The death of the Annual Survey...
Matt Stephens
Founder of Inpulse | Author of 'The Engagement Revolution' | Angel Investor
Imagine a company using a business system from the 1950s , say an IT system or payroll or a performance management system – hard to imagine isn’t it?
Yet this is exactly what we do when it comes to employee surveys.
Once or twice a year the annual survey is trotted out and questions from 50-60years ago are asked and re-asked year in and year out. We only get to see the results 3 months after they’ve been submitted and use them to compare ourselves to organisations that might be nothing like us or to tell us how we’re doing on our journey. And, for good measure, we can pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for this privilege.
Madness? Most definitely. And yet today most large companies do just this every year without fail.
Not anymore. At Quest we’ve developed Heartbeat. It’s real time answers are totally transparent, the survey is based around what we now know has the greatest impact on our performance – how we feel. And behind the emotion you get to understand why employees feel the way they do.
Heartbeat is different from the daily pulse surveys which we have found disengage employees with their repetitive nature. Who really wants to be pulsed every day? And how can you respond?
We believe that the answer lies between the annual survey and the daily pulse – we call it Heartbeat moments. Those moments in work when knowing how people are feeling and why really matters. Like at annual results, or after a town hall or during a change programme. Heartbeat is a fast, flexible and user-orientated survey. One that happens when it needs to,, not all the time or once a year.
And the results are appealing, not just visually but in being able to take action and respond more quickly. Clients using it are finding that the solutions required more often than not involve a conversation between the leaders and employees rather than huge actions that involve new projects to be created.
So why not give it a go? To take a trial and see the difference just drop us a note at [email protected].