By | Brad Clum | People Analytics Translator
Surveys can be a fast and effective way to generate employee insights in service of desired organizational outcomes. They also too often result in little change or action. On the People Analytics team at Genentech, we’ve spent the last few years refining our process to maximize impact. During a recent internship, Thaddeus Demeke helped collate our six stage survey process into a “Survey Playbook” that serves as an internal guide for future projects. In hopes of contributing to the development of successful survey practices and generating more conversation on this topic, we’ve outlined the key elements of the playbook below.
Stage 1: Define Goals
There are three steps within the “define goals” stage: Define business goal and scope → Define method of insights delivery and timeline → Develop hypotheses
To assess whether a survey project is a good fit for our team we evaluate it on four primary criteria:
- A compelling business goal (which, for us, typically means specific, high impact, people decisions that the data will directly inform)
- A need for in-depth statistical analysis (without which our team is not needed)
- A willingness to collaborate (and cede some degree of control)
- Availability of People Analytics resources
If we decide the project is not a great fit for our team we will offer light consultation to help the client more successfully, and independently, run the survey. This allows us to be helpful without taking on a heavy workload and also makes it more palatable for the client when we decide not to directly manage the survey project.
