In this episode, Jenni talks to Benjamin Ellis from SocialOptic, one of our collective partners. He talks through how collecting the right type of data about your organisation and employees will help you to plug-in and find the answers you need. It’s all about measuring to take action.
Benjamin shares some great tips to help reduce the chaos and move towards calm through gathering and understanding the right data.
Benjamin has worked with us on our research projects around line managers and deskless workers. Our Remotely Interested 2023 research report is due out in September 2023 and Social Optic are our data partners for the survey. They also work with us on some legacy client projects that are digital/technically strategic, and you’ll find Benjamin talking about culture and measurement on our blog Measuring culture in organisations
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
Get in touch with Benjamin through SocialOptic or on Twitter under @benjaminellis or via LinkedIn
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be joined by Benjamin Ellis, who is the Managing Director of Social Optic and someone I have worked with for a number of years. In fact, I think it’s over 15 years now, which tells you a little bit about my age and Benjamin’s. Benjamin holds a degree in electronic engineering. He’s got a postgraduate certificate in education in science and technology. He has got a postgraduate diploma in psychology, he’s contributed to books, and as I said, he’s the Managing Director of Social Optic, which is an innovative technology company dedicated to helping people work together by transforming opinions into actionable insights.
Hello, Benjamin.
Hello, Jenni. Good to be here.
Thank you for coming along.
So, as is the way with this podcast, we’re going to talk about data and insights and the chaos that can come from not having them in organisations and where people may need to think differently in order to bring a sense of calm and how data can kind of help them do that. But I think what’s important is to think about what data is first, because I think to anybody listening, it could be any number of things.
When you talk about data, what is it?
well, that sounds like a good place to start. So, in reality, data is just the ones and zeros and data on its own isn’t actually that useful to people. What you need is data with some structure around it in context, and that starts to make it information, and it starts to become useful. But actually, you need that information in the context of what you already know and understand. And that’s what makes it knowledge. And that’s what you can start to use to make a difference. So, really, the point of collecting data, the useful point, is to turn it into information that can become knowledge.
Because really, what you’re trying to do with data, at least in our context, is build your understanding of the system, so the organisation or the customers, and how it works, how it responds to change and how it is changing. Because otherwise, it’s just numbers. And whilst they might be very pretty, and you can make art out of them, that’s not going to help you run your organisation more effectively.
How can data be causing chaos in organisations?
So, there are lots of organisations that I’ve worked with, and you’ve worked with, that maybe don’t have very much data, or don’t have very much insight. And is that where the chaos comes from for organisations? Is it not having the data and insight, or is it having data and insight that’s just pretty numbers, like you were saying? Like, what is it that could be causing some of that chaos in organisations?
So, I think it’s worth stepping back for a second and thinking about data and information and change. Because in terms of where chaos happens, it’s not just not understanding what’s going off, it’s mistreating the system. So, organisations tend to fall into one of two camps. Either they change too slowly, so they need to change, but they’re not changing because they don’t understand that the situation’s changed, that they need to react. Or they’re changing too quickly. So, they’re trying to do lots and lots of change, and the system’s not able to absorb that change.
So, one of the reasons for having good data is to understand how is the organisation changing, and then how does it respond to change? Because every organisation has an optimal rate of change. If you move it too fast, it becomes very chaotic. Interestingly, if you don’t move it fast enough, the organisation will create its own change for you, and that will be undirected and unaligned. So it is about having enough data to know what’s the situation, how quickly are things changing, is that change that we want to happen? Where we’re creating change, is the organisation or the system responding the way that we expect, or are unexpected things happening? And again, that’s okay, because part of the process is learning. So the reason we’re collecting the data is not just for the data’s sake or that change, it helps us ask other questions. Oh, that’s interesting. When we do this thing, this unexpected thing happens, why is that?
We can collect some more data, and then we start to understand, oh, actually, the organisation works in a slightly different way than I thought, or this set of teams respond to these types of things, but not these types of things, or they’re missing this piece of structure.
And again, the point here is to build up an understanding of your organisation or your customers so that you can understand very quickly when change happens. Predictively, this is what’s going to happen. This is what I’m going to do. Okay, is the thing that I’m doing actually having the effect I expected? If it is, press on. If it’s not, change and adapt.
And sometimes people talk about the fact that they can make data tell any story they want it to tell. And there’s an ethical element to that for me in terms of when we look at data and how we might manipulate it to maybe tell a story we want to tell.
I think the old quote is, you can torture the data to say anything that you want. And it’s very true. And a lot of people talk about data as if it’s inherently scientific. And it’s not scientific, and to apply the scientific methods to it. And a lot of that is about disproving things, what’s called the null hypothesis. So it’s not just collecting data to prove what you think is happening. The old classic, I searched Google five times and I found 15 articles that sound exactly right. It’s collecting the data that tells you when it’s not working.
And that’s quite hard for a lot of organisations because people tend to want to measure things that make them look good.
And we don’t want to measure things that make us look bad. I think that’s the work. When we work together doing research and insight, it’s always that uncomfortableness that we’re looking for to kind of help people change.
And if you don’t understand what’s wrong, you’re not going to be able to fix it. And that’s a problem with a lot of organisations, the wilfully not looking. You need to look and understand what is wrong here that we need to change. Is it getting better? And again, the process of collecting that evidence. The first time around can be quite scary for people.
