How to make meaning from 11,300 online surveys, according to a research expert
Here at Workplace, we know about work. We know all about the labor-intensive tasks, endless email threads, and legacy IT systems that weigh people down and get in the way of the real work. It’s what drives us to build enterprise tools that bring people together and make work feel less like work.
But we wanted to know more about people.
Aside from the meetings and manual processes that slow everybody down, what are people’s most persistent pain points? What are their most fundamental needs at work, and are they being met? If not, what can we — at Workplace — do to help unlock the full potential of each and every person at work?
Last year, Workplace’s Research team embarked on a mission to unearth insight about the working population. The project lasted nine months and gathered insight from a total of 11,300 people across seven global markets, as well as 112 one-one interviews and 28 focus groups. We sat down with Jo Tenzer, Research Lead at Workplace, for a behind-the-scenes look at Workplace’s biggest research project.
Here, Jo shares the inside scoop on making sense of three key research methodologies, finding the ‘ah-ha’ moment, and turning the research into actionable insight.
Matt Bochenski: To kick things off, let’s start with the basics. Give me an overview of what this research project was and how you got involved?
Jo Tenzer: Well, the reason we did this piece of work was to understand more about the working population. So for Workplace, it’s great how much we understand about the digital ways people work, but the point of this piece of work is to get a much broader understanding of people’s needs at work, their pain points at work, who the types of people are that they collaborate with and so on. The aim was to segment the working population and to get a more holistic understanding of working behavior.
MB: This may seem like an obvious question to us, but why is that interesting or important to Workplace?
JT: For Workplace in particular, when we’re thinking about who our potential customers are, it this research informs us as to how we should be targeting them, how we should be marketing to them, and what we should be building for them. It allows us to be able to fully understand what different types of people need, what their pain points are, and how we can address those within the Workplace product.
MB: How did we go about putting the research together?
JT: First and foremost, it’s a collaborative process. So starting with getting a wide group of people involved, explaining the need and the importance of this type of research. And because we wanted to look at the working population as a whole — not just Workplace users or the Workplace audience that we had at the time — we decided to do it with a vendor who could help us get a representative sample of workers that we could then interview online anonymously via a survey. And once that was done, we could then break down those people down into groups and do a lot of qualitative work to really dig into the needs that people have and the frustrations that they’ve got at the moment. And we did that through a variety of one-to-one interviews and focus groups.
MB: What were some of the biggest challenges of the research process?
JT: One of the biggest challenges was the fact that we wanted to do this so that it was as globally representative as possible. And when you’re doing multiple markets — both qualitative and quantitative work — that takes time. So whilst Facebook and Workplace are very ‘move fast’ environments, this project was almost a nine-month project.
MB: Are there particular moments or stories that you can share to give us some flavor of what it’s really like to be involved in a research project like this?
JT: When you’re doing a project that has three different methodologies — online surveys, one-to-one interviews, and focus groups. So you have to put on two different hats. You’ve got to put on your quantitative hat to make sure that you’ve got a really robust survey and you’re asking the right questions. This enables you to get the understanding and the data you need to form your story.
And then you have to put on your second hat — your qualitative hat — where you’re writing discussion guides and making sure you’re going to be able to ask the right questions in a different way. This allows you to really dig deep into what people are doing and saying. And that qualitative hat is also a bit adaptive. You might hear something new that you want more detail on. You change the discussion guide on the fly so it’s perfect for the focus group interviews that follow. And you can’t forget to inform all the people doing the qualitative research around the globe!
MB: Can you give us a sense of what you’ve found, and how you and the vendor figure it all out? You do nine months of research — tell us what you end up with and how you make sense of all the data.
JT: You start with the 11,300 completed online surveys across seven markets. That’s a significant amount of data, which the vendor ran for us. First, the vendor will apply a weighting scheme to make sure it’s representative of the working population. To be able to truly segment the market the vendor needed to run a number of statistical techniques.
It starts with factor analysis to identify the key elements that differentiate, so you only focus on the features or elements we know will have the most impact. The vendor then ran cluster analysis, which is a classification method that uses a number of mathematical techniques to arrange sets of individuals into clusters of shared needs and attitudes. These techniques tease out the different types of people who work across the world, and we stayed closely involved with the vendor throughout that process.
MB: At the end of all this, do you have an ‘ah-ha’ moment where the insight jumps out at you and you pop champagne corks? How does that moment work?
JT: If we go back to why we did this study, it’s because we wanted to segment the market. Once you’ve got all this survey data and you’re running this factor analysis and cluster analysis — and you literally run it hundreds of times — each time you run it, you have a bit of an untangling moment of like, ‘Does this make sense? Does this look right?’. And then you literally do get that ‘ah-ha’ moment when you have run it hundreds of times and you know that’s it. There might not be champagne corks but it is exciting!
MB: Let’s move to the bit where you tell us what we learned. What was the end result of this nine months of hard work?
JT: Well, just to go back a step, once you’ve had that ‘ah-ha’ moment, that’s when you do the qualitative work and dig deep on each of the segment you’ve identified. The qualitative work really helped us to get a deeper understanding about their needs and wants, drivers and barriers. So for us, we discovered that the working population can really be split into six segments — or different groups of people with different needs and attitudes.
And for Workplace, or any company that focuses on anything within the workplace, that’s super interesting. We took those six segments and we shared the results of that across the business, and what that helped us to do was to prioritize the segments that Workplace was going to focus on for targeting, for marketing and for the product that we’re building.
MB: How did Facebook IQ come into the picture?
JT: For FB IQ, they were doing some work focusing more on Millennials and Baby Boomers at work. And something like this project was super useful for them. When you do a research project like this, you’re asking a lot about needs and attitudes. So aside from the reasons why we did it for Workplace, we were able to look at our data by age group. This meant we could cut the data by Millennials, cut the data by Baby Boomers — and pick out a story for the FB IQ team.
MB: Taking a piece of research and applying it in a completely different context in another part of the company. Does that say something about our culture?
JT: It really does. Think about how we’re saying that in the future of work, everybody is connected to everybody. We’re not just connected across different parts of the company, we’re connected across different countries. The FB IQ team are based over 5,300 miles away. It’s almost as far apart as it gets! We worked fast on the project, they got the data they needed, and as a result, they’ve written a really nice piece of work.
I look at it and I feel really excited by it. When you do a piece of research like this that’s so big — there’s so much in it that you don’t always take everything out. You use research for the purpose that you’ve got it, and then sometimes it can just sit there. So to be able to repurpose it for something else for a different team, and for another team to be able to use it to have an impact is really great.
MB: How do we ensure people’s privacy in this environment?
JT: We wanted to understand the market as a whole. So this piece of research was done with a vendor — with Ipsos MORI — who have the highest of standards when it comes to security accreditation. So for us at Workplace, we have no idea who any of the respondents are and no personally identifying factors.
Jo Tenzer has over a decade of research experience and joined Facebook as a Research Lead in 2013. She currently focuses on research for Workplace by Facebook where she manages projects that drive product and strategy decisions.
