Online surveys are a powerful tool for facilitators who need to coordinate cross-functional teams. They can help you collect feedback, measure progress, identify gaps, and align expectations. In this article, you will learn how to use online surveys effectively to facilitate collaboration and communication across different functions and roles.
When selecting an online survey platform for cross-functional team coordination, it's important to choose one that allows you to design, distribute, and analyze surveys easily and securely. Look for customization options such as control over question types, logic, and layout. Additionally, integration options are great for connecting the survey platform with other facilitation tools such as project management, communication, and data visualization software. Finally, reporting options should include the ability to generate and share reports that show the results and insights from your surveys, as well as filter, segment, and compare data across different groups and variables.
Before you create your survey, it is important to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and who you want to reach. You should define the objectives and audience of your survey in relation to your facilitation goals and the cross-functional team context. To do this, consider questions such as: what is the purpose of the survey? Who are the respondents? How will the survey results inform your facilitation process? How will you use the data to guide decision making, action planning, or problem solving? By asking yourself these questions, you can ensure that your survey is tailored to meet your needs.
Once you have defined the objectives and audience of your survey, you need to design the questions and format that will help you collect the data you need. To do this effectively, it is important to use clear and concise language, avoiding ambiguity, jargon, and bias. Additionally, it is essential to choose relevant and appropriate question types such as multiple choice, rating scales, open-ended, or matrix questions. Furthermore, using logic and branching can create a logical and coherent flow for your survey by skipping, showing, or hiding questions based on previous answers or criteria. Finally, incentives and reminders can be used to increase the response rate and quality of your survey by motivating and engaging your respondents.
In my experience I've found this part to be one of the most critical parts of the process. If you don't ask good questions in the right way, the data you collect is rubbish. It's always best to use someone with research training and experience to craft the questions, put them in the right order, and ensure there's clarity in the questions so you get the answers you need to make good decisions.
When designing your survey, it is important to consider several factors that can affect its distribution and collection, such as timing, channel, and privacy. You should choose the best time to send your survey based on your objectives, audience, and facilitation schedule. Additionally, you need to select the most appropriate channel to deliver your survey - this could be email, web, social media, or mobile. Finally, you should ensure the privacy and security of your survey and data by using encryption, password protection, or anonymity options.
After you have collected the responses, it's important to analyze the results and share the insights with your cross-functional team and other relevant parties. To do this, you should use descriptive statistics to summarize and describe the main features of your data, as well as inferential statistics to test and interpret the relationships and differences between your data. Additionally, you should use data visualization to present and communicate your data in a visual and engaging way. This could include charts, graphs, tables, or dashboards.
Sorting the data right and generating insights in visuals always makes it easy to make critical decisions. I always try to work on dashboards to be able to filter out and generate data with different data sets.
The final step of using online surveys to coordinate cross-functional teams is to use the feedback to facilitate action. By leveraging the data and insights from your surveys, you can validate assumptions and hypotheses, identify strengths and weaknesses, align expectations and priorities, and plan actions and next steps for the team. This will help you resolve any conflicts or disagreements and set objectives, assign roles, define tasks, and monitor progress.
I'm not a big fan of surveys personally because, even with the best questions, they often fall short in capturing the true sentiments behind the feedback. Instead, I would recommend engaging in one-on-one meetings, retrospectives, brainstorming sessions, and other forms of in-person interactions where a deeper understanding can be achieved.