However, not all surveys will improve the situation.  The following are four warning signs that conducting a survey may do more harm than good.

1.  The leaders don’t really want to know what people think.

The people who hold the top spots in an organization are usually out of the feedback loop.  As they move up the ladder, they are increasingly unaware of the pulse of the organization.  When the intent to conduct an employee survey is proposed, leaders who understand this phenomenon will jump at the chance to collect information that they have gradually been phased out of.  These leaders will want more details about what will be asked, and might even propose other questions that they would like to ask.

On the flip side of the coin are leaders who think they already know, or worse, don’t really care what the employees think or how they feel.  If you propose an employee survey and receive a resounding, “Sure, go ahead” without any curiosity or concerns, beware.  They probably don’t really want to know what people think.

2.  The leaders won’t believe the results.

Sometimes leaders will dismiss the results of the survey, even if it seems they wanted to know.  I once conducted an employee satisfaction survey that I created in-house due to lack of funds for the project.  Once I presented the results, the leaders wanted benchmarks to compare against to see if the results were “normal.”  Of course, having created the survey in-house, there was no other data to compare them against.

Before conducting a survey, watch for signs that the leaders commonly deflect accountability by picking apart the validity of numbers in other settings.  One way to combat this scenario ahead of time is to discuss the output that will be generated from the survey.  Discuss hypothetical results with the leadership team to determine up front what else they will want to know, so you can build it into your analysis.

3.  The leaders won’t do anything about it.

Even leaders who want to know and believe the results still may not do anything about it.  If employees give their opinion and then nothing is done, the integrity of the leaders and you as the surveyor drops, and future surveys will not be taken as seriously.

When discussing hypothetical results, gauge the interest of leaders in taking action.  For example, if the survey says that people don’t know the direction the company is going, are the leaders willing to share strategic information?  If the answer is no, then don’t bother asking.

To combat the first three reasons not to conduct an employee survey, make sure leaders know the questions you are asking and what you are actually measuring with the questions.  Discuss ahead of time what the implications and actions might be based on hypothetical responses you think they might have trouble absorbing.

4.  You don’t want to say what you already know.

The fourth reason not to conduct an employee survey, instead of being directed at the leadership team, is directed at the surveyor.  Are you conducting the survey because you don’t know the answers, or are you conducting the survey because you don’t want to say what you already know?  Is fear getting in the way of you speaking up and sharing the problems you see in the organization?  Is the survey actually a cop-out?

If any of that rings true, here’s an idea for you:  Include your point of view in the proposal for the survey.  State your hypothesis – what you believe to be true – and say you would like to conduct a survey to test it.  Share the implications and the action plan for improving the situation if you are right.  Then offer the option to skip the survey if they agree – they just might.  If they don’t agree with your hypothesis, then you will still conduct the survey.  Not only will you get more involvement from people who disagree with you, it will also be more scientific and objective than if you were just using the to communicate for you.

Yes, surveys can be very useful tools to help direct a change initiative.  That is, of course, if the leaders want to know what employees think, will believe the results, and will do something with the opportunities that are revealed.

(Editor’s note: This post first appeared in the Change Starts Here blog at Enclaria.com)

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A crucial step in driving alignment with strategy after the strategy itself has been established is to capture the activities (projects, initiatives, call them what you will) that are already underway. A matrix of the strategic initiatives against the strategic objectives almost always reveals opportunities to improve alignment; initiatives that don’t map well to objectives, objectives with no initiatives, and in some cases, objectives with too many initiatives.

Unfortunately, many organizations struggle to even create the alignment matrix. With neither a centralized project management office (PMO) to capture and track the status of discretionary activity, nor any understanding of the labor actually being allocated to each initiative, leaders have little more than capital and expense budgets as a weak indicator of actual strategic initiative activity.Discretionary projects often have significant labor expense, but little or no capital budget. Labor is treated as a sunk cost that is allocated to business units and departments on the basis of full-time equivalent employees (FTEs), not to specific projects and initiatives. Middle managers have discretion to undertake operational improvement projects and strategic initiatives with limited senior level oversight beyond the capital budget process.

