How to make engagement surveys worth running

Hey everyone and welcome to the Modern Employer Podcast, a place where we discuss progressive people, practices yet again and always share practical tips and advice that you can take away with you and start actioning as soon as tomorrow. As always here with you is myself, my name is Olya Yaksina and I'm your host currently ahead of people and culture at Work Life and throughout all of these sessions I will always be exploring varieties of ways in which we can make employee experience the best it can be. And here with me is Michael Franco, the guest that I have been trying to get on this podcast for some time. I'm very excited. He is a fractional CHRO who is built and fixed people functions for companies from 5 to 500 and is also the founder of Koga Club. So he can tell us all about a time Michael. How are you doing? Thank you so much for having me. So yeah, Michael Franco, I spent more than a decade in HRM people ups across the country or across the globe in many countries and that's mostly been internally and fractionally. And I guess I don't know if tying into what we're discussing today but I keep noticing that same problem of the feedback that your people have and the really important stuff and the workflows that are broken and the things the customers say, it never really reached the top. So during an engagement I kind of started solving for myself and building and that's where Quacka Hub came from and it's kind of grown since then. That's fantastic and I'm also glad that we get to speak to you today because I feel like this episode in particular is going to be really valuable for all the leaders of you and us, me, company scaling companies who are starting to suspect that maybe their engagement data is not as truthful as the reality. And it is true that your people can see all the workflows they see and they hear what customers are saying they understand how they are working together but it's difficult to capture everything in real time and it's really hard to start spotting trends on time before it's too late etc. So people teams end up always playing this kind of like Quacka Hub exercise or fixing something once it's already gone wrong, once people already noticed, once they've been marinating on the topic for a bit and hopefully it hasn't become toxic yet so let's fix it. But actually what if this could be done differently. And a lot of conversations that had recently as well was about the anonymity of surveys, the ability maybe to answer these surveys in the first place and feel like your employer is going to hear you. And I'm really interested Michael, what's been your learnings from your experience of how to make sure that people are actually safe feeling those surveys in the first place? I think that's exactly it is. Your engagement survey measures how safe your people feel. For instance if you have a team of 10 and you're able to filter by gender and tenure and all that kind of stuff, all the filters they have, it's pretty easy to know who says what. So if people are just going to give you 10s and say everything's great and never give you any feedback, well it's because they're afraid that you're going to find them out. And that goes with free text even if you do like a Google doc or something and you ask for a Google survey, your writing style can also give you a way. I say certain things like super and all these weird words that maybe other people don't use. That was definitely Frank over did that. And I think that's one of the biggest things that when we're having these surveys, most people don't feel safe because either nothing's going to be done or they're going to get repercussions for speaking about these things. Yeah, I completely recognize myself and everything you're saying because even to the best of our kind of us trying to keep our service anonymous, I cannot help it but notice and know who may have left this feedback. So it's not even for the lack of trying maybe the ask people teams are struggling but it's just for for kind of maybe the lack of the right tooling methods or the lack of kind of the right ways of getting through it. I don't know what do you think is the answer here? How have you found so far? I find when you lay out the guidelines of putting guardrails and are just completely honest with the people saying, don't give anything away because we will probably be able to figure out where you are if you're saying it this way if you say, Tom is being rough. We know who works with Tom's. But also then just addressing it even if you know who it was, you address it to the entire group and you ask it as a question is, you know, this came up. What do you all think behind it? What should we do? How can we make this better? And it gives an opportunity for the people who are being like, I didn't know it was an issue because everything's great to speak up because they might be, you know what, that is kind of an issue and it makes the other people feel more comfortable to say, okay, so I'm not the only one that thinks this or I'm not the only one that thinks we can do this better or I'm not the only one that hears this from customers. And when you start asking these questions and really listening and then acting on them, your people are going to be more open to giving you this information without a survey. You know, just to, hey, I heard this just a heads up. I want to put this out there so we're aware of it and we can get ahead of it. Yeah, no, that's, that's really true. One thing I have started practicing recently actually for this was to have like at the beginning of their own boarding journey, have a session with them and it's basically people team sitting down with them having a session and telling them that we are here for you. If you feel something is very wrong, if