get moving on survey results too often overlook the significance of their own planning cycle.
It is the rare organization that schedules an employee survey to mesh with the annual planning effort. The numbers generated by a well-designed employee survey are just as hard as sales and revenue figures, but they don’t appear on the “score card.”
Managers who think of a survey as a necessary evil are unlikely to recognize survey results as the ‘voice of the employees.’ Employees are telling management a lot about what can make the company earn more, run better, attract the right people, and solve persistent problems. But someone has to listen, and that takes a mind shift from “data” to “voice,” the collective voice of the current staff.
Adding survey results to planning isn’t rocket science. It takes about a month to design and execute a survey for a company of several thousand, and another month to produce the numbers and analyze the comments. Add another week for ‘miscellaneous’ and you have it synched with planning efforts.
It is not uncommon for major interventions (cost cutting, new products, new sales and marketing campaigns, reorganizations…) to be planned and put into effect without anyone every wondering “what might be in the way that our employees know about but we don’t?” Asking after the fact is no help.
Ask before you jump. Any major business intervention must contain an analysis of the current mood, interests, and concerns of the people responsible for making it a success…or failure. Not asking is ignoring the collective wisdom every company has, but few put to good use.
One such intervention, a major recruiting and mentoring program, ran into a brick wall so obvious that it brought tears to management’s eyes: the so-called “Performance Maximization” effort that included an unwieldy model, complicated programming, and a totally overwhelmed and therefore ineffective support team. “If we had only fixed the performance thing,” one manager lamented,”This would have been a breeze.”
Every major intervention must include the voice of the employee. Again. Every major intervention must include the voice of the employee. It’s that simple. Count out 12 weeks from the planning date, that’s when you survey.
Call Michael 503.241.0595 to learn more about synchronizing surveys and annual planning because this one step will keep surveys on your company agenda.