Managerial discretion is biased towards operational improvements, which tend to have more tangible benefits delivered sooner than strategic initiatives whose benefits are less tangible in the near term. The pool of labor available for discretionary efforts is the difference between total labor available, and the necessary effort to run the business everyday. Keeping the lights on always takes precedence. Whatever is left over is given over to discretionary activity, divided between operational improvement and strategic initiatives. It is generally the same people whose time can be allocated to each.

Large organizations become especially adept at optimizing the status quo; making current business processes as efficient as possible. Strategic change represents the unknown, and a greater risk of an individual manager being seen as mis-allocating his or her labor resources. So in the aggregate, little labor is left to devote to strategic change.

A more enlightened approach requires a comprehensive understanding of discretionary activity across the enterprise, captured and administered by a robust PMO function.Workforce time reporting enables executives to understand not just what projects are underway, but to manage the set of projects as an investment portfolio. When viewed this way, executives are able to reduce the total number of projects (many of which may consume resources with little progress to show for it), better balance FTEs between strategic and operational change, and drive a higher share of projects to deliver their intended value on time and on budget. In the absence of this more enlightened approach, it comes as no surprise when there is a failure to execute strategy.

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This series of posts (in three parts) is adapted from an article of the same name that appeared in Harvard Business Publishing’s Balanced Scorecard Report in 2006.

In Part I, I asserted that perception matters very much to the strategy of an organization. Perception of external stakeholders, of customers, and of employees. Often, the change program requires measurements of customer and employee perceptions. How organizations go about gathering these perceptions is a key factor in the success of the change program. In Part II, we examined the challenges of survey design, and its impact on the effectiveness of the strategy-driven perception research. Here, we conclude with consideration of alternatives to surveys, and an examination of how to use perception data in the context of the change program.

Consider Focus Groups or Interviews

While most perception measures come from surveys, focus groups and interviews are also valuable tools. Focus groups can be a component of a survey (answering the complex question, “why are employees unhappy?”), or can simply serve as a way of capturing the perceptions of a small group when surveys would not be effective or practical. A focus group can reveal complex root causes for perceptions that may not be anticipated in a set of multiple choice responses.

Focus groups typically involve eight to twelve subjects and one or two facilitators, with generally no more than five questions. Experienced facilitators employ several techniques to elicit and structure responses from participants, which may be captured through flip charts, note taking, or audio and video recording. Because facilitators affect results, it is vital that they be experienced, neutral, and knowledgeable about the topic. Specially designed focus-group facilities feature one-way mirrors to enable skilled observers to capture participants’ body language and group dynamics without influencing them. Internet and other technologies now enable on-line focus groups, from simple discussion boards and blogs to real-time sessions assembling people from different locations to interact with text, audio, and even video.

One-on-one interviews are another valuable technique. By separately asking members of a group with similar characteristics a standard set of questions—for example, asking salespeople the same questions about follow-up calls to customers after a store visit—you get the benefits of a focus group (more detailed, qualified responses and more flexible dialogue), without the burdens of scheduling and travel.

Put Your Findings in Context

With survey data in hand, how do you best present it? It’s easy to present survey data in graph form, but graphs by themselves don’t tell a very useful story. Including all the detail in a change program progress report is usually not necessary, though the detail should be available to the leadership team so they can drill down if they want. What is necessary, however, is context. The performance advocate for the overlying strategic objective should work closely with the research designer to analyze the survey findings, considering them in the context of data from prior surveys and other measures in the report—and presenting that context in the reporting.

Focus group feedback, including carefully selected participant quotes (paraphrased when necessary to ensure anonymity), should be summarized through the facilitators’ written analysis. The research designer should attend the management discussion of the findings to answer technical questions and help shape subsequent research requests.

Because of the very real danger of simply replacing the old “comfortable fictions” with new ones, leaders should balance their reasoned judgment with a healthy skepticism when making decisions resulting from their enriched understanding of stakeholder perception.

How is perception research done in your organization? Do leaders shun surveys because of what they might learn? Do employees suffer from ‘survey fatigue?’ Please offer your comments and insights below.

