The survey business has many faces, from the simple Survey Monkey polls to the advanced technology sites with indepth statistical analysis reports only trained experts can understand. The former will always have a place in organizations. Companies can gravitate to these types of polling surveys because they are cheap and many think merely focusing on low scores in a pie chart is the pathway to better a company. Unfortunately for the companies, this is never the case. There is a big difference between polling a company to find out what percentage of people are happy and using a sophisticated survey tool to develop prioritized action plans for each workgroup/manager.
Diagnostic tools that are built strictly for business transformation will ALWAYS provide better results than those that can also be used to find the percentage of students who prefer chicken nuggets to hot dogs in the cafeteria. Businesses require three competencies:
- A great analytical tool built specifically for organizational analysis
- Competency in in analysis, change management, alignment
- An implementation plan that will breed success.
Be innovative. These skills and tools must be learned, tested, and adapted for clients. If there is one thing you must remember about surveys, it is that data is easy to get, but change from data is not.
