Regular People insights are a gift to any leader

Leadership

May 29

6 minute read

It’s a familiar cry – ‘the People / Culture / Staff Survey data is out, and you need to respond to it.’

‘Sure boss. I’m on it …’ you say with a slightly sinking heart.

The instinct is quickly to look for the categories in red, identify the numbers decreasing year on year and to produce quick justifications for the declines. It’s then often natural to read the verbatim feedback and to take them all personally.

All completely normal behaviour some of you might recognise.

Our challenge to leaders is:

‘How do you use the process of gathering feedback and data from your people to drive and improve your culture in a sustained way?’

Or to put it another way, how do you prevent the survey being a once-a-year exercise (or whatever the frequency is in your organisation). How do you switch your mindset to make it a vital data set informing your long-term mission to make your team / group / company a great place to work?

Based on our leadership experience and the thriving teams we partner with, we have identified five golden rules in relation to the People Survey:

Keep it a constant, year-round activity not a one-time thing.
Connect your people-related actions to the feedback you have received.
Focus equally on what you are doing well (to amplify it) and on where you need to improve (to fix it), always involving people in the solutions.
Communicate quickly, regularly, and precisely – and ensure the whole Leadership Team shares the same narrative and vision of what can be accomplished.
Don’t assume you know why people responded in the way they did – and spend time getting to understand more.

Taking each in turn:

Teams that put their people at the heart of their mission and focus on doing everything they can to make the environment easy for people to succeed, are the teams that thrive. And those are the teams who keep the People Survey alive throughout the year. The data is referred back to by the Leadership Team when decisions are being taken and as a result the wider team are left feeling heard, valued, and respected.

That way, all the decisions you make which relate to your people and to the environment they are working in, can be put in the context of the feedback received. It may be a cliché, but it remains true; ‘You said … so we’ve done …’The power of that never diminishes and, when said authentically, means you get the team onside working with you. Remember, it is critical to deliver on what you promise. There is no easier way of ‘losing the dressing room’ than saying you will change things and then failing to deliver.

The importance of calling out what you are doing well is vital. Don’t obsess about the negatives. Make sure you are taking a balanced view of the results, so you provide a positive story about the things that make it good to work here. And for the Leadership Team, these may be your unconscious competences – the things you do well naturally. So, calling them out focuses the mind and keeps you doing the things that matter to your people.

Communication is key – as is involvement of people throughout your team or group. Fixing stuff and making things even better is a joint responsibility and the best people to know what needs sorting and how to do it are the people who completed the survey in the first instance. Involve them. Make them part of the solution rather than letting them be the recipient of the plans. Then get a clear and concise story. Own it with the rest of the Leadership Team, make sure you are all on message and go tell your story. And then keep on telling it and gathering feedback on how the changes you are making are landing across the team.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, don’t assume you know what’s driven the scores or comments. Your interpretation of the results may be well off the mark. Ask people what prompted them to score a particular question in the way they did. It’s the only way to get truly under the hood of the data.

The People Survey is your annual (or bi-annual) gift. It is how you can run your team or group well and it is how you can collectively thrive.

As a final point, our opinion is a People Survey should be done frequently, in short, sharp chunks to give you a real-time view of how you are doing. After all, you don’t just get your financial / sales / performance data once a year – so why should your people data be restricted to once or twice a year. But that is a whole different subject for another day…