you feel your relationship with your new manager is like a little bit drained or you feel you need some help, don't carry this alone, don't wait for the engagement survey to pop up, you know, don't suffer and silence, come and talk to us. And I actually found this really strong relationship builder tool as well. And maybe they will say nothing in the engagement survey and kind of lose that score or two, but the people they will kind of have more opportunity to really raise the issue. And so what would you say, I guess the alternative here is really just to, I mean, some companies, they do not anonymous surveys at all. So they are trying to like remove their thing. What's your opinion on non-anonymized engagement surveys? Because it was pretty hot like a couple of years ago, I remember. Yep, it really was. And I think majority of the engagement surveys we have are not anonymous or not to the best of the ability to be anonymous. And I just disagree with that because we have different people with different behaviors and different levels of confidence and so many other things. You need an outlet for somebody to be able to say what's on their mind or what's bothering them or maybe an insight that you really need to know where there is almost no way for them to be found out. Right, I know everything gets stored on a database and stuff. And the anonymity is whatever, but it has to be somewhere where they can just speak and get comfortable. I don't think because otherwise if you're, even if you, and that's a wonderful thing, you're doing it with onboarding, I think that's so important and more teams should be doing that being like, hey, work part of you, we're here to help you, right? Even if you have a problem in your own department, we're not that department. We're here to help and find a solution for everything. Only if you have that, somebody might be too afraid to bring anything up to you. And therefore you're missing out on stuff. So you have to have that place where it's safe for everybody, especially to people who have much quieter voices or who are more nervous to speak up on things. Were you missing out on tons of tons of information? Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, I think it's quite, it's quite an interesting dynamic with engagement service that I found. And I really want to just know your opinion on this. And because I've been, something I've been thinking about really and it's, when people are filling engagement service and they have some constructive feedback to say, sometimes that constructive feedback comes across as like quite negatively framed or, you know, like the words that are used are really big words and they land in a place that for people teams becomes like very emotional to read, etc. And I've noticed that there's been a couple of times in my own experience where it's, it's at what point do you think engagement service show negativity within the culture versus it? Like some people being overly negative to actually, some people are saying constructive things and we should jump on it and fix it. What's, how has it been for you? Because for me, it's really tough and it's really on the knife's edge. Feedback is, is hard when you get honest feedback about anything about how you're doing work or just what you've built, especially in people in culture, you know, like you're like, I'm trying to make this wonderful place and trying to give the best initiatives and somebody is like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And you're like, I spent months trying to put this together and get the budget for it. Well, but, - Yeah, and it hurts, it does. But it's honestly, you're like, okay, cool. So what did I miss for you? And that goes into people's personalities too, 'cause some people are just, they will just knife to the heart being like, "Oh, you want it real stuff?" Okay, it's horrible, boom. And you're like, "Wow." But we have to, I mean, it's our responsibility of leaders and people kind of making these initiatives to be able to take that. 'Cause not a reason we do this, gonna be golden for everybody 'cause everybody's completely different. And again, we can't, we can't, he's everybody either. So sometimes feedback will look at, we can address it, we can make small adjustments, but at the end of the day we go, well, you know, the rest of the team's pretty good with it. We've asked as much as we can, we've given outlets for anonymous, and we only had one bad, you know, like, this may not be the culture for you then, and it's now just a culture fit. But if one person feels it, somebody else probably feels a little bit too. So I definitely do think we have to take that hard feedback and understand that maybe is that person giving it really hard, but somebody else might feel it, or we might need to make adjustments. - Yeah, yeah, I definitely, this is the one thing that comes out time and time again, is this learning that you have to have thick skin, you have to just take it, you have to learn how to just absorb it. But on the other hand, I think it's also to do with some of our, like, like I said, like, when it comes across as super negative, could it just be somebody being super honest, and that's how they communicate, and then us on the other hand sitting there and like preferring a method of communication that is more forgiving, and it's kind of this fear almost, that as a people team, suddenly, if you're communicating, it's like how you absorb information on the other end when you're a feedback does not align with like your preferred method of receiving feedback, how much is it actually going to affect you at your job, fixing something or perceiving something? And that's really interesting. What do you think about kind of that as a problem? - In a people team, and leaders in general, we have