In the first installments of our Change Management series, we took an in-depth look at the task of gathering feedback and explored some of the most effective techniques. In this final post in the series, we will delve into two of our favorite tools and how to leverage information gained using them.
The Survey Solution
As we’ve mentioned, Collaborative Solutions has experience with soliciting and analyzing customer change management data. Recently, one of our larger customers (20,000+ employees) wanted to gauge the initial feelings of stakeholders affected by Workday implementation. A small group was chosen to represent the larger user community. For this customer, we leveraged Survey Monkey, a web-based tool that provides many options to create simple or complex surveys quickly, allows direct, web-based responses, and analyzes and reports results directly on the website.
In our experience, Survey Monkey is exceptionally easy to use. We created eight, 8-12 question surveys using a variety of question types in less than an hour and then emailed survey-specific URLs to stakeholders. Should the need arise, Survey Monkey also allows an administrator to manually enter data for stakeholders that, for whatever reason, are unable to complete the survey online.
Survey Monkey makes analysis and reporting easy and user-friendly for survey administrators. You can display data as a bar chart, line chart, pie chart, or variations of each. In addition, you can export survey results into meaningful reports that slice and dice data to your preference.
Survey Monkey may not be the best choice for every situation, but for this customer it proved very effective. Just remember to analyze the specific situation so you can choose the best method to meet your specific needs.
The Focus Group Solution
In another situation, Collaborative Solutions worked with a large customer who elected to utilize a focus group of stakeholders. This customer chose stakeholder attendees from throughout the organization, selecting members from a wide variety of roles, responsibilities, and tenures, including people who had worked there for less than a year to some who had been at the organization for more than 20 years.
The customer planned different topics to discuss and developed questions to guide the conversation. During the focus group, the customer used large flip charts to capture participant feedback. In this case, the customer drew a four-quadrant chart representing four categories of topics. Participants wrote responses on sticky notes and posted them to the flip chart within the appropriate quadrants.
What we learned surprised both us and the customer. In this case, the customer discovered that Workday Time Tracking would be a major change for this organization, which had previously maintained a timekeeper role to manually input hard-copy timecards at the end of each week. Through facilitated conversation, we discovered unexpectedly that many employees were not following current procedures to fill out standard time cards. In fact, some employees were writing hours down on napkins that were often illegible and subject to being torn. As a result, the Office Manager was forced to figure out who worked what hours on what day by following up with employees or simply guessing, which resulted in inaccurate timekeeping. These timekeeping inaccuracies in turn affected payroll, financials, and all metrics related to time actually worked during a given day or week.
With this information, the customer decided to begin immediately enforcing current rules and guidelines by auditing time cards randomly, ahead of the Workday Time Tracking rollout. Changing behavior in advance would help facilitate change when the time came for the new system implementation. Needless to say, this information would not have been uncovered by a less personal feedback gathering method.
In just these two case studies alone, it’s easy to see the importance of choosing the correct feedback mechanism and being able to accurately and effectively interpret the data.