In 2008, after reading the fantastic book “First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently” by Gallop, it gave me the idea to pick a handful of questions listed in the Appendix, and send a quarterly anonymous survey to the team in each business I managed.
The results were enlightening for the leadership and management team. We could easily gauge how satisfied the team was with our management and communication, and we found a lot of big and small things to change around the business.
Successful business owners constantly seek feedback on their business – how to improve the experience for customers, and increase profits. Often, feedback from the team is overlooked yet it is a rich source of change. It can be confronting if your ego is not in check, but that’s not effective. In your constant drive to make your business better, tap into the many eyes and ears around the place with this simple survey.
Benefits of sending a quarterly anonymous team survey
- Your team have a safe, anonymous way to provide you and the rest of the leadership team, honest feedback about your performance, the wider team and the business in general
- Small and big changes to make in your business can be identified, especially if the bulk of the team are really unhappy
- It is a simple measure on how your management team is performing – are they working with, and managing their people effectively
- You can be alerted to toxic team members or poor managers
Some questions to ask
- How likely are you to recommend working here to a friend or colleague (0 being extremely unlikely and 10 extremely likely)
- Do you know what is expected of you at work?
- At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
- In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for good work?
- Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
- Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
- At work, do your opinions seem to count?
- Does the mission/purpose of the company make you feel like your work is important?
- Are your co-workers committed to doing quality work?
- In the last three months, have you talked with someone about your progress?
- At work, have you had the opportunities to learn and grow?
- What three words would you use to describe our workplace?
- What one thing can we change about the business?
- Since the last survey have you seriously thought about working elsewhere? If so, why?
- Any other feedback or comments?
The first question is the Net Promoter Score. That second last question is a really powerful and telling one. Watch your management team cringe if a lot of people answer YES to this, and then work with them to understand why the team is so unhappy to work in your business.
We use 15 – 20 questions in the anonymous surveys we send, and they rarely change so we have a baseline to compare our performance. Many of the questions are YES/NO or out of 5 or 10, so it can take less than 15 minutes for a team member to complete.
As you will see, most of their time completing the survey goes into the last deliberately open question – “any other feedback?”. This is where the gold flows. If a team member is really unhappy, they download here.
You can pick up trends in lack of communication by the leadership and management team, toxic or underperforming team members and gauge the overall internal vibe of your growing business.
The survey takes less than an hour to initially set up (send it using MailChimp or Google Forms) and every quarter you need no more than an hour to re-issue and read through the results. That is a small investment of your leadership time to make your team feel heard, communicated with and unlock small and big changes in your growing business.
This is an article for Business Blindspots Tasmania. To ensure you receive regular updates from expert business advisers across a range of areas follow our LinkedIn Group
