We are excited to introduce the first batch of Data Filler and Diagnostic Surveys — designed to make collecting employees qualitative inputs a breeze.
While speaking with our current and future (wink, wink) customers about how they collect opinions and sentiment in their orgs, we would almost always hear about the same pain points.
“I don’t like having a separate survey tool because:
- I need to do everything manually: adding contacts, sending, collecting data, making sure that everything’s working…
- I need to find and buy, or design questionnaire on my own
- I need to crunch collected data, often requiring someone’s engineering help
- Then I need a dedicated system to store the results (usually spreadsheets)
- I need a way to represent the results (usually powerpoint)
- In order to avoid data snapshots, I need to repeat this often
- Even when I get results, I am having trouble understanding the causes of those responses (“why is my e-NPS dropping, while other indicators seem to be static?”)
- On top of all of this, data confidentiality might be an issue as I can’t guarantee that throughout the whole process”
That’s why we streamlined the whole process with Surveys. Send some of the best-in-class, peer-reviewed surveys and get visualized results paired with your data, guaranteeing your employee anonymity the whole time.
You can run two different types of surveys on Orgnostic platform: Data Filler and Diagnostic Surveys.
Let’s dive in and learn more about each group.
“I am convinced that the present and future success of producing value from surveys involves combining survey data with systems data.”
—Mike West
Data Filler Surveys
Data Fillers are automated micro-surveys that come in two flavors: “Onboarding” and “Exit”. Turn them on once, and forget about them.
Sending onboarding or exit surveys, each time a newcomer joins the team or someone leaves the company, is tedious work. Since Orgnostic’s platform is connected to your HRIS, an appropriate survey will be triggered with each employee status change.
Onboarding is aiming to:
- Assess your new employee’s and their direct manager’s expectations and clarity of pre-hiring communication
- Mutually reflect on initial expectations and experiences after the first 90 days of the employee’s engagement — this is when the follow up survey is sent
Inputs from this survey will fill your data for metrics such as: Skillset Levels at Hiring, Time to Productivity, Quality of Onboarding, Quality of Hire, and Quality of Source.
Exit has several goals as well:
- Understand the reasons and motivations behind your employees’ departures
- Learn where your employees are leaving to and whether you could have prevented it
- Understand the skill gap that is created by your employees’ departure
Inputs from this survey will gather the data to track metrics such as:
Exit Reasons, Regrettable Leaves, and the Employee Lifecycle.
But how do you preserve answer anonymity when these surveys are sent to individuals?
That’s a good question right there. Each survey question feeds one or more specific Story metrics. Thus, you’ll never be presented with the view which shows who ticked which box. But there’s another catch here tho: these metrics only get updated once there are enough answers in the pool that a single answer is untraceable.
Diagnostic Surveys
Diagnostic Surveys are a set of the most well-researched surveys stemming from I/O psychology powerhouses such as Denison Consulting, 6 Team Conditions, Harvard University and University of Michigan.
Run any of 5 different surveys:
1/ Culture
The Culture Survey is a 48-question (~17 minutes long) survey designed to assess the state of organizational dynamics that link with business performance. To diagnose the state of culture in your company we use Denison’s Culture model and their Denison Organizational Culture Survey (DOCS) instrument. This instrument is the most widely used and research validated diagnostic tool for establishing the link between organizational culture and company effectiveness.
This survey answers how your company manages the trade-off between two dynamics: 1) stability and flexibility and 2) internal and external focus.
Learn how the underlying beliefs and assumptions of your employees translate into these high-level questions:
- Do we know where we are going?
- Are we listening to the marketplace?
- Are our people aligned and empowered?
- Does our system create leverage?
2/ Team Effectiveness
The Team Effectiveness Survey is a 23-question (~5 minutes) survey designed to assess team dynamics that lead to great team performance. Our Team Effectiveness Survey is a version of the Team Diagnostic Survey developed at Harvard by Drs Ruth Wageman, J. Richard Hackman, and Erin Lehman.
The model states 6 conditions that exist prior to superior team performances. These conditions are separated into groups that are called the Essentials and the Enablers.
Learn how to improve team design practices and provide your front-line and top-level managers a blueprint for team interventions. Use the scores gathered in this survey to answer:
- What are your teams’ greatest strengths?
- Which scores are most concerning?