But if you don’t do that, you’re not going to make things better. If you just look for the positive reinforcement, you’re actually going to make things worse because you start to get a tunnel vision around, well, everyone says this organisation is great. We give them 50 pounds every time we complete a customer satisfaction survey and the cuddly toy if they give us 10 out of 10. So it’s avoiding that kind of thing and actually making sure that the data is telling you what is not working as much as it’s telling you what is working.
I love that.
How can you use data to shift from chaos to calm?
And we’ve talked a bit before about the usefulness of data. And I want to take us into looking at how you shift from that kind of maybe chaotic space into the calm. But there’s something about data and usefulness which might link us into a bit of that as well in terms of making sure that
You’re not just measuring things that are nice to measure. I know we’ve just talked about the fact that they’ve got to be things that are proving or disproving or they’re a bit uncomfortable, but people do seem to get stuck with measuring things for measuring sake. I spend a lot of time saying “so what” to people when they’re giving me their data and insight. And I know in my book when I interviewed you for that, we talked about people measuring how bacon-y an organisation is as an example. I’ll pop a link in the show notes to that because it’s a pointless measure and I often come back to that for employee engagement of 65% engagement. So what? What’s your view on that?
So, it’s interesting that there is a trend now where people are starting to try and measure more things, but a lot of it slips into the analytics bucket. And analytics can be good and useful, but they’re a particular sort of data. So, I’ve seen some company gold dashboards in recent times of HR analytics of ratios of various things, the amount of coffee drunk relative to the number of HR professionals. They’re not necessarily going to help you. And most organisations are relatively overweight in what I would call instrumented measures. So, think numbers you can pull off of systems. Yeah, we’ve created this many new email addresses and great.
What you actually need are the experiential and attitudinal measures. So, what are people thinking and feeling? And particularly the attitudes, most organisations are very light on that. And if you look at any theory of change, pick any one of them, they come down to what are people’s attitudes that then lead to the behaviours.
So, if you don’t understand their attitudes and you don’t understand what they’re seeing and experiencing, you’re unlikely to create successful change. And if you do put a change program in place, you’re not actually going to know if it’s doing anything. The nice thing about those attitudinal measures is they tend to be leading measures. They change very quickly. They’re very sensitive. So, if you put a program in place, if you’re asking people, have the behaviours changed? How do you feel about this thing?
Those answers will move quickly. So, you’ve got sensitive data. Most of the things organisations measure lagging measures, you know, things like revenue, for example, is great, but it’s very after the fact, you know, it’s turning the ship after you’ve seen the iceberg. So, really want to try and look a bit further ahead, you know, how confident are we feeling? What are you seeing? What are you experiencing? That kind of data is really what gives you the insight as to what’s going off in the organisation. How healthy is it? How is it reacting to the change?
What three things to consider with data and insight?
Nice. And if you were to give people maybe sort of just three, three things to think about when it comes to data and insights, what would be maybe those three things for people if they’re looking at this at the moment? Three things.
1. Amount
I’ll divide that into a 1A and 1B. So, how often are you collecting data? So there is a temptation to try and collect it too quickly or too frequently. Sometimes, there’s no point asking people at the end of every day, how is your relationship with your manager?
You’re just going to annoy them because it’s not going to meaningfully change on a day-to-day basis, or not in a way that measurement is going to be useful to you. Not over measuring in terms of the information you gather as well. So there’s no point giving people a 400 question questionnaire, focus down on what is it that I need and how quickly can I action this? And that determines how much. So, amounts in terms of frequency and depth of data.
2. Communicate
The second one is making sure that you communicate that as well so that people have heard that you’ve heard. And too often people don’t close that loop. It’s really important in the employee context, just that act of demonstrating, “Hey, we’re paying attention to this. We see.” Drives behavioural change, but also it’s really important in terms of the quality of data that you capture.
Something like a customer experience survey. If people think that you’re just going to put that in the drawer, people are not going to invest time in answering it. If they see that real change happens as a result of how they answer that survey, they’re going to give you better quality data.
3. Action it
And it does sound quite basic, but it’s amazing. We’re putting a lot in place at the moment to help people build systems to action the data and to measure how they’re actioning it. Because there’s no point collecting the data if you’re not going to use it to change what you do. And that’s the loop to close. You know, actually have an action plan after you’ve collected it. What are we going to do? What are we going to change? And then how will we know if that has worked or not?
And that’s what closes the loop for you. And that’s going to bring the system back to a stable state of change. I love that.
We talk so much about actions and survey fatigue coming from the fact that people aren’t taking actions. And that’s where it’s sort of coming from. And I think that’s such a perfect tip for people, that making sure you can actually do something with it, because we see it in our organisation as well, that people just aren’t, aren’t doing it.
Thank you for listening!
So, thank you so much for coming along today. And if people do want to get in touch with you, where’s the best place for them to do that? So you can find me via the Social Optic website. Or Benjamin Ellis on Twitter, if that’s still a thing. And LinkedIn as well. I love to hear from people. Perfect. So we’ll pop links to all of those in the show notes. And thank you again for coming along.
So in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about employee experience with Lucy Kemp from our collective team. And Lucy’s worked with multiple startups and rapidly growing organisations, helping them improve the experience for employees.
So thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation. So, please do join our community and mailing list from the link in the show notes. We’ll see you next time.
