Back and listening
Summer is almost over and we are getting back on a fast and adaptable rhythm in all organisations. It is not just a time for action, it is also a time for listening and colect critical information concerning much more than financial input to close our next year’s budget.
Looking beyond the numbers, we need to consult, involve and design our policies and practices based on our people’s perceptions and experience.
At Bound we often observe that some organisations tend to postpone listening in demanding times and we necessarily advise all managers to consider that these are the most important times to implement an organisational assessment.
The organisational assessment methodology, tools and post-survey implementation plan are not necessarily the same for all contexts, and understanding the key differences of specific organisational surveys seems to be critical to have a strategic and actionable outcome from any assessment.
The typical concern is that people tend to fulfil too many surveys already and when considering people focused organisational assessments they all seem to measure similar dimensions. First thing is to define what is the goal of implementing this survey, at this particular moment, and it needs to be much more than to comply with specific legal or quality standards, it should be relevant and focused on specific transformation or learning outcomes the organisations is aiming to achieve.
Without a clear argument for why it is important to colect feedback we will not engage people at all. Secondly, in most cases people haven’t seen any learnings or transformation resulting from a past assessment and they assume that their own opinion actually has not being taken into account at all by management.
When considering health outcomes without a clear assessment we are at mercy of health and wellbeing trends. We are not piloting or preventing at all and as we have observed in recent months people are getting worse, physically and mentally. Also, turnover, despite the financial situation, has never been higher across sectors and industries.
It is definitely a time to rethink our approach to surveying our people and considering next year plan, defining what will be the critical listening periods and what focus should these assessments have. Being intentional, data driven and have a clear commitment to make the necessary changes or adjustments. We are tired of change but if we don’t change our people’s policies and practices our human sustainability is actually endangered.
So in this edition of our review we will help you to clearly distinguish different type of organisational surveys and become more confident on their specific goals and outputs on our blog post. We also suggest a great book “Employee Surveys That Work: Improving Design, Use, and Organizational Impact” by Ale Levenson, and to watch an inspiring great Ted Talk by Marc Anner about his radical approach to listen and fight for workers rights “Defending Workers’ Rights, From Trauma to Empowerment”.
Listening will be a critical competitive advantage to enable caring and inclusive working conditions for all, so we need to boldly prepare for the next organisational cycle. Let’s do it!
Do take part in this conversation by leaving a comment on our blog or replying to hello@bound.health
Managing Partner @ Bound.Health
