How can I derive measures from the results of a survey?

Insights from Dennis – 10/21

What do you do when you have a stone chip on your windshield?

Right, you drive to a garage and have the windshield repaired or replaced. Very obvious.

If you have friends over in the evening and realize that you have no wine or beer left at home, what do you do then?

Right, you go to the nearest supermarket and get the drinks for the evening.

And what do you do when an employee quits?

You hire a new employee. But is that cool? No!

The more sensible question would be: What can you do so that you don’t lose an employee and don’t have to hire a new one? Therefore, the question should not be: What do we do when an employee quits, but: What do we do so that NO employee quits.

A common reason for resignations in companies is a lack of employee motivation. Unmotivated employees cost your company twice, both monetarily and through a lower willingness to perform. Quitting disrupts processes and adds workload. So instead of losing good colleagues and employees, it makes sense to increase employee motivation and thereby avoid layoffs.

Two months ago, Dennis announced that easyfeedback would be launching a new survey template on the topic of employee motivation. Dennis has dealt intensively with the topic in advance and designed questions that can be used to measure employee motivation. The first question is relatively obvious: “Dear employee, do you come to work motivated in the morning?” The answer can now be positive or negative.

But then Dennis immediately thought of the next question: why is it like that? So why is the employee motivated, i.e. what are we already doing well or why is the employee not motivated, what is he missing and where do we have to become active?

And here we return to the original topic, namely how to derive meaningful measures from the results of a survey in order to bring about an improvement and, in this case, to increase employee motivation.

Dennis has put together two tips for you in this regard. So here we go:

Tip 1: Determine the ACTUAL and TARGET situation

As a general rule, always ask about the current situation first. How are things going at the moment? Are the employees motivated or rather demotivated? Of course, this can also be applied to other areas, for example, when I talk about customer satisfaction. Only if I know the current state can I ask further, namely about the target state or the why. Why is the employee satisfied or dissatisfied? What is already going well or what is missing? And only if I know what my employees or customers want can I try to derive measures to get closer to this goal.

The why does not have to be included in every question or answer option; it is possible to work with filters here. If someone states in the survey that they are dissatisfied with an area, you should of course ask why they are dissatisfied. If someone is satisfied, on the other hand, the question of why is dispensable. For things that are already going well, improvement is not necessary. At this point, we rather look at the points that are not going well and need an adjustment.

Tip 2: Action planning with ICE score

Through the questions mentioned in tip 1, you get quite a bit of info. Now it is a matter of crystallizing the measures from this pot of information that have the strongest impact. The ICE score can help you with this.

The principle of the ICE score is that you measure a possible measure on the basis of three scores. You assign points between 1 (low) and 10 (high).

Impact: How high is the impact of this measure likely to be?
Confidence: How confident am I that this measure will have the desired effect?
Ease: How easy is this measure to implement (time required, know-how)?

Once you have determined all three values, you calculate an average value for the measure. You do this for all measures and can then prioritize them based on the average value. The measures with the highest values can then be implemented. This is how you approach your action planning in a structured way.

We hope today’s insights will help you with your next survey. Maybe you can even look back at past surveys, prioritize the results with the ICE score, and find out which measures are the most relevant. If you have already implemented measures, you can check again whether the effect has really been as you hoped.