I got the following email today from a reader of my employee satisfaction survey eBook. I thought her question about action planning was so good that it might be interesting to others, so I am posting her email (excerpted) and my reply below. First, her email:
Dear Phil,
I’m taking you up on your offer [to help on survey issues]…I am focusing on the “action planning” part of employee surveys. Most follow-up guidelines state the obvious steps after a survey:
1. Understand the results
2. Provide feedback to respondents
3. Identify priorities
4. Develop an action plan
5. Implement
6. Follow up
I want to develop a specific, motivating guide for managers to carry out steps 2,3,4 – that is, how to conduct follow-up meetings that are engaging in themselves, and not motivation-killers as I have observed many to be. E.g. “So here are our scores. What should we do about them? Who wants to speak up first?” For me, a key issue is that the scores are just that: scores. They don’t explain how people think and feel that caused them to give those scores, and managers/facilitators need to be able to elicit that information, both what people like and dislike about the current situation. I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I have some ideas on how I could create a facilitation package along these lines but before I “reinvent the wheel”, have you got anything? Terrie
Here is my reply:
Terrie – Thanks for your email. You’ve laid out the problem perfectly. Feedback meetings are often downers and often become gripe sessions. The key is to focus on solutions and desired outcomes rather than problems (or scores – which you so aptly state are just numbers and don’t really get to the emotion or energy behind an issue).
Let me offer this in terms of general direction. Ask people to think about how we might improve in the areas of concern and also to focus on strengths. Especially focus on things like:
1. When do we get this right? Rarely does an organization fail at something 100 percent of the time. When things are working well, what happens different in those circumstances? Is there a way we can make that happen more often?
2. What resources do we have available to us to solve this issue? This gets the group out of “constraints” thinking and more focused on how we can fix something. The understood part of this question is that we have the ability to improve in this area if we just focus our resources more appropriately.
3. What can you do personally in your daily life to help improve this area? One of the reasons action-planning meetings can get so negative is that there is a lot of focus on what “they” need to do to fix things and very little focus on how “I” may be contributing to the issue and perhaps can contribute to the solution. For this to work well, it is very important for the leader to assume their share of responsibility and to talk about what they will personally commit to doing to improve.
4. Ask folks to imagine that the organization is miraculously transformed and now acts perfectly in this area – what things are we doing different in this perfect world that we don’t do today (again, thinking about the organization in a positive frame, as opposed to a negative one).
These tips aren’t foolproof – nothing in organization development is. But the general tone of meetings should be much more positive and constructive if you focus in these areas. My thinking on these issues is influenced a lot by the writings of Peter Block (Flawless Consulting
Good luck and let me know if this is helpful. Phil.
