“That’s a stupid question”

As someone who designs questions for research, that’s not really what I want to hear. But I do. And sometimes expressed in more forceful terms than this too.

Most of the time, it’s in surveys. I can chalk it off as the reaction of someone who is too short on time to give a considered answer. But just occasionally, I’ve had it in focus groups or interviews. And then you have to ask whether the question you’ve written is as accessible as it should be? Does it make sense to the person you’re asking it of? What help do they need to break down how they feel about their employer into more manageable chunks?

In a focus group or interview, you’ve got the chance to qualify the question and help people into it. In a survey they’re on their own, so you have to be careful. So let’s look at a current question from Linked In’s Inspiration Index: http://lnkd.in/ii_nus. It’s a single question: “How often do you feel inspired by your work?” And it has some issues, that I’m sure they must have considered carefully:

• “Inspired”: is that the right word? We can see why they avoid “engaged”- that’s too hard to define. But why not “happy” or “satisfied”?
•  “Inspired”: what do they mean? Those days when you genuinely feel the love for your boss, your clients and your work? Or just the days when you “get it”?
• “Inspired”: does it matter? Do you need to be inspired in your work, any more than you need to be inspired when you’re socialising, being a parent, or just doing the dishes?
• The rating system. There’s a sliding scale from “Never feel inspired” to “Always feel inspired”, with no points in between. How does my shifting the slider “a bit” compare to the next man’s?
• The rating system. There’s no control, or comparison. It’s an absolute scale, but no definition of what, say, 73% means.
•  The timing. What’s happened that morning is likely to have an effect on my response. Will I be asked again?

But honestly, I don’t think it’s a stupid question because, what they’re looking to find out is clear enough. They’ve gone for one question to maximise response at the expense of detail, but they know a lot about the people responding anyway. In aggregate - and there’s over 100,000 responses already - the data will become fairly reliable. Potential problems with the rating system and timing will likely be ironed out in the bell-curve. And there’s standard practice to deal with the bulk response and the outliers. 

What I am saying is that even to design a one-question survey, you need to consider a lot of things. So get someone who does it a lot to help you.

Big Data? What Data?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Big Data of late. It’s hard not to. Many people believe it’s the answer to a lot of problems. And as a researcher who likes getting his hands on a bunch of stats, people have expected me to have an opinion.

Reading this this CIPD report made me think I ought to think about more my thoughts. Because what’s been running round my head is “What data?” I perfectly can see how a retailer has all the transactional data. And especially if they have loyalty schemes / log-ins, they can look at that by type of customer, by region, against historical data, by types of product etc etc. There’s lots of hard data, and there’s lots of ways to cut it. The other trope that’s routinely reeled off is Moneyball. Baseball is a stats driven sport, with every aspect of the game being readily quantified against the opposition, stage of game, against left-right handers etc etc

What I haven’t been convinced of, and haven’t been by this report, is that there’s an analogy to working life. The report suggests three types of data: people data (demographics, skills, reward, engagement etc), programme data (attendance, adoption, participation in programmes and key projects and assignments) performance data (performance ratings and data captured from 360, goal attainment, talent, succession programmes and talent and assessment). And for me, right there is the problem. There may be data, but it is not automatically captured – there isn’t that retail or baseball analogy.

Much of that data has to assessed, possibly with some subjective judgements. And even if it’s purely objective, it will depend on the skill of the manager and/or the arsedness of the employee to get it right. It’s a massive leap from where we are now to the assertion that “Generally it is felt that HR data will be revolutionised by big data.”

Right now, I don’t think there’s really good data. By all means try and create it - there would be fantastic value. But for now, let’s look at what we can reliably and more easily measure, and let’s include staff surveys of all types in there. Then let’s use that as a pointer to the conversations you should be having with employees to understand what matters to them and how you can make the greatest difference to them and their ability to serve your customers.

Making it personal

In my last blog, I made the case for simplicity. But, people* say to me, doesn’t mean that you are applying simplistic, one-size-fits-all solutions? No, I retort, not a bit of it, glad that they’ve raised this very issue, as it gives me the opportunity to talk about my approach to research. Again.

Yes, looking for the simplest, biggest picture is a guiding principle of mine. I want to look for the fewest actions that will have the biggest effect on the most people. But the detail of how you do that is crucial.

And that’s where research comes into its own. Specifically the qualitative. Any quantitative that you have done will serve to point you in the right directions. But it is by talking to people, in depth, that you will get to the core of the issue. It is them who will help you to understand what works well, and what can be improved, and suggest what may be introduced.

By asking the open questions that you simply can’t do otherwise, you’ll see where issues are - they’ll be front of mind. But you also see where issue aren’t, what is obviously already satisfactory, or just off-the radar. Dig further into what you uncover and you’re understanding not just, say, that communication is an issue, but whether it’s about frequency, channels, transparency, tone, attitudes, or whatever.

So too, it’s only by speaking to the people in the organisation that you will start to uncover the culture of the business and what works well there. How and why are people most inspired and persuaded? What improves the chances of engaging them and enabling them to perform? 

I want to work with people to find recommendations by them and for them. I do want those simple solutions, but I want ones that absolutely fit the business that they are designed for.

* By “people”, I mostly mean the conversations I’m conducting with myself…

Work’s complicated. Strive for simplicity.

Do people really know what they think about their work? They’re humans after all, and that means that they don’t make rational decisions (especially in the presence of zombies), they have very selective memories (and we’re biased to the negative), they make emotional judgements (which can be affected by cake). And so much of the working experience is tied up in relationships with other humans with all the same faults. That’s always going to be hard to understand.

Then think about the other complicating factors in working life today: understanding your role in a changing strategy, delivering ever-more challenging targets, being always-on, taking more accountability for making customer decisions, probably with less direction. Work is a confusing place to be.

And yet it’s vital to understand what people think about their work, and how well they are dealing with those challenges. This blog puts it well. Fundamentally, very few of us manufacture widgets anymore. The best measures for our capacity to improve aren’t in how many widgets come off the line and how much faster that line can run. The capacity to improve is in the hearts and minds of the people. And if you take as your starting point that people can’t rattle off a rational, complete and objective view of what’s right, wrong and missing from their working lives, then you’re going to have to work hard to get to the real truths.

You need the richest possible mix of qualitative and quantitative work to get a spread of opinion and deep discussion. Those human factors mean that everyone has a highly individual experience; it’s a complex picture and it can be tempting to present that picture. But you must resist and search only for the universal, unifying truths. You must draw them out to see what to celebrate, cultivate or change. That’s where simplicity lies and there’s real comfort in simplicity. In a complicated world, simple is do-able, simple is buyable. Simple happens.