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This series of posts (in three parts) is adapted from an article of the same name that appeared in Harvard Business Publishing’s Balanced Scorecard Report in 2006.

In Part I, I asserted that perception matters very much to the strategy of an organization. Perception of external stakeholders, of customers, and of employees. Often, the change program requires measurements of customer and employee perceptions. Here, we consider how organizations go about gathering these perceptions, which is a key factor in the success of the change program.

Ensuring Survey Success: Skillful Research Design is Vital

A survey program is the best way to regularly monitor stakeholder perceptions. E-mail and Web-based survey tools enable faster design, execution, and analysis, and have reduced the cost considerably. Many enterprises already have e-mail address lists from the Web sites and customer databases they maintain for direct communication and marketing purposes. Wireless telephony and text messaging enable nearly real-time data collection and analysis. Technology, however, is no substitute for good research design, and in amateur hands, such tools amplify the risk of getting unactionable results or even causing adverse consequences.

Regrettably, to save money, many firms opt for do-it-yourself research design, even when they lack the expertise to do so effectively. The principles of research design are beyond the scope of this article; suffice it to say that unless you have a professional market research staff in house, do-it-yourself research design is risky, unlikely to yield much useful information, and can actually do harm. The “Hawthorne Effect” demonstrated that the very act of studying a group of subjects changes members’ behavior. A poorly designed survey can antagonize the subjects, or, if they fear repercussions from any negative responses, discourage candor. Either way, it can taint results.

The research designer must be both unbiased about the research topic and familiar with the study environment. Unwittingly or not, do-it-yourselfers often allow their leaders’ biases to creep into the questions. But subtle changes in the way a question is phrased—even the order of the questions—can dramatically affect how people respond. Allow leaders to contribute their opinions when establishing hypotheses, but keep them a safe distance from the actual design.

Strategy-driven research begins with the cause-and- effect relationships among strategic objectives on a strategy map. Strategic objectives for customers and employees require perception measures to give a full picture of performance. While financial measures like sales volume or market share reflect the results of customer behavior, leading measures of customer perception can help executives anticipate changes in these ultimate outcome measures.

Changing people’s perceptions is often central to strategy. Well-designed research might provide leaders with insights about which perceptions need to change or help test hypotheses about how a change in perception will actually occur. A customer perception measure can validate the effect of an internal process initiative.

For example, as part of its strategy to develop more profitable relationships with its customers, a bank undertakes an initiative to have customer service agents spend more time on the telephone with customers calling for support. By equipping agents with better customer information, the bank believes they will be able to probe beyond the original scope of each call and promote additional products appropriate to the caller. A sound customer feedback program can enable the bank to validate the assumptions underlying its strategy, or to uncover negative perceptions (e.g., that calls are taking too long or agents’ questions are intrusive). Only by measuring agents’ new behavior (for example, through average call duration), along with agent and customer perceptions, can increased sales reasonably attributed to the new strategy.

While an inexperienced research designer would simply begin by writing questions, a seasoned designer would start by studying the environment and its population groups, as well as the organization’s strategy, to decide the best method (e.g., surveys, focus groups, or data mining) and frequency, and how to segment the research population. Drawing on her academic and practical understanding of human behavior, statistical analysis, and survey design, she would then develop a comprehensive research plan and plan follow-on research.

Conquer Survey Fatigue

Leaders seeking “silver bullets” for intractable problems don’t often have the patience to execute surveys repeatedly. But few surveys provide full value in one execution. Periodic sampling of a population reveals trends that are impossible to see in a single snapshot. Often the absolute value of a perception measure is meaningless; the insight comes from tracking the direction and magnitude of change in the measure over time.

“Survey fatigue” is a common reason why organizations resist using surveys. Employees in firms with Internet survey tools may be bombarded with narrow, one-off surveys from multiple sources whose timing is not coordinated and that, over time, do little more than discourage response. Such surveys may be sent to every member of a large population when a relatively small, carefully chosen representative sample would be valid—thereby reducing survey frequency and minimizing fatigue. All research requests should be funneled through a single coordinator.

