If you work in the internal communications industry, the chances are you would probably describe yourselves as a “words person” rather than a “numbers person”.
Yet capturing, interpreting and responding to data is an essential part of a communications team’s job, particularly when it comes to measuring employee experience and developing an effective strategy to improve it.
To truly diagnose what’s causing chaos in an organisation – and what’s working well – you have to ask questions that delve into the subconscious mind of individuals, and you have to use the right tools to do this so that bias is minimised. In this blog I’ll look at the many different methods for doing this, their advantages and pitfalls, and how they can be effectively combined to inform your employee experience strategy.
Where do you start with data and employee research?
What’s important to remember here is that measurement isn’t the end goal. It simply tells you what to look for next.
Communication is cyclical, which means that how we diagnose the issues inside organisations must be too. It’s why I’m critical of simply sticking with the age-old employee survey as the only source of measurement around organisational health – it is not enough. There has to be conversation to truly diagnose what’s causing the chaos.
Which methods should you use to gather employee insights?
The right methods will differ depending on the size of your organisation, what you want to know, and when you need to know it by.
Sometimes the insight is needed quickly and sometimes it can be done over time. Geography also plays a role – but more so than ever, technology can overcome those barriers.
Remember, the way you ask for the insight will say just as much as the tool you use. If people are going off on stress/sick leave, then an online survey won’t cut it. It will feel faceless and like a tick-box exercise.
Equally, if the people you’re interviewing are vulnerable people, using technology to conduct the interviews won’t work here either.
There’s a lot to consider when choosing the right tool. I’d recommend starting by taking the employee numbers and the reason for the research into account and using these as your two overriding factors.
Here’s my overview of the main research methods for informing an employee communication strategy:
Listening Interviews
What’s important here is the language you use and your focus on listening. Anyone can interview someone, but a good interviewer is actively listening.
Active listening includes:
- Eye contact
- Taking notes
- Mirroring the interviewee
- Creating a safe space for the conversation
- Paying close attention to the words, the tone and the body language
- Delving into specific points made that aren’t on the list of questions
It’s easy to work through a list of questions and make a note of the answers. But if you’re actively listening, you’re taking the person on a journey to help them work their way to the core of the issue.
You’re listening to understand, not just to respond.
Things to be aware of:
For many people this is a good opportunity to vent. If things are bad, they will welcome the chance to moan at someone and share all the things that are wrong with the organisation. It’s important to note individual experiences don’t make up the norm.
Also, make sure you include positive questions – what do you love about working here, who is your friend at work, what do you enjoy about coming to work?
Focus Groups
I always recommend these come after a survey. I use them as a chance to discuss and validate the findings to sense check and delve into the detail a bit.
Tips for conducting focus groups:
- Keep the group to around 10 people
- If you can, have two people facilitating the session to make sure you don’t miss the feedback
- Timings can be flexible, but two hours is the longest
- Contract with the group how it is going to run, the outcomes you’re looking for and how it will be captured
- Give people something to choose between that gives them grounding – for example, ‘if both of these items cost the same which one would you choose?’ This gives you better, more realistic data than just ‘Which one do you prefer?’
Things to be aware of:
Focus groups can be tricky. Be aware that people’s gut reaction to things can’t always be rationalised.
Being mindful and aware of this is important so consider the wording in the questions you use and look out for responses that could be coming from the gut.
Surveys
There are three main types of survey I recommend, based on the work with clients and what they’re trying to find out: employee engagement, internal communications audit and culture tracker:
- The employee engagement survey is designed to combine both general engagement factors and those directly relevant to the current organisational strategy.
- A communications audit survey evidences attitudes to both current communication impact and effectiveness. This provides the foundation for a data-driven approach to creating audience personas and segments and pinpointing the ideal communications channel infrastructure and usage.
- The culture tracker is delivered through team leaders or organisational managers, with questions focused on specific change objectives. Team members answer a few key questions, pinpointing strengths and opportunities for change within the team. This can be used on a quarterly, half-yearly or annual basis.
Things to be aware of:
Sometimes the data only shines a light on certain areas. If you ask about toothache but don’t ask about a headache you’re only going to know about the toothache and the headache will be missed. Surveys can easily miss some of the key things that need to be discussed.
Context is also important. Asking people about the future of the organisation in a year of growth and then again a year later after redundancies, will bring different answers. Make a note of what is going on inside the organisation at the time.
Be mindful of sampling error. If you ask five people outside one office, you’ll get answers from just those people. It might be better to ask people from different locations, or different levels in the organisation.
You have to measure things with a reasonable frequency and consistency. As you’re measuring attitudes to things, you’re going to need data spread out over time to look at trends and make sure the data isn’t skewed too much.
Don’t stop doing surveys doing times of crisis – they can be even more important then. It is critically important to understand, in a direct, unfiltered way, what your people are experiencing in the moment. It is also important to balance the ‘direction’ of communications, as there has likely been a large amount of outbound and little ‘inbound’ content.
Polls
Polls provide fast and effective feedback making them an excellent tool for pulse-checks and gauging immediate reactions to specific issues. They’re particularly useful for organisations looking to boost engagement with new digital platforms or initiatives, as they can be integrated into the adoption journey, helping to baseline responses and encourage participation.
Polls can also be part of the communication process itself, serving as both a feedback mechanism and a way to focus employees’ attention on specific topics. When used regularly, polls can become a valuable component of the overall communication strategy, providing ongoing insights that help shape decisions.
Things to be aware of
The simplicity and speed of polls can also be their downfall. Poll questions should always be informed and contextualised by these other types of feedback. Without careful design, poll questions can be misinterpreted, leading to misleading results.
A regular cadence is important for poll questions, both to avoid response fatigue, and also to enable users to anticipate when poll questions will appear.
Getting the right mix of methods
Knowing which tool to use, and when to use it, comes with years of practice and an understanding of those who are taking part. For example, when combining a survey with a listening interview, you need to consider the order of them and the questions you ask.
Making sure the approach to the diagnosis is bespoke to the organisation and the specific chaotic issues is hugely important. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach, and where we try to do that, we suffer from results that don’t help us to move forward.
Extracting the data
One of the greatest challenges in employee research is turning subjective experiences into objective data that can be analysed and acted upon. This is where tools like the Likert scale come in, allowing organisations to quantify feelings and opinions in a way that can be tracked over time and compared across different groups.
But conducting effective employee research is about more than just gathering data, it’s about understanding the story behind the numbers. While surveys and polls can provide valuable insights, they are often lagging indicators—they tell you what has already happened, but not necessarily why it happened or how to prevent it in the future. To get a complete picture, this data must be complemented with the insights gained from conversations – in interviews, focus groups, and other methods that capture the richness of employee experiences.
It’s important to remember the huge role that context plays too. Simple numbers won’t tell you anything about the background to when the data was captured. For example, a survey conducted after a stressful commute or a difficult day at home may yield very different results than one conducted on a good day.
If you’d like help with employee experience research in your organisation drop our team an email info@redefiningcomms.com. This blog was written based on the chapter about data and diagnostics in my book Influential Internal Communication.
