Organizations have always needed to track employees’ views on the workplace. But traditional survey methodologies that were typically designed for the post-WWII civilian workforce left employees annoyed at these large, time-consuming exercises and equally frustrated with the lack of feedback or actionable outcomes.
What’s more, companies had no idea how to turn large amounts of data into actionable strategies.
This large-scale, “heavy-weight” approach – the mainstay methodology of survey research – has been primarily more a function of administrative convenience and efficiency than of organizational impact.
Data That Inspires Contributes to Building Strong Leaders
Today’s organizations are large, complex and increasingly driven by knowledge work and collaboration, producing massive amounts of powerful data, naturally. The opportunity to put that data to work has never been greater and the availability of information to inform insights is available to those organizations willing to look beyond data as simply a set of fancy reports. To be sure, today’s HR Analytics have the ability to provide complete transparency and predictive capabilities that inform policy, practice and resource decisions. Organizations can develop clear intuitive processes that maximize skills, inspire employees and build strong leaders.
Research indicates the best approach to developing and maintaining a real-time organizational pulse is possible with a lighter, more flexible, and more continuous climate assessment program.
Advanced Employee Lifecycle Sampling
An on-going organizational sensing model is considerably less intrusive, much more cost-effective and more positively received by staff as an indication of a responsive and committed leadership team. More effective than single-, one-off events – an approach that is continuous and woven into the employee experience and organizational life cycle provides Leaders a better opportunity to understand and influence supported by focused, contemporaneous, actionable information.
Employee Life-Cycle Sampling:
There are important milestones in every employees’ experience that serve as career inflection points:
- Recruiting & Candidate experience
- Onboarding new hires
- Training & early experience
- On-going engagement
- Events (promotions, transfers, supervisory changes)
- Leaving the organization
These are all ideal opportunities to solicit feedback, demonstrate support, identify opportunities for action and reinforce the brand promise first described during the recruiting phase. New employees would be surveyed at specific intervals and with specific objectives. All employees would be surveyed at-or-after specific career inflection points.
Organizational Sampling:
Staying abreast of organizational climate and measuring progress against on-going initiatives can be accomplished very effectively with a carefully designed survey sampling program delivered to a rolling percentage of the workforce each quarter. This approach enhances communications, reinforces employee engagement, reduces “survey fatigue”, improves participation rates and contributes to crowd-sourced (rather than entirely top-down) solution finding. Woven into the fabric of the culture, employees come to expect regular feedback opportunities, embracing their role in building a positive and effective workplace.
Event-driven Sampling:
Events occur regularly across the organization that have consequential impact on the workplace. These events can run the gamut from intensely local (such as a specific supervisory lapse, a workplace injury or a specific achievement) to broadly impactful (such as an acquisition, a major policy revision or a fundamental regulatory change).
Value-Based & Actionable Data
The data generated by continuous sampling strategies is considerable and best represented by a full set of reports that are equally light-weight and actionable for leadership teams across the organization. Within the context of organizational structures, strategic and functional priorities, recent history and other relevant factors, meaningful analytics should:
- Provide Leaders with a clear descriptive and interpretive view of the results, and how those results have changed over time.
- Investigational data that highlight a blindly empirical “everything against everything” set of correlations and regressions, looking for unanticipated relationships.
- Analysis of every written comment.
Ensuring Sustainability
An externally managed approach to organizational climate sampling ensures a real-time, on-going and sustainable communication and feedback strategy. In fact, sustainability is one of its greatest advantages. Lean and responsive HR organizations deliver services and address issues cost-effectively. The negative consequence is that there is very little organizational “slack” with which to guarantee that resources necessary to sustain important long-term initiatives like this won’t be diverted to address short-term necessities. An effective approach ensures that when significant organizational challenges arise (precisely when climate assessment is most important), the program continues to run “in the background” while internal resources are focused on core business challenges.
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