to be the most adaptable in communicating, because the team that we're dealing with is gonna be multiple different personalities, multiple different behavior styles, and so we have to appease all of them, what we have to understand all of them, maybe not a few, but we have to understand all of them, and we have to be able to communicate effectively to all of them. So therefore, yeah, it might hurt us. We were like, man, I wish I was a constructor, but I wish he did like a sandwich thing of good, bad, good, because that's what I like. But at the end of the day, we have to go, okay, this is just the way the person is, they're very direct, they went straight to the point, they don't like this because of A, B, and C. Or, you know, we have to read a whole book and we're like, okay, what is the problem because they still haven't got to it yet. You're giving all these random details. So it's on us, I really think that's on the leaders and I really think it's on people teams, to what we have to adapt, you know, sometimes what they said, they didn't mean to say it in a very mean way. It's just how they taught. They didn't mean to hurt our feelings, they didn't mean to dismiss six months' work of work and budget fights and everything. They just, they say it in their way. They'd say it to themselves, feeling like, oh, this is dumb. - Yeah. And so with kind of your experience, have you had this happen to you before where you had, you know, like people just misunderstanding each other and you know, once it does happen, how do we get in and resolve it or how do we prepare for situations like this really? - Yeah, actually, just recently had a, I was with a company and I was, I came along, probably midway through their expansion. And they had a manager who had a direct report to them and she thought it was slow, like he just didn't understand anything, he was just, he was not up to par. And she's like one of those people that does like the two line emails. She's very direct, like the what and the when. And he would always come back with like, it's kind of questions and she's always like, he doesn't understand it, he doesn't understand it. So I guess this was going on for months when I was brought in and when I came in, she was almost managing around him, like I saw her getting out of task that he could have done her he should have been doing because she just didn't want to deal with all the questions. Now, I don't think neither of them were wrong in what they saw, but they were both completely right about the why. Because it wasn't about attitude or competence or not understanding, it's just, he, she was wired to lead with the outcome. And he was wired to lead with accuracy. So she wanted the what and when and he wanted the, the how, the why, the what ifs. - Yeah. - And so to her, like he looked like you just didn't understand things into him, it looked like she was careless, like you don't care about what goes into this work. So we did a behavioral assessment across the company and kind of gave insights on how these, how they communicate, like what their behavior changed the communication. And we saw that change almost immediately of men understanding, oh, I get it. This is why this person takes some, or asks these questions, this is why this person's so direct. Now, they didn't change who they were, but they did change their communications, like she would then still give the what and when, first part of the email real quick, and then underneath, she'd give all the, the question, or answers to the questions he might have. And he started leading right away with the action, like, hey, here's the thing we did. And then he would give all the caveats at the end, right? So they both kind of gave each other what they needed right away. And then they gave what they wanted, what they needed afterwards, right? So they appeased the person they're communicating through. - Yeah. And if we were to try and extrapolate that back to the way that we tried to understand what people want from us through this engagement service, through listening exercises, how can we, like, what some practical tips and advice can we give out to our listeners today on how can they make sure that these communication styles, at least are known. - That's it. And not everybody has the budget for behavioral assessments to do like insights or discord, or everybody, if you don't, there's a really cool, like I always say, just split your people into two groups. It takes like 10 to 20 minutes to two groups. You have the team that leads with tasks. They want the numbers, specifics, the deadlines, basically to what and the when. Then you take the other team and they lead with people and ideas, they want the big picture, they want the context, they want the why. You can give them abstract and they're kind of looking at the whole middle part to get to the end is fluid. And then when you're communicating, communicate with those two groups differently. Give the what and the when, and then give the abstract to the others. And watch the difference in how that message lands. I mean, I'm sure you've, you've unsent out, tons of communication. You ever sent out a communication, like you have one person that reacts like, "This is the coolest thing ever. I totally understand it." And somebody comes to you and goes, "What, I don't even know what we're talking about." It's just, it's communication styles, right? - Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I actually reminds me of an exercise that we've done recently. And this is the, again, like super practical. If you're listening and you're thinking of how could I pull something like this off and make it fun. I had run a manager summit a couple of months ago. And then this manager summit, all I had was just the managers in there. So of course it was kind