In summer 2006 my colleague Matthew Strong and I were asked by our employer to input into the annual employee opinion survey cycle. By applying our knowledge of behavioural management techniques (OBM to some of you) we were able to help our leadership team develop and implement an action plan, which saw an improvement of 28% across the targeted survey measures and a 10% improvement across the remaining survey measures from 2006 to 2007. This article is intended to share a brief background of the organisation, our methodology, the results, and our key learning points. The organisation The annual employee opinion survey cycle Results are slowly communicated down the levels of the organisation during early summer. Local departments are asked to develop an action plan to target the areas for improvement. Typical responses include management road shows, away days, leadership DVD’s, text messaging, publications sent to employee home addresses, bus tours and more star performer awards. The main results remain fairly stagnant from year to year. An opportunity to try something new A team of middle managers within our part of the business decided to jump off the annual treadmill of scatter gun action planning and set out to try something different. A number of the managers have attended a short behavioural management techniques course which introduces the concept of using consequences to drive desired behaviours in the workplace. This appetite to try something new provided us with a unique opportunity to get involved. We were invited into the planning process and asked to help shape the direction for the focus in year 2006 / 2007. Using the behavioural engineering model to narrow the focus We took the 100 questions and mapped them against the six categories of the model. Almost straight away we were hit by the number of ‘reds’ in the Information box. Examples of the survey questions in that box would be “My immediate manager clearly communicates team strategy and goals”, “I know what I need to do to help the businesses achieve its goals”, “My immediate manager gives me regular feedback on my performance”, “My immediate manager has a regular performance 121 with me”. The BEM turned out to be a perfect tool for assisting the leadership team with narrowing their focus. They were readily able to identify with expectations and feedback being fundamentals for performance and the regrouping brought significant gaps into focus and gave the leaders the confidence that this was the right area to focus on as first priority. Using the behavioural engineering model to implement the change We were now faced with the challenge of implementation. Remember those typical action plans? The danger here was that we revert to the norm of making a big deal out of communicating what was going to be different….and then going back to the day job.
Once more the simplicity enabled the leadership team to readily identify with the plan. Monthly team feedback surveys We set about developing a simple monthly feedback survey. Every team member filled in a response for their line manager every month on whether they had:
Each local manager would see their individual results and the leadership team would also see the results for their managers. The monthly feedback survey changed the environment for leaders since it prompted them to talk to their managers. This, in turn, impacted the environment of the local managers. Whilst being very simple and easy to administer, the survey had a huge impact on the environment for both leaders and local managers, the local managers were now getting feedback from above and below. Impact on pinpointed behaviours
Impact on employee opinion survey results When the results of the annual survey came in, our department had one of the best sets of results across the organisation and we were also able to clearly demonstrate that it was the focus on expectations and feedback that got the improvement. Of the measures outside of our action plan, we showed a typical improvement of 10%. For the measures we had targeted, those which we mapped into the information box of the behavioural engineering model we were able to demonstrate a massive 28% improvement year on year. There was no such marked improvement demonstrated across the targeted areas for the rest of the business which ruled out the impact of any wider corporate initiatives which were also in play at the time. What worked well? Armed with a basic understanding of behaviour, we were clear from day one that the leverage lay in the relationship between the leadership team and their managers. Our proposals were worked up with the leadership team and it was the director that pulled them together and said at the start ‘lets focus on this one area and get good at it’. When the wider management team were briefed again it was presented by the director. The invites to complete the monthly survey were sent out from the leader of each department. When the occasional local manager vented frustrations at the proposed action plan it was the leadership team that dealt with the issue. All of our efforts had to be kept well behind the scenes for this to remain credible. Line management accountability was being used to manager performance.
Focusing on the theme of expectations and feedback, and including upward feedback helped the local managers and team members to fill a gap. Monthly one to ones are mandatory and the feedback for the leadership team was that utilising this time to focus on agreeing expectations for the month ahead and feedback on performance for the previous month made much better use of the time. There were many examples of small changes made as a result of increased feedback but the most significant feedback we received on the intervention was that in many cases it has strengthened the relationship between local managers and their team members. To the informed reader this may seem like a very basic intervention and I suspect it’s that simplicity that made it digestible. It was simple and consistent. This is something that we rarely experience in our organisation. What didn’t work so well Through observations and feedback from team members we were able to detect some avoidance behaviours. In some cases the local manager, perhaps unintentionally had shaped the team members towards answering everything positively, since when the manager received his feedback he would talk to the team about the results, in order to avoid these discussions they filled the surveys in positively. There were a couple of examples of team managers encouraging team members to respond positively and, perhaps a little more extreme, an example of one local manager punishing the team for being honest in their responses. For the purpose of this intervention such examples were noted but not acted upon. However, it does highlight the need to make sure the manager’s manager is actively reinforcing the desired behaviours and not just the survey results! An interesting point to note is that many of these sound bites were concentrated within two areas of the department. From observations of the leadership team there appeared unsurprisingly to be a correlation between what the leader was doing and the behaviour of the local managers. Data collected suggests that up to 25% of the data collected in the monthly surveys was unreliable as a result. To conclude Overly complicated bureaucratic organisations desperately need to move forward with focused diagnosis and simple solutions. From my experience, a behavioural approach can deliver just that. The results of this intervention certainly demonstrate that finding those leverage points can have a big impact with relatively little effort. Delivering an improvement on a highly valued yet subjective employee opinion survey buys us some credits in the bank to push on to the next step. This intervention is just the first step in getting the base behaviours to occur. We need to shape a closer connection with tracked business results and increasing the frequency to make it meaningful. But first we have a new director, new management and a reorganisation to contend with. In true corporate tradition, when you start to see some improvements you know its time to throw everything back up in the air! Allison Reynolds is employed by a large utility company in the UK. In her current role as a performance manager she provides training and coaching for managers and team members who wish to use behavioural management and work process improvement techniques to improve business performance.
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In early 2006 there was a significant change to the environment. A new CEO was in post and sending out a very clear message that the survey results were a key business metric and that an improvement was required.
Clearly we needed to change the environment for our local managers and to do that it was back to the leadership team – if we wanted our local managers to do something different, then we needed to get their leaders to do something differently. Again we need look no further than the behavioural engineering model which had been telling us all along that it was critical to set expectations and deliver feedback to get the local line managers to also set expectations and deliver feedback! 
The use of the survey and monthly presentation of the results increased reinforcement of the pinpointed behaviours. Presentation of the data, which illustrated whether behaviour was increasing relative to previous months, was a prompt for reinforcement, from both leader and self. The fact that managers knew they would be measured prompted them to have a go. We received lots of feedback that asking for upward feedback, providing feedback and even agreeing expectations for the month felt uncomfortable, even embarrassing initially, but they kept it up because they knew they were being measured. Managers had previously been avoiding these behaviours because they found it punishing, with the surveys in place they felt they could no longer avoid it. However, after a couple of cycles of asking for and giving feedback, the discomfort went away and only the benefits remained! |
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