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GETTING READY FOR SURVEY SEASON!
Dr. Salvatore Falletta EVP and Managing Director Organizational Intelligence Institute – a Skyline Group Company I am often asked by senior leaders and HR professionals about the “best time” to conduct an employee survey. Well, it depends. In general however and contrary to popular belief, the best time to conduct an employee survey is when something significant occurs in the organization, for example: •
Leadership change (e.g., a new CEO or C-‐level executive comes on board)
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Past or future merger, acquisition, or divestiture
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Large-‐scale organizational change
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Organizational restructuring/reorganization
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Reduction-‐in-‐force or layoffs
Many politically savvy business leaders will tell me that they’d prefer to avoid surveying their workforce during a difficult time or transition to avoid poor survey scores. While seemingly counterintuitive, conducting an employee survey soon after a major reorganization, layoffs, dip in revenue, or poor earnings report is the best time. After all, surveying your workforce shouldn’t be about yielding good scores – but rather to accurately measure and manage employee engagement, strategy alignment, capabilities, and organizational change and improvement.
THE FREQUENCY AND TIMING OF EMPLOYEE SURVEYS In addition to performing employee surveys to navigate and manage change, the vast majority of companies run their employee surveys on a routine cycle. For example, high-‐performing companies such as IBM administer their employee survey quarterly to a different segment of their workforce to avoid over surveying employees while other leading companies (e.g., Novartis) survey their workforce on a biennial cycle (i.e., every 2 years) to ensure plenty of time to drive strategic change across their global lines of business. However, for most organizations I recommend surveying your employees on an annual basis. An annual employee survey cycle provides business leaders and HR professionals with enough time to effectively plan for, design, administer, analyze, and communicate a strategically focused employee survey, and more importantly act upon the results.
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FOR THE ANNUAL EMPLOYEE SURVEY – SURVEY SEASON STARTS NOW! For companies that are on an annual employee survey cycle, the best time to launch and administer your employee survey is arguably in October. Of course, this assumes a calendar fiscal year in terms of your organization’s annual strategy and budgetary planning processes. In addition, the month of October avoids major holidays and any long summer breaks in most parts of the world. While there are a number of tasks and deliverables associated with employee survey initiatives, the following timeline depicts the major milestone associated with an ongoing annual survey cycle.
Source: Organizational Intelligence Institute, 2014
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PULSE SURVEYS In addition to the annual employee survey, best-‐in-‐class companies tend to pulse their employees on topical issues and trends as they arise (e.g., work-‐life balance preferences, generational issues, diversity and inclusion, employee communication) and to track progress on action planning and change initiatives associated with the annual employee survey. While useful, you should consider the impact of over surveying your workforce (i.e., employee survey fatigue) and the timing of such surveys (e.g., try to space out your pulse surveys at least 5-‐6 months after the annual employee survey launch).
SOME THOUGHTS ON REAL-‐TIME, ON-‐DEMAND, AND MICRO-‐POLLING Many well-‐intended business leaders and HR professionals will ask whether we have “real-‐time” or “on-‐demand” surveying solutions. After all, it’s quite fashionable today to tout the value and benefits of real-‐time – that is, real-‐time pulse surveying, real-‐ time analytics, real-‐time social media feedback tools, real-‐time micro-‐polling technologies as well as on-‐demand data visualization dashboards, scorecards, and the like. So, from this perspective, there is really no “best time” to survey your workforce since real-‐time and on-‐demand means all-‐of-‐the-‐time and anytime respectively. However, as mentioned earlier, it all depends on what you’re trying to measure and why. For example, there are a number of firms toying with social media applications, specifically micro-‐polling technologies with which to pulse their workforce with a Question of the Week (e.g., “did your manager provide you with constructive feedback in the past week?”) while monitoring the incoming data in real-‐time via an online dashboard. Intuitively, such an approach seems simple and useful enough to address relatively innocuous questions related to direct manager behavior – like the example above or perhaps a question on team communication or collaboration. However, good luck on trying to micro-‐poll your employees on politically laden, sensitive, or “hot-‐button” questions pertaining to your company’s compensation practices, advancement and promotion opportunities, performance appraisal system, or the extent to which they are aligned or agree with the corporate strategy. Taking action on such questions in “real-‐time” (or even near-‐time) is virtually impossible without a C-‐level discussion, debate, and decision. Arguably, micro-‐polling is best for polling your workforce on harmless survey topics related to day-‐to-‐day workplace issues or basic hygiene factors which in turn can be addressed relatively quickly at the direct manager or team level. Therefore, it is important to identify the “what and why” you’re trying to measure before considering real-‐time, on-‐demand, and micro-‐polling solutions. Visit: www.oi-‐institute.com for more information.
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