Basic Buy-in

The instrumentation portion of our VetPowerment solution is pretty simple: each employee in the organization takes a five minute survey, once per week. That’s it. Five minutes. Generally seven questions, though some questions will ask you to express your opinion on how a value statement applies to six different colleagues. But still, five minutes.

I’ll get into the rest of VetPowerment another time — suffice to say that the solution helps leaders develop and maintain a positive workforce culture by identifying potential challenges and strengths, then providing guidance for improving the challenges and building upon the strengths.

And it starts by having as many employees as possible spend five minutes per week on a survey.

For the best results the organization needs at least a 60% participation rate over a sustained time, and it’s also important that as many people in the organization contribute. But the struggle for some clients begins right out of the gate — the leaders can’t get enough involvement.

That’s already an alarming sign. The best case scenario here is that the leadership just isn’t trying; maybe they thought a single email or announcement at a staff meeting would be enough. (It’s generally not.) But if there is some true effort in the launch and the responsiveness is low, it’s quite possible that apathy, dissociation, or outright alienation are already strong forces in the organization.

Considering that survey participation is only the first step, it could be dismaying that it turns out to be the first real hurdle. But the silver lining here is that it’s still just a hurdle, which means it can be overcome if the leadership is really invested in improvement.