It is that time of year again, the ritual of looking back and looking forward. With it comes talking to employees. How are you doing, what are your ambitions etc. At minimal to ensure employees feel their opinion is considered and at best an serious attempt to collect insights and use these as basis for plans aiming to improve. Why is it that we are only interested in their opinion at the end of the year?
If you want to skip to the ‘good part’, at the end you find questionnaires to download
Over the years I have participated in many of such rituals and have come to the conclusion that there are two parameters underlying them
- Approached seriously. It is done with purpose, there is an honest ambition to improve the corporate culture because of the insight that a good corporate culture has positive effect on the employees, on operations and also on the corporate performance.
- Done systemically. It is done following sort of methodology (just chatting I do not consider to be a methodology. A survey of sorts is. A survey whipped up by the intern at HR rarely is effective. A survey that has un underlying idea and that is rigorously tested most likely is effective.
I have to give credit to Pierre Groll (former CEO of Audatex), who was the only CEO I worked with who ticks of positively on both. Although his reasons may have been skewed towards the financial, the various attempts demonstrated his serious interest in improving the culture, and his approach invariably was systematically.
A good questionnaire to collect information about how well employees are doing is the Q12 from Gallup. Born our of an interest of why some teams function well, what makes them different, surveying millions of people, evolving in a short list of 12 questions. If you are interested in the background, read the book: First break all the rules. Recommended.
Apart from understanding the individual, you may also want to collect information from the team, and you soon find yourself exploring 360-degree surveys. I have not encountered one that stood out, but one that was a good attempt. At Oysterlab (former venture builder from Alpiq) we used a survey that one of the team members had experience with in a former company. It was a good attempt in that is systematically explored values and behaviour your would like to see in an innovation lab although the measurements definitely had improvement potential. Here you find an overview of 360-survey questions and metrics inspired by it.
With the above mentioned surveys you probably get a good insight into the corporate culture at the various levels of the company. Let me know if it works or if you would approach it differently.
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