One of the leader’s (or owner’s) biggest challenges is to make good decisions, with confidence, and stick to them through tough times in implementation. What increases confidence and helps make better decisions? Good data.
Quantitative data is usually easy to get and pretty dependable. Qualitative data, the things that tell you how people think and feel, are much harder to get in complete and accurate forms. Employees and customers are often hesitant to tell the leader the truth, and even in “anonymous” surveys, they still worry that their answers may be traced back to them. So, if you need or want to know how your people are really doing, what can you do?
Internal
On the internal front, two suggestions are 360-degree performance reviews and employee satisfaction surveys.
For 360-degree reviews, I find they are best used for the top leader and the senior leadership team. The survey should be sent to the person’s supervisor, laterals, and direct reports. For the top leader, I suggest direct reports and one level down (depending on the organizational chart). Communicate a sincere desire to improve and help the leadership team when requesting the feedback and explain how you will anonymize and protect respondents. I like to double anonymize by compiling all open-ended comments, and then summarizing those into a few general key bullet points for the employee’s final report.
Satisfaction surveys are often waaay over complicated. The two main forms are single global ratings where employees are asked “overall, how satisfied are you with working here?”, and summary of job facets where employees are asked to rate satisfaction on individual job elements. Just about all the research indicates that employers get more accurate ratings using the single global rating. So, keep it simple: a handful of basic, high-level questions about general workplace satisfaction. Again, communicate how the results will be aggregated and kept confidential.
External
The main way to get external qualitative data is customer reviews and satisfaction surveys. Reviews are harder to control and tend to feature only the extremes of really satisfied or really unhappy customers.
But customer satisfaction surveys are simple and can provide a lot of key information. Once again, keep it simple: three to five questions are usually enough, and make sure they focus on the elements you most want to know about and understand. Be sure to include at least one value question, too (ex. “how would you rate the value of the product/service for the price/rate?”). Finally, these are best delivered at the time of sale or very soon after. You’re more likely to get a response, and it’s more likely to be accurate.
Three ways to get more and better qualitative data to improve decision making and decision confidence. After initial setup, these are not time consuming to continue. Even if they were, their value can be enormous toward increasing employee commitment, reducing turnover, getting ahead of problems, and having raving fans.
Want these blog posts delivered straight to your inbox each week? Click here to subscribe.
Follow us on social media at the links below.
