Place plays a massive role in how we think about managing business. The “where” of work has helped us understand, organize, and quickly answer “who’s”, “what’s”, and “when’s” by having everyone physically accessible. Be it a short hallway conversation, or a walk to another department, or the ability to read the room as part of a presentation. The need for social distancing has cut off many of the information streams we rely on to guide the day to day of managing highly engaged teams. That is why, given how much Covid-19 has forced everyone’s way of work to change, we created the Free Organizational Wellbeing Pulse Survey series.
Read more: Top 10 Drivers of Organizational Wellbeing During Covid-19
The new year is a chance to start fresh. Often, we make resolutions for the purpose of pushing our life in a new direction, doing something that recontextualizes our often-scattered efforts in a concerted plan towards a desirable future. Given the annual structure of engagement programs, the same barriers to meeting our new year’s resolutions can prevent the organization from creating the kinds of changes to make work more enjoyable for everyone.
Engagement and Performance are both key areas that a manager must manage. An organization filled with folks who hate their job or who are unable to perform is headed for disaster. It really is quite unfortunate then that "Performance" and "Engagement", despite their importance, are incredibly squishy concepts that depend on unique efforts and experiences of every member of a team. This presents a daunting challenge to managers, that few appear to be meeting well.
However, this may be because the tools that we use to approach problems within the workplace lead us to the wrong conclusions about how to achieve important, but squishy goals.
Read more: Managing Engagement & Performance with Gardens in Mind
Organizations are immensely complicated social structures whose engines run on human creativity and effort. As a consequence, diagnosing what is and isn’t working as intended can be incredibly complicated. This high degree of complexity is, in fact, why we developed Mindset and the Flow@Work model of engagement. We believe, based on review of the available evidence, that engagement is at the core of understanding how well the processes and structures of a given business are working for those who work within it.
Read more: How to Solve Problems with Customized Survey Research
So, you have gone through the survey process, carefully reviewed the results, and decided on how to respond to the results. Now you are left with the most important part of all, deciding on the questions that you will need to answer going forward. Put another way, how do we ensure that our next survey process leverages what we have learned, builds on what we plan to do, and answers the questions that are central to the organization?