of like, not all of the company, just one third of it. And they were all locked in the room and we did, and do you notice the color theory? You can be like blue, you can be yellow, you can be red, or you can be green, I believe, these were the colors. And we basically, like typically you will have to have like a person coming in and giving all of this, they're meant to be like super trained on the stuff. But we read through all the theory and then we did what's responsible, a tried department does and tried to upload it all into cloud and give us some exercises that we could use on the market. (laughing) And we built like a couple of really cool exercises actually where we did something similar to what you were talking about and we basically gave them, we divided them all into tables and each table was given a color. You are going to be this color, this color typically communicates like this. So they had like a cheat sheet that we shown on the screen to everyone. And then we gave them all scenarios, like the deadlines coming up, you're the manager of this person, explain, get them to hurry up, get them to tell you what's going on. And then we would see how each different color would have communicated that message out. And in this exercise, these people could self identify as a particular color, but it was really interesting is they could try and also identify their director ports. They'd be like, "Oh, actually, you know what, like my director port actually does, it just very, very much resembles them." And that was free, like that was free. And we run that for one of this kind of group sessions when we brought them all together for the manager summit. And honestly, it's not your like super scientific disc assessment or insight at all. I get it, but it was so hilarious. People had so much laughing because they just like tried to act the doll. and this was super, super memorable. And yeah, if you're looking for a team activity that could also be educational for their styles, I really do think that that could be a fun one. So recommend. - But awesome one. Yeah, and the best part I'm sure is when you saw your leadership have that little light bulb moment when they saw like, I know, who talks like this. I totally get it. It's such an easy exercise and you're right. Cause nothing. You can do this. You can break people up and use cloth or whoever you use. And it's doable. You don't need to just practitioners or insight practitioner. You can do it yourself. - Yeah, yeah, just make sure. Obviously you upload everything and you find all the right information and you don't like invent something. But if one is you can get the integrity of the prompt coming in. I think that something really exciting could come out on the other end. With your platform, because I know, can we talk a little bit about your platform? Because I know what you do there is you kind of integrate the two things, right? You've been telling me about how it works. So just be really interesting to know like, what's been your research into this sort of engagement tools and surveys? Is there many other places like this that integrate the two together, the personality and the survey or like? - I have it from that. - What do you know about this space? - I have it. Well, I'm a disc practitioner. So I've always loved disc. But I noticed that they never really, you know, you have your engagement survey and then you have your goals of everything. Every fee, but it was never all connected. And I think the biggest issue with all this is it needs to be connected, need to be communicated effectively. And so where I took it from when I was trying to solve my own problem is, okay, well, we have these behavioral assessments, we have these behaviors that we all have. Well, why not integrate that exactly into the feedback we're getting from people so we can maybe take that feedback a little lighter when it is harsh and also maybe get more out of it when it's harder to get. And then tie that all into where we actually talk about what we saw on these surveys. Because I don't think those ever really reach one-on-ones or anything, you know, sometimes you get a presentation and then you wait till next quarter and then you get another presentation. So it doesn't touch people. Same thing with the behavioral assessments that you did. Like those kinds of sites are so amazing. Even if you do it yourself, they're so useful. But is that one time? How do we keep using this to keep being aware of the differences in our people and the differences that the things we're seeing in our engagement data? So that's kind of where I tied the platform in with the one-on-ones, the disc and then the engagement survey that's anonymous with the anonymous feedback. So basically, the way you think about it is that it is an ongoing conversation. It is tying the way that people communicate. They all communicate differently. So it's trying to understand how everybody communicates to not all be upset, but all be on the same page. And then you are talking about kind of understanding what you wanna measure through the engagement, maybe like your themes. But what I'm learning from you today is that an engagement survey is almost like a day-to-day conversation, a one-to-one, potential subject. And could you give us maybe an example of how you weave all of this in? How does it play out on a regular stretch of three months, for example? - Yeah, I'll give you the shortest version possible because it just becomes, and so you do an engagement survey, you find out all this, you get this feedback that's anonymized, it's company-wide, so you can't break it down by a department or gender. You just know that these people set these things and these scores happened. Everybody has a disc assessment, so you can see what your team is, your mix styles, so you