Make Data Work For You

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:

1. A great analytical tool built specifically for organizational analysis
2. Competency in in analysis, change management, alignment
3. 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.

Brainstorming for Survey Design

Force field Analysis is a wonderful brainstorming tool to elicit from your survey team members the key drivers and barriers of our organization. Force Field Analysis involves listing, and then examining, the factors that can help implement the change and those that can hinder it. This lays the groundwork for creating the survey's Critical Success Factors and items. Force Field analysis is based on the law of physics that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A state of equilibrium is established between these two sets of contending forces. Change one force on either side and the situation changes-unless met by a new contrary force of equal strength.


This analysis technique is more than a decision-making technique. When used creatively , it identifies, for your organization, the key drivers to get you where you want to be (your Main Thing) as well as your barriers of getting there.
 
Here are the four steps for sucessful Force Field Analysis:
 
STEP 1: Identify the Main Thing on a flip chart on the far right and your present state on the left.


STEP 2: With a brainstorming technique, starting on the left side, go around the room and offer ideas how to go from where you are to the MT. All ideas are written down without any dialogue and keep adding ideas until each member passes.

STEP 3: Now identify the barriers you feel that would prevent you from reaching the goals of the MT for each of the drivers.

STEP 4: Make a list of all drivers and barriers on a clean paper, which list will be your guide in identifying the Categories, Factors and Items. Each of the “drivers” or “restrainers” will be in corporate into the survey design. Each of the items are directly correlated to the success of achieving the corporate vision.