Don’t just survey your employees: map their experience.
Don’t just survey your employees: map their experience.
Comparing the challenges of surveying employees and users, and what HR can learn from Product Management and UX.
“Surveying employees is not rocket science: you just write some questions, send them to the employees, process the responses, done deal, easy peasy, right? How hard can it be? Just use a tool like Survey Monkey and be done with it….”
The real answer? Sending a survey is pretty easy, but it’s INCREDIBLY hard to do it well. (The fact that there are Master’s degree programs on this topic, should give you a hint).
As I stated in many of my previous articles written for ProductizeHR, there are lots of parallels to be traced between HR and Product Management. Your candidates are your leads, which you want to convert into employees/users, you want to onboard them as quickly and effectively as possible, you want to engage, upsell and retain them, and maximize their lifetime value.
Naturally, this means that when looking at the challenges in surveying your team, it is helpful to look at them by comparison with the challenges in user interviews.
Surveying Employees in HR vs. Surveying Clients in Product Management
By now, I am sure you can see the similarities. In this article, I wanted to hone in on challenge #10, the one about Impactful Actions and Follow-up, with a focus on a common piece of advice:
Warning: Never Ask Your Customers What They Want
The purpose of customer surveys in product management is not to gather a laundry list of features, bounce random ideas off of people our outsource your product vision to the masses. Doing this is a guaranteed way to generate fake use cases as customers
tend to be like kids at buffet table, taking food they will never eat asking for features theywill never use ’
From TheProductManagersToolbox.com
After all, as Henry Ford once said:
Also, unless questions are very carefully crafted, surveys can be a double-edged sword: they can give you insight, but they can also set untenable expectations about what is going to be done about the answers. Some folks might get the impression that -just because you asked for an opinion- you are making a commitment.
And even in the best scenario, actionable insight can be dispersed and vague. Surveys can be valuable to obtain feedback at scale, but they are only useful when you have defined the right questions to ask.
Asking the right questions: a learning lesson from Product Management
One of the best books out there on learning from your customers is “The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn if Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You.” by Rob Fitzpatrick.
The core ideas of the book revolve around avoiding the pitfalls of biased and misleading feedback by asking the right questions in the right way. Here are the key takeaways:
Avoid Pitching: One of the central ideas in the book is to refrain from pitching your product or idea to customers during interviews. When you pitch, customers often respond favorably to be polite, even if they have reservations. This can lead to false positive feedback, creating unrealistic expectations.
Focus on Problems, not Solutions: Instead of asking customers if they would use a specific feature or product, focus on understanding their problems and challenges. By delving into their pain points, you can uncover real needs and validate whether your offering addresses genuine customer concerns.
The "Mom Test" Principle: The title of the book comes from the notion that when asking questions, avoid those that your mom would give biased answers to, such as, "Do you think my idea is great?" Instead, aim for objective, unbiased responses by framing questions more effectively.
Talk about Past Behavior: To get reliable insights, inquire about customers' past behavior and experiences related to the problem you aim to solve. Past actions provide more reliable indicators of what customers truly value and use.
Listen Actively and Don't Debate: Actively listen to customers without interrupting or debating their responses. Debating can make customers feel defensive and inhibit honest feedback.
Keep it Casual: Engage customers in casual conversations rather than formal interviews. Casual settings encourage customers to open up and share authentic thoughts.
Identify Real Pain Points: Through careful questioning, discover the severity and urgency of customers' pain points. Understanding their motivations and the impact of the problem will help you prioritize solutions effectively.
Iterate and Improve: Continuously iterate and refine your questioning techniques. Learn from each customer interaction to improve future interviews and