Executive Driven Survey Overview

Leading through Listening

TalentMap is committed to improving organizations by helping their leaders collect, interpret, and leverage employee feedback. This is what we mean by “leading through listening.” Our clients’ survey programs contribute value to their organizations only when leaders use the results to take meaningful action. We continuously hear that what happens after the survey – interpreting, clarifying, prioritizing, planning, and acting – is where executives and survey program leaders need the most help. Yet, that’s where the ROI is.

The best way to remedy what happens AFTER the survey is to involve your Senior-Most Leader (i.e., CEO, CAO, Owner) and their direct reports BEFORE the survey is even designed.

At TalentMap, we call this an Executive Driven Survey. Having your executive team drive the survey includes the following preparation:

• Ensuring the executives know they own the survey, not HR.

• Aligning the survey content and report system (Compass) to the executives’ priorities, including the company strategy, change initiatives, external headwinds, and internal challenges.

• Showcasing the executives in innovative communications via video recordings, internal messaging platforms, live meetings, and emails.

• Planting seeds for executives to collaborate with employees across silos and levels as part of a transparent and iterative action planning process.

• Illuminating for executives the idea that survey responses are not about making employees “happy” but rather they are about finding shared dissatisfaction with the status quo so that the organization is primed for tackling change.

As a survey program owner in HR, what do you gain from an Executive Driven Survey?

At the most basic level, involving your executives in promoting the survey is likely to influence your participation rate for the survey. But there is so much more potential.

• If you want HR to have a seat at the table, you need to make the survey more strategic and business focused. Connecting survey content to organizational performance metrics, strategic planning, and/or efficiency goals makes the survey more than “just an HR activity” about “making people happy.”

• If you are trying to spur more sustained change effort from your leadership team after the survey reports go out, you need to get commitment from your executive team on achieving a new (or existing!) desired outcome that is related to employee feedback from the survey. Building ongoing dialogue with the executive team early in the survey process lets you prepare them for a commitment to demonstrate change in response to feedback.

• If you want to foster a stronger relationship with the executive team, one where you are a trusted internal consultant for people strategy, then you need to work with the executive team more on high-profile HR activities. The employee survey is highly visible, and very important in showing what is important while creating upward feedback that leaders need to know about.

• If you need to build trust between and among leaders and the workforce, then giving the executives the responsibility for communicating and reacting to survey results provides the opportunity for them to take that step forward.

What Steps Are Involved to have an Executive Driven Survey?

Your executives need to take a preliminary Strategic Assessment that will be used for a Strategic Engagement session with them, where a TalentMap consultant will leverage the information to explain (a) how the engagement survey will connect with their interests, (b) how they can convey their ownership of the survey process to employees, (c) what the Executive Presentation of results will be like (after the survey), and best practice for what the executive team needs to do to create improvements from the survey results.

• Take the preliminary Strategic Assessment online from TalentMap (10 minutes).

• Participate in the Strategic Engagement session before the survey is launched (and preferably before the survey content must be finalized – 1 hour).

• Commit to pre-survey communication messaging (1-2 hours total).

• Commit to communicating and reacting to survey results in a medium accessible to all employees (2 hours).

• Commit to a transparent, collaborative, and iterative action stage related to just one organization-wide issue raised by the survey feedback (and related to business performance).

• Commit to ongoing updates for employees on progress.