Transforming employee surveys

Just finished teaching a seminar on HR metrics, and we spent time looking at how to change the typical employee survey into something that adds value and that drives results. Key messages were:

1. Keep it simple - you really don't need hundreds of questions.
2. Think horizontally vs. vertically; spread questions out over time.
3. Start with results in mind.
4. From results go to action; who will take action and how.
5. How do you convince this person (or people) to take action?
6 With target in mind, what kind of data do you need?
7. What dialogue is required to accompany the data?

Dialogue focuses the data and helps guarantee results.

It seems easy, but what we learned is that there are data people and dialogue people and for some reason, their skills don't always transfer.

Thus, our challenge is to teach data people to engage in high quality dialogue, and to help dialogue people learn data skills.

If you have proven ways to make this happen, please share your success stories.

More lessons from the road coming up soon.