- How do I prioritize actions to achieve better team performance?
3/ Employee Wellbeing
The Employee Wellbeing Survey is a 17-question (~3 minutes) survey designed to assess how your employees feel about engagement, burnout, and safety at work. This survey is conceptualized on engagement-burnout theory measured by Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, and Maslach’s Burnout Index and embellished with constructs such as Psychological Safety, popularized by the work of Dr. Amy Edmondson at Harvard.
Stress at work can lead to more absenteeism, turnover, and long-term, harmful effects on your employees’ overall health. Getting the upper hand with employee wellbeing helps you build a more sustainable business environment.
Learn how well your employees feel at work and use that output data to find:
- What team dynamics and processes lead to lower engagement or higher burnout risk?
- What is the impact of burnout symptoms on performance?
- How well are your employees adapting to organizational changes?
- Do employees feel safe expressing opinions and attitudes?
4/ Talent Management
The Talent Management Survey is a 7-item (~4 minutes) questionnaire designed to quickly assess vital qualitative features related to your talent management processes, mainly: rewards system fairness, performance accountability, and information flow. The Talent Management Survey is inspired by Dr. Dave Ulrich’s work on the Leadership Capital Index and measurements designed to capture the value of talent management systems.
The survey helps you fill in the qualitative gaps that complete the story of your employees’ lifecycles in, through, and out of your company. Use it to find out:
- How fair is your compensation system?
- How efficient is your performance management system?
- How purposeful is your information sharing system?
5/ e-NPS
The Employee Net Promoter Score Survey, or e-NPS, is a two-question (~3 minutes) survey to assess how likely your employees are to recommend your company as a great place to work. E-NPS is based on Net Promoter Score, which is a measurement used to assess customer loyalty.
The most important feature of e-NPS is that it is a quick and straightforward thing to measure. It is easy to reference and compare, but it should be used along with other metrics from the talent management, total rewards, and turnover sections to get a wider picture of your employee experience.
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Contrary to Data Fillers, which are triggered by an event (i.e., an employee joining or leaving the organisation), these surveys have their own, more transparent lifecycle — preparation, communication, sending, input collection, and visualization.
To have a successful run of any diagnostic survey, we suggest:
- Prepare before sending it out. Speak with your CEO and management team first and then give the heads up to your org
- Choose the cadence wisely. Depending on various factors inside of your organization, we recommend sending any of these surveys 2-3 times per year
- After sending, make sure everyone will be notified and nudged
- During the the 7 day period, you can see the answer rate and be notified if your team needs an extra motivational push
- And finally once it’s done, you’ll be able to explore the insights
Diagnostic Surveys come with the Diagnostic Add-on.
Ensuring Employee Anonymity
In the Covid-19 era of employee spy tools, we go against the flow.
We’ve heard HR horror stories like:
“When I was running a survey with tools like Google Forms or Survey monkey, I’d have a lot of data that I’ll need to anonymize afterwards. I was in a really bad situation where I was gatekeeping employee anonymity from the CEO because they wanted to know the names of employees who gave some explicit feedback.”
This is why Orgnostic’s Survey flow is designed to save you the trouble — collect the feedback, but anonymize the answers by all eyes; even yours.
Team size: if the team consists of 3 or fewer people, we’ll simply ignore it. It’s too risky to out people, and not having those answers will not skew your big picture results.
Delayed collection: with automated surveys, we’ll delay collecting the data until we have 3 of the same type. This means, once we collect 3 of the same type of survey, we’ll show the viz.
Data abstractions: you’ll never know who answered what. You’ll never know if they answered or not. Team leads or department heads won’t be able to see this info either. You’ll eventually have the option to see the number of answered vs unanswered surveys, without knowing individuals.
No email spy pixels. We measure how much time people spent answering the survey to know if they really put some thought in it, or if they just did it to fill the form. For now, this is an internal feature. We’re still thundering about the best way to expose it to our users.
People not answering surveys is not a good thing, for sure. But it’s also a signal that you should work on your employee engagement inside your company. With Diagnostic Surveys, you can see teams with the best engagement and the ones who need an extra push.
The coolest thing is that with Orgnostic, by combining systems data with surveys data, you are able to make links between performance, pay, structural changes and find causes to engagement, burnout, net promoter score or cultural issues, without compromising your employee privacy!
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