know, like, hey, this person's a little bit more talkative, more reserved. And then all of that data goes into one-on-ones that are preset for the manager that's are done monthly. So let's say we saw a drop in autonomy, or people mentioned a bunch of things. Well, because it's company-wide, you're gonna have this same kind of conversation with everybody on your team, except it's tailored to their, their distile. So you know that you're, you know, maybe you can't just go, some people you just go like, "Hey, what's going on with this? What can we do? How do we fix this?" And other people you have to kind of break into it slowly, right? And so the idea is that you're bringing these things into one-on-one, so if somebody said in the feedback that, you know, these workflows or this new implementation of this is not working, you can then address it to your entire team. What do you think about this? How can we do it better? And now you have thousands of ideas, and if you really are doing this over, you know, at least three times, they're slowly, and especially if they see change or action, they're gonna be more open about it. I mean, the ideal situation is to not need anonymous surveys at all. People will just come to you and be like, "Hey, I know your communication style. Let me tell you something that you need to know that, well, better the business." But that's a perfect world, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Honestly, I feel like it's also, it's also important at that point too, and I'm just like, "Refate now," but if, let's say, "Disc Profiles," right? And let's say, "Color Theory," let's say, we know what communication style or profile, or whatever the other person prefers. How do we equip our managers to actually use that to their advantage? Because if we do only do that training once in the blue moon, and we do invite a practitioner or we DIY it or whatever, it's still just once, how can we rely that they will remember how to communicate again in the future? Do you have any advice? Without buying software and stuff like that, like I integrate this Slack to help people with communication, but for yourself, why not take exactly what you said you did the color thing, right? And you're gonna say, "I'm a yellow or something." Take that into cloud and ask it to write a one-pager. Just a quick three-doze, three-dones-one communicating, and maybe what they do under stress, what they do when they're excited. They just have that for your team on a drive or something. Or have it printed out. Something where they're always gonna have it, so they're like, "Hey, you know what? "Today I'm gonna talk to so-and-so." Let me look, oh yeah, there it is. And they can kind of, it's subconsciously, and it's not a fix all, but it's a good thing to have in the back of your mind like, "Oh yeah, I remember the communicate. "They need the data. "I better start with numbers." It's just something to keep people always remembering it, and that again is free. You do the color thing, have it bring it up, and as long as it's close enough, you're still trying your best to adapt, right? And I think people do notice when you try to adapt. - Yeah, and I think that matters a lot. This last part, like you are just trying, and people will see that you're trying, because a lot of the time I get pushed back from people who, for example, don't like a disc or profile analysis on themselves. I worked with some senior directors in the past who would say things like, "Oh, all of this is BS." And nobody can profile me, and I'm like, "Wait, you're unique for all this." And all these questions are crap, and blah, blah. So you have like some really strong, some people have some really strong opinions. And I feel that possibly there may be are some people that will not fit very well into a color or a style, or a something. But just to almost just to have this vague idea anyway, is helpful and trying your best is helpful. And even that whole culture around mobilizing people to try better is already super, super helpful. So I want to kind of share that part louder for people at the back that don't get discouraged by people who think this is all BS, because that is just a small number of people, and also the whole culture around improving and not stopping and good and trying to do better. All of that is going to pay dividends. In the future, it's not none of this ever goes to waste, and people will remember that you are doing it for them. - And the folks that say they can't be profiled, it's fair enough, we're a blend of everything, no one person's the same. And also we change. Like if you take on a bigger role, your behaviors can change a little bit, because things have changed. So I would just ask that person, okay, that you don't have to be red, green, blue, go be purple, whatever you want to be, you may profile yourself. Tell me how you like to hear things. Like do you want to straighten, you want the details, and then know you have something to work, again, it's vague, but you can get a vague idea of how to be like, you can be your outlier, it's totally fine, maybe. Not everybody's going to fit perfectly in it and let them be unique, but still have them be a part of everything. - Yeah, and that's actually a really good idea. Just get them to, okay, then you tell me. Then you tell me, I'm not going to tell you who you are, I'm not going to go and take you through in 97 questions to tell you your horoscope and who you are and your numerology and where you belong in the chain of souls. But yeah, then you just tell me what you're doing and how do you want to respond to and how should I approach when you are not feeling well and how do you look like when you're overwhelmed and when should I check in on you and stuff like this, actually, it reminds me, spill ages ago. