🖤 Open Works #015 Wrangling Survey Results Into Priorities

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 350+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL:DR

Create a better feedback loop and tighten your “we’ve listened → here’s what we’re doing → here’s what we did” comms.

⚡️ The Problem

Knowing what to prioritise when it comes to your people and culture roadmap is a problem felt by most People Leaders at some point during each quarter of every year. You are not alone friend.

Let’s look at 2 x levers you can pull to make this easier.

🎮️ Lever 1: Asking the right questions

A lot of People teams fall into the trap of asking “are you engaged?” questions in their surveys/pulses. You probably know the ones i’m talking about:

1. I would recommend [company] as a great place to work

2. I believe there are good career opportunities for me at [company]

Meh.

These kind of questions don’t give you a lot of signal. And, whilst I love Gladiator, this isn’t really the look we’re going for👇️ 

💡 We think better to focus on tangible components of culture. Specifically:

👉️ Engagement Culture Survey 

Example:

1. Given our business goals of {xyz}, to what extent does {how we run meetings} serve us?

2. Thinking about {how we run meetings} What do you propose we start/stop/continue ?

Looking for better question inspiration? Look here 👇️

🎮️ Lever 2: Crowd Source Priorities

Surveys serve a purpose, but even if you ask good questions, then sometimes you still have a mountain of possible interventions and experiments you could run. Our favourite practice for dealing with this is a simple dot vote on your virtual whiteboard of choice (e.g. miro) but you can also do in notion with comments and emoji counts if you’d rather.

1. Share possible improvements org-wide (from survey/pulse/async miro session)

2. Share your guiding principles for prioritisation (e.g. Impact vs Effort)

3. Invite your whole org to dot vote using those guiding principles (miro or Figjam etc)

Now you have a prioritised set of interventions, you’ve invited everyone to the party and you’ve not held a single meeting. Very Nice 🙌 .

🥇Closing The Loop: A Transparent People Roadmap

Closing The Loop

Of the 150+ startups and scale-ups we’ve worked with over the last few years, less than 10 do this next bit well and only 2 do it really really well. So if you want to be in the top 1% read on.

The comms blueprint used by the top 1%

1. Here’s what we found (share your data learns via Loom and memo doc)

2. Here’s how we prioritised (share the dot vote summary)

3. Of that prioritised list, we have capacity to tackle {2} over the next {4 weeks}

4. Here’s what we’re prioritising {the top 2 things} and why (here’s the guidelines we used to prioritise e.g. Impact x Effort.

5. Here’s when you’ll hear from us next and here’s where you can follow along for updates {link to your public people and culture roadmap}

The top 1% then do what they said they were going to do.

Then they repeat.

📚️ Good reads on this problem…

📔 Open Org Culture Playbook: Team Health Checks; an alternative to survey fatigue

✏️ Open Org Blog: How to make culture tangible

🤲 Wanna get your culture problem featured in the next edition?

Hit reply to this email and share it with me! : - )

🖤 Join Us

Together We're Building A More Trusted, Transparent World of Work.

Join 350+ startup and scale-up people leaders in Slack and get exclusive access to 2 x monthly live events (roundtable and guest fireside) and a quarterly hackathon, as well as Adam and I in your corner forever.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know a friend who might like this? share this with them so they don’t miss out on the next crowd-sourced problem!