The Buck Stops with Executives for Actions from Surveys

By Leo Brajkovich, Ph.D., Kenexa

U.S. President Harry S. Truman was famous for having the motto, “The Buck Stops Here,” emblazoned on his desk during his tenure in the oval office. This motto applies to top executives who want to get the highest return on their investment in people. When the results of their enterprise-wide employee survey become available, middle- and lower-level managers and supervisors will look to the top executives for cues on how to behave. The top executives’ reaction and subsequent follow-up steps can often make or break the potential impact of an enterprise-wide survey.

Getting top leaders to embrace and enact company-wide initiatives and endorse an overall approach to follow-up has obvious benefits for the organization. It also creates potential to foster a bias toward action taking among the various levels of management reporting to top leaders. These benefits include:

Demonstrating the importance of communicating and involving people in organizational improvement

– Setting an example for fellow managers throughout the company to follow
– Building accountability for follow-up at the highest levels and below
– Sending a message of leading from the front and measuring progress against goals

Conversely, if senior management does not engage in following up on key survey results, numerous problems can arise including:

– Breeding apathy for change among other managers
– Tacitly setting the priority lower for people issues
– Relegating responsibility for driving action to Human Resources (HR)
– Causing employees to eventually disengage from the organization’s issues
– Stifling the exchange of ideas and best practice for business improvement

MAKING BETTER DECISIONS

An organizational survey can help an executive team better manage a business in several ways, depending on the focus and content of the research. Insights gained from survey results principally impact making better, more informed decisions, particularly in terms of the HR strategy and ongoing investments in human capital, is the principal area of impact for insights gained from surveys. Making better decisions in these key areas ensures an engaged and focused workforce, which research is showing leads to improved business performance. Executives also gain insight from internal consultants that will improve various aspects of the business including how to reduce cycle times, how to gain new customers, how to cut costs, how to develop new products more quickly and how to please existing customers.

For the HR executive or survey team member leading the effort, the challenge is often how to engage other top leaders in the survey results. The best way to attract and hold executive interest is by ensuring the survey targets strategic issues that support the business strategy. The caveat here is that it is not just relevance being done, but relevance seen as being done. You cannot over-communicate the strategic underpinnings of any organizational assessment. Otherwise, executives will only see the pain, not the potential gain. Once a survey is conducted, however, the focus becomes how to best re-engage if needed and to involve top leaders in the follow-up process.

PACKAGING RESULTS FOR LEADERSHIP USERS

Two principal aspects tend to determine the engagement of executive leadership in action planning: Packaging and Placement. Both stem from the concept of leadership “user groups.” Most complex organizations have various http://www.kenexa.com/ : Talent Management levels that can act in different ways on survey feedback.
Each group is responsible for and empowered to, act in various ways in the organization. Top executive leaders are most concerned with acting on behalf of the organization as a whole. For example, if the CEO wants something to happen in 90 days, it usually does.

The survey results have to be packaged and targeted correctly so that the relevant analysis is distilled and the high yield topics for the company as a whole are underscored. Recommendations to top leaders are typically an integration of data-driven analysis with experience and judgment-driven synthesis. For example, issues and topics that most affect productivity, profitability, and http://www.sbinformation.about.com/od/advertisingpr/a/customerloyalty_2.htm : customer loyalty, which only top management can address, should be emphasized to the executive team for review and action planning. Other topics that may interest top managers include drivers of company values, current corporate priorities, competitive position, innovation, integrity, speed to market, and company image. If the requisite analysis has been done, showing the ongoing trends and linkages between these topics and business performance becomes the principle piece of feedback for top leadership. Not only is the outcome “Giving unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” it’s also getting Caesar’s attention!

PROVIDING A VENUE TO ABSORB, REFLECT AND APPLY

Once the survey results and information have been packaged effectively, arrangements must be made for executives to receive the results in an environment that fosters mindful thinking about priority issues that require action. The placement of results could be at a planned leadership summit, an executive meeting, or a special session dedicated to the survey results. Ideally, plan a 1.5 to 2.5 hour facilitated session to develop a deeper understanding of the most critical issues facing the organization and to gain consensus at a high level about how the follow-up process will be structured and managed across the organization. This time should also be spent working through a comprehensive framework leading to concrete thinking on subsequent action steps. These include enterprise-level follow-up such as:

1. Company-wide priorities for action
2. Communication to managers and employees
3. Integration with existing plans and initiatives
4. Resources required and initial timeline
5. Identifying likely proponents and barriers to change

Top leaders are always looking for a way to give their company an edge in the marketplace. Although they often have the most to gain from the feedback and information gathered by an enterprise-wide employee survey, top leaders are also among the toughest to reach with intelligence about the state of their human capital and the business. Every effort must be made by those involved in managing the survey effort to secure a time and place not only for review of the relevant results, but also for reflection, synthesis, and the forging of the path to change and sustained organizational improvement. Otherwise, the real “bucks” might start going somewhere else.

Author Bio: Andrea Watkins writes articles for Kenexa, a provider of Talent Management solutions that transforms global workforce by identifying the best individuals for every job. Effective Leadership and Learning Management tools are essential in increasing organizational performance.

Category: Business Management
Keywords: talent management, effective leadership, learning management