Rather than surveying the entire employee population annually, the organization could send the same basic survey to a controlled random sample every quarter (25% of the employee population), polling different subgroups each time. The sample size is determined mathematically, according to population size and acceptable margin of error. A basic set of questions could be asked each time, and carefully targeted new questions could be included when needed to understand new challenges. Under this model, no employee in the target group would receive more than one survey per year. By generating quarterly findings (rather than the usual annual ones), this model is especially appropriate for strategy reporting.

Next: Alternatives to Surveys

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This series of posts (in three parts) is adapted from an article of the same name that appeared in Harvard Business Publishing’s Balanced Scorecard Report in 2006.

When helping organizations design measures for their change programs, the moment comes when I float the idea of surveying employees or customers. Invariably, there is an uncomfortable silence, followed by protests that surveys are expensive, that they don’t tell them anything new, and that a steady diet of them annoys people and thus defeat their purpose. An unspoken source of resistance is leaders’ fear that survey results will challenge the comfortable fictions they may be sustaining to support their decisions.

True, surveys can be expensive, especially for professional research design and administration. But in the past decade, technology has gone a long way in offsetting their cost and complexity.

Customer and employee expectations and perceptions all matter to a company. Understanding them is vital to predicting the behaviors of these stakeholders: whether they’ll invest in your shares or buy your products or work hard. When done properly, surveys are essential for developing a balanced portfolio of leading and lagging indicators. And when survey results inform key management decisions that involve making large investments in pursuit of even larger revenues, the value can be substantial. But in the absence of clear-cut results, surveys may raise more questions than they answer.

Perception Matters

Understanding, shaping, and fulfilling the expectations of stakeholders is central to successful strategy execution. In for-profit organizations, strategy is rooted in the need to satisfy shareholders’ expectation of a return on their investment. The decision to invest (and, by implication, the stock price) is driven by investors’ collective expectations of the firm’s future performance. Customers’ perception of the value proposition predicts his or her behavior toward the firm, namely, whether he or she buys its products. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. While executives may envision what the value proposition should be, it is customer perception that determines what the value proposition actually is. The concept of the customer value proposition applies to the firm’s internal customers as well. In my work with IT organizations, I’ve learned that expectations and perceptions shape behaviors that influence the quality of these internal service provider-customer partnerships—and ultimately, how efficiently the resources that drive enterprise performance and strategy execution are used.

Of course, human capital is a key intangible asset necessary for creating value. A company can influence, but not control employees’ expectations and perceptions of the firm. These factors largely drive their behavior: how hard they work, how well their actions support the firm’s interests, and ultimately whether they’ll continue working for the firm.

Perception drives behavior; that’s why the behavior of these stakeholders is indeed the firm’s reality. Woe unto the firm that doesn’t understand what its investors, customers, and employees are thinking.

Next: Ensuring Survey Success

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Condition IV: Capability Building

The skills of the workforce and the capabilities of the organization must change to support the change agenda.

Lesson 8: Don’t overlook employees’ beliefs when driving behavior change

McKinsey idea: Requiring behavior changes without understanding what employees believe may not have the desired effect. Behavior stems from personal beliefs, and without understanding those beliefs, mandated behaviors may run counter to employees’ self-perception.

Tenacious Tortoise comment: McKinsey’s example of bankers becoming uncomfortable with becoming salespeople is not convincingly applied in the general case. But it is easy to see that simply telling employees to do something they otherwise wouldn’t do will have less effect than patiently creating an understanding of why the new behavior is desired and understanding and addressing any discomfort that the new behavior creates.

Lesson 9: Skill-building programs aren’t enough

McK: Enterprises engaging in formal training programs in skills required for the change agenda see little effect if the training is treated as a stand-alone event. It is important to provide the opportunity to practice new skills, receive feedback, and share experiences with colleagues reinforces the training and ensures that new skills do not stagnate. Interspersing training and field experience with new skills enables new skills to ripen and mature.