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. of spill, they kind of, they are like a, a B2B company that does therapy for employees. So you basically you pay them and they plug in their, all of their accounts, psychologists and stuff into your employee base and employees can book sessions with them. This is not an advertisement or anything. I'm not getting sponsored. I'm just remembering that back in the day, they used to have this tool which was called God, something like me, some like me profile or about me or some like this. And you could write your own about me and then you could request somebody else's about me. And if you do that, both of yours about me gets shared with each other and you know how to talk to each other going forward. And then they took it away and I haven't found another platform that does it. So maybe this is going to be my next Claude project. I just revealed it. Because I'm super useful. We don't have some. It is. One of the things in Clark, the whole board chart, you can see that basically one page or how to talk to somebody. You're going to have a meeting, you're having a meeting with a boss you don't speak with or a director for the guest speaker. I mean, having something like that to be like, oh man, I haven't talked to this person a while and you can just look up real quick. Just a quick little out line. You're like, okay, all right, I know how I can bring this to or how I can best effectively communicate with them. I mean, that's something would be great for everybody to, before every time you have a talk, you're like, okay, I know how to do this. Or I can adapt a little bit to this. Oh my god, this is such a, I literally just wrote it down on my phone. And that's why I love making these episodes. And I hope you like making some notes as well because some some some some gold playing around here. This is really great. If we were to come to the end, you know, of this conversation and you wanted people to just go away with like one thought about engagement surveys, communication of teams, maintaining their, you know, like conversation through time, right after the service over blah, blah, what kind of one or two thoughts that sort of you want to transcend on people today. So you can finish this call and they're like, okay, I'll think about that. Um, I think the biggest, the biggest thing I would say for every company, regardless of how you're doing your surveys, if you're doing a survey or whatever, your reaction to what your employees say or how your employees rate you or whatever determines if they're going to say anything on us to get. You have to, you have to be patient. You have to take action or you have to at least address it even if you don't, if you disagree and your whole employees are like, we need to switch to building planes and you're like, we do software. What are you, we talking about? You still do address it. Even if you disagree with it, you have to address it, acknowledge it and ask questions. Your reaction is going to determine if your people are going to keep telling you the stuff that you want to know. I absolutely adore this advice. I love it. It's like, made me emotional because this is so true. And I have, I have got it wrong in the past when, you know, like I didn't, I didn't acknowledge something that somebody was saying. And then actually in the next engagement round, when people were feeling it and they said, nobody acknowledged what I said last time and they like said it black and white and big, big lesson, you know, and just even if it's hard to read, even if it's, you know, not according to your own color or communication style, take it on the chin, think it through, be really analytical, really objective and yeah, like you're right. Just the way people respond is what's going to be memorable. It's the feelings. It's the feelings everybody always remembers. And I'm going to remember what they filled in. They maybe will remember what they filled in or how they filled in or how they've set it, but they will remember the feeling of doing it and then the feeling of it being brought back to them. That's what they will remember. And that's really, really powerful for us in the people's space because we literally operate through subjective experience. Thousand percent. Good and agree more. And on that note, thank you so much Michael for coming onto this episode and sharing with us. So just a quick, quick summary, we basically have spoken about the importance of making sure that through the engagement service, people feel safe to answer the questions that are in there that people feel safe to raise their concerns. And in general, making sure that as their responses are coming through, you're able to play back those responses, even if it is not something you're going to do, but it's still making sure that you acknowledge this. We also discuss the various communication styles and how it may be useful to even profile your employee base, your managers, your director boards or just people cross-functionally to build more opportunity for more meaningful communication and less collisions and less attitudes and just more people working closer together. And we've also just been talking about making sure that we continue speaking about engagement data that came in for one to ones following that. And it's not something that should just sort of come on through the people teams, but maybe just something that should come out through the managers, through the leadership, through team-coms, through team meetings in the future. These topics should continue floating and servicing. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much again Michael for being with us. I'm sure people can find you on LinkedIn and talk to you more and ask you more questions. But yeah, thank you so much and goodbye everyone.