A few months ago I had the opportunity to interview an industrial psychologist from a Fortune 5 company with hundreds of thousands of employees. Due to the company’s internal regulations, I cannot share the interview itself, or the name of the company or employee. However, here are ten takeaways from this individual’s experience leading a team that assesses and improves organizational culture, and how these might transfer to museums.
#1: Assessing and addressing employee engagement and wellbeing impacts the bottom line. When employees have a good experience at work, not only are they more engaged, but they do more things above and beyond their job description and they offer better customer service, which drives the bottom line and makes the company money. In addition, a good employee experience helps reduce turnover, which is very costly and very disruptive to any organization. There is a true value proposition in place for taking employee feedback seriously and doing something with it, and research backs this up.
#2: Assess regularly. They distribute two large surveys a year. On both surveys they ask 7 questions related to employee engagement, including burnout, inclusion, and employee effectiveness. In the spring they also ask questions related to employee enablement — do they have what they need to do their jobs? In the fall they ask questions about senior leadership and cross-functional collaboration (those questions generally produce less favorable feedback).
In addition, they launch smaller assessments as needed: for example, they assess the onboarding process for new staff on a regular basis, and conduct check-in surveys when they see signs of burnout.
#3: Ask focused questions. Their survey is specifically designed to assess employee experience, and is divided into two sections: “belonging” (do you feel like you belong here?) and “fit” (do you feel like you fit with the organization?). Questions are very targeted to answer these two questions.
#4: Connect responses to meaningful change. The worst thing an organization can do is ask employees for feedback and not do anything with it. It is important to “link and label” – to communicate “this is what we heard you say, and this is what we are doing in response.” Otherwise, even when you make wonderful changes based on feedback, employees don’t know that what they said informed changes.
#5: Create a library of tools to address issues. Over the past decade, they have built a robust library of training videos and plans and action steps managers can take to make change.
#6: A survey is not always the right tool for assessment. For a quantitative survey to be useful you need a large sample size. If your sample is under 50 people, in order for results to be meaningful you need a difference of 15%, which is huge. With a smaller group, a three-point difference between departments could simply reflect one person having a bad day.
Focus groups are better than interviews for organizations with smaller departments. Focus groups should be conducted by a neutral third party and kept confidential – no managers in the room with you. One challenge with focus groups is that people sometimes follow each other; a skilled facilitator knows how to solicit quieter voices, but one person can plant ideas in others’ minds.
Interviews are great but require a significant time investment. You can aim for interviewing 25% of your staff, across teams, in 20-minute interview blocks. Make sure questions are consistent and you have someone taking notes. As with focus groups, interviews should be conducted by a neutral third party and kept confidential.
#7: Whichever tool you use to assess organizational culture, make sure to plan carefully. Think about what you are really trying to learn. Is it why people are quitting? If so, you might want to ask questions about the environment, teamwork, and management.
Don’t lead with a negative statement like “we hear people are burned out.” Ask about day to day experiences, and what might prevent people from getting their jobs done in a timely, successful manner. It’s not useful to ask what people love about their job, except as an icebreaker.
The most useful data comes from the overlap in what is said between what people who are positive about their jobs and people who are negative about their jobs. For example, if they both talk about scheduling conflicts, that’s a space where you need to dig more deeply. It’s also helpful to ask people for their solution ideas (for example, “what are 1-2 things we could improve?”) and compare answers from employees who are positive and negative about their jobs.
#8: Address some (but not every) problem you uncover. When you get your results, start small, and fix something easy. For example, if lots of people complain that they run out of paper towels in the bathroom – fix that! Issues like communication take longer. But quick wins help engage everyone.
Only take action on 2-3 things total (including that early easy win) or nothing will get done.
Have employees help solve the problems that assessment identifies. Cross-functional teams can come up with multiple ideas, and present a few options to managers. These ideas should come from people doing the work on the ground, with clear deadlines and ongoing updates to keep the conversation alive. Keep the process moving, linking and labeling as you go.
Here’s an example of a success story: One of the biggest complaints that came out of survey results at this company was people saying that they didn’t know what’s going on. A group of employees met and came up with the idea to have a blog feed. This was a total game changer for the company. The feed is off to the side within their Outlook system, not in emails, and there are push notifications. This is now a way to share things like restructuring announcements — all the things leadership previously forgot to share with the entire company. That went a long way toward solving this problem.
#9: This whole process requires leadership buy-in. You need the people on the ground to do the work, but you also need the leader to do their own work supporting the process and changes.
#10: It’s generally not about pay. In general, people don’t start working somewhere unless they believe in what they are doing, and have agreed to accept a certain amount of money. When you do a correlation analysis, pay consistently ranks low among the factors that influence employee satisfaction. Autonomy, meaningful work, flexibility, and how you are managed outweigh pay, assuming you pay fairly, hiring people in at an acceptable rate and adjusting for inflation and salary trends over time.
Museum Questions 