TT: Sounds right, but there needs to be a bit of a reality check here. With increased specialization of knowledge workers, broad-brush training programs for large groups of workers have become far more rare than in the past. Leaders who pay lip service to the idea of training employees in new skills under-invest in training programs and the integration of training with the work itself. Outsourcing of functions to firms with lower labor costs or concentrated skills has decimated enterprise training programs. A surplus in the skilled labor market resulting from higher unemployment raises the incentive for organizations to simply hire proven skills rather than take the risk of training existing workers for new tasks. It seems unlikely that organizations will invest in the carefully-designed training and field integration called for by McKinsey’s authors.

Been There, Done That

In their article, the McKinsey folks have captured and consolidated some important lessons for anyone driving change in organizations. But reading through the article, I was struck with the extent to which these ideas are well-understood in the community of strategy and change professionals that I’ve worked with over the years. When consulting, we’re often in situations where we have to guide the decisions of our clients; big decisions about the strategy itself, but countless smaller decisions about the design of a communication program, how a leader should act in a meeting, how to tell a story, or what to do with incentives. It is easy for me to imagine much agreement and little interest in the lessons here among experienced consultants, simply because they’re already part of the practice of driving change.

What was missing in Kotter’s and later McKinsey’s assessment of the low success rate of change in organizations (see part 1) was the degree of experience in change management in each organization. The common sense lessons offered by McKinsey aren’t common sense to those leaders and managers with little actual experience in driving change. That the majority of change programs are led by persons with little experience is perplexing, that the majority of these change programs fails is not at all surprising. To drive change in the enterprise without the guidance of an experienced facilitator, is simply, ahem, irrational.

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Condition II: Role Modeling

Conventional wisdom says that leaders must visibly behave in ways that reinforce the change agenda, and enlist others with influence to support the cause of change.

Lesson 4: Leaders are biased when seeing themselves

McKinsey idea: Most senior executives understand the concept of role modeling, in the abstract. But they mistakenly believe that they are already exhibiting the necessary behaviors. 360 degree feedback sessions and surveys help executives see beyond their own biased and generous view of themselves as ‘being the change.’

Tenacious Tortoise comment: Some executives view the strategic management process and change programs as a burden on their time – they say, “I need to get back to my real job.” These are the ones who are most likely to miss strategy review meetings, or arrive unprepared. The moment of truth comes when the senior executive either offers leeway and forgiveness, or holds team members fully accountable for their engagement with the process. I’ve seen months of good change program effort derailed when the leader him- or herself opts out of a critical meeting, or worse, is distracted by e-mail and phone calls during the meetings. Of course, these behaviors aren’t visible to rank and file, but the message sent in the leadership team has a profound effect on their subsequent behavior in the organization. This is why the quality of the coaching relationships I am able to build with leadership team members is a good predictor of the overall success of the change program.

Lesson 5: Don’t rely excessively on ‘influencers’

McK: The value of identifying and enlisting ‘influence leaders’ in the enterprise is unquestioned, but don’t view these influencers as the critical path to success. Unexpected members of the rank and file who ‘step-up’ to the change agenda may have more impact when driving change.

TT: In practice, far more energy is invested in developing the strategy than in broadly communicating strategy and performance across the organization. Identified influencers have often achieved that status because of their superior political skills. Enlisting influencers in the cause is no substitute for an effective communication program, and may require significant political concessions to those influencers to ‘buy’ their public support.

Condition III: Reinforcing Mechanisms

Policies, processes, procedures, systems, and incentives are all artifacts of the enterprise that must be modified to reflect the desired future state of the organization. But common sense changes don’t result in common sense behavior when people aren’t rational.

Lesson 6: Money is a costly way to motivate people

McK: Linking desired outcomes to staff compensation has limited impact on motivation. Meaningful links are difficult to establish, both because of low-credibility metrics, and because compensation incentives are usually too small to make a difference. But small, unexpected, often non-monetary rewards can have a disproportionately large effect on satisfaction and motivation.

TT: Compensation is simply not a motivator, it is hygienic, according to Herzberg’s Motivator-Hygiene Theory. Incentive-based compensations are far more difficult to implement successfully than they are to imagine. Fortunately, the frenzy I saw for linking compensation to strategy over the past decade or so has subsided a bit, and given the anxiety of job losses, pay freezes, and forced furloughs, this seems like a good time to resist the urge to establish these connections. Non-monetary rewards and recognition can be a powerful motivator, but institutionalized programs of such recognition can quickly lose effect and credibility. Understanding individual employee motivations is a far better investment of management energy.

