Managers say, “Let’s do the climate survey.”

This is a previously unpublished entry written in September 2010.

July 2010 The senior leadership group agreed it was time to bring the rest of the managers into the discussion of organizational climate and what it can do for us.   Their reaction to the idea and the ambiguity of doing an estimate of climate was, “Let’s do the survey.”  Honestly, I didn’t see this coming.  But I’d underestimated their desire for data.

A little background

In 2009, the survey feedback – largely focused readiness for change – in which we learned that people were anxious, frustrated, and justifiably critical of management, we also uncovered a fair amount of distrust of managers.  Only 50 percent of the relatively small group responded to that survey.  By December 2009, when I’d been on the job for about four months, we wanted to confirm the results and focus them.  The survey asked a lot of open-ended questions and it was proving a challenge to know what were the central messages and which were outliers.

The focus group began with a review of themes from the survey posted on flipcharts.  We narrowed the topics and then we asked managers to step out of the room.  At this writing, there is still a lot of sensitivity about whether it is safe to give managers honest feedback about how they manage, our work, and work life.  It was even stronger then.  We made an agreement that we would report the results to managers at the end of the meeting.  But people would not be associated with their individual comments.  To minimize the venting, which would naturally take place, we focused on two kinds of responses to the topics: what’s getting in the way and what can we do about it.  What we heard was a loud and fairly clear endorsement of the main themes of the survey.

• We have many, varied demands and expectations on us – the amount of work and the manner of doing the work – it feels like an impossible task to meet them all.  Managers don’t do enough to set expectations, manage the relative priority of those expectations, or back us up with clients.
• We don’t really understand where our office is going.  We don’t hear enough about what leaders are discussing, planning, focusing on, which would give us perspective on how our work plays a role and is more or less aligned with that direction.  What do you all talk about in those meetings and what does it have to do with us?
• We don’t feel that the workload is balanced and fair.  Some people don’t do as much work as others and are not held accountable.  When people are good at their jobs, they are rewarded with more work, not more compensation or recognition or opportunities for professional development.

Those messages, as I like to say, are a very big deal.  Not only did we review them with managers at the end of the meeting, I wrote it all up and gave everyone a copy.  In other words, “this really happened.”

Even if managers didn’t have them in the forefront of their thinking, I’d have expected that folks would be reluctant to ask for feedback in a more structured way.

But you learn something new every day.  What did I learn?  Stuff that looks like data is more welcome than a story told in narrative in some cultures.  Ours is one.