Lesson 7: Employees care about fairness

McK: Employees won’t pursue a change agenda they perceive is unfair to customers, suppliers, or other employees. Leaders should spend much more time understanding how employees understand and perceive the impact of the change program on stakeholders. Employees asked to behave in ways they see as unfair to others will ignore or thwart the change agenda.

TT: Wise advice. Extreme pressure resulting from the global economic slowdown is causing most organizations to look at costs, and the impact of cutbacks is being felt by employees and customers everywhere. These realities are inescapable, but asking employees to do things they believe are unjust in the name of company survival, even at the risk of personal job loss, will inflict damage to the organization / employee compact that may take years to repair.

Next: Two final lessons from McKinsey.

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The summary and my comments presented here (in three posts this week) are no substitute for reading the article itself, and it is likely that with some effort you can find a copy to view within your own organization or network of colleagues. My aim is to both entice you to read the article and to engender discussion here.

Despite the plethora of books and articles on the topic of Change Management since the 1996 publication of John Kotter’s Leading Change, McKinsey’s Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller contend that the field of change management hasn’t been very successful. Kotter’s earlier research revealed the only 30% of change programs succeed; McKinsey’s 2008 survey of over 3,000 executives worldwide found that only about one change program in three is successful.

McKinsey’s Emily Lawson and Colin Price offered a framework for influencing attitudes and behavior in their 2003 article The Psychology of Change Management. They said that four common sense conditions are necessary before employees will change their behavior: a compelling story about why the change is necessary, leaders and colleagues modeling the role of change, reinforcing mechanisms to align processes and incentives with the change, and capability building of the skills needed for the change. Common sense, indeed – but the problem is that people aren’t always rational. Aiken and Keller revisited these four conditions to organize their nine new lessons why common sense doesn’t always work.

Condition I: A Compelling Story

Established thinking in change management says that ongoing communication of a compelling reason is a necessary ingredient for change.

Lesson 1: What motivates leaders doesn’t motivate employees

McKinsey idea: Leaders tell stories about change that are company-centric: ‘We can regain our leadership through change, determination, and hard work’ or ‘We’re falling short of our competition, and our survival depends on change.’ But employees have been shown in research to be motivated roughly equally by five factors: social impact, customer impact, company impact, team impact, and self-impact. So the typical change story misses 80% of what workers care about.

Tenacious Tortoise comment: Absolutely! As leaders progress in their careers and rise in their organizations, their own motivations become much more aligned with the company than when they were younger. Leaders think they understand how their employees think, but the fact that they’ve become leaders makes them think differently than rank and file employees. Focus groups in which new strategy messages are tested with employees easily reveal this gap in thinking.

Lesson 2: Let employees write their own story

McK: In a behavioral study, participants given a lottery ticket with a randomly assigned number in willing to sell back those tickets for far less than those who were given the opportunity to select their own number. When people are able to make their own choices, they are far more committed to the outcome.

TT: The success of the balanced scorecard programs I’ve led had a lot to do with the extent to which the cascade process enabled mid-level managers and front-line managers to understand high-level strategy and then express the story (as captured in the cascaded strategy map) in their own words. Facilitators need to strike a careful balance between mandating every word of strategy in the cascade and allowing sub-units of the enterprise complete freedom to go their own way.  

Lesson 3: The story needs to be about both avoiding threat and seizing opportunity

McK: While the ‘deficit-based’ approach (identify and then fix a problem) is the predominant change model taught and used, a ‘constructionist’ approach (discovering, dreaming, and designing solutions around new ideas) has arisen as a reaction to the blame and resistance that results from a purely deficit-based model. Excess emphasis on either model in the change story is risky.

TT: Not a very compelling lesson from McKinsey. It is easy to say that emphasizing either extreme is a bad idea, but they offer no guidance on finding the optimal point between the two extremes. It’s a fine line between beating up people for poor past performance and losing credibility with unconvincing ‘blue sky’ aspirations for greatness.

Next: More lessons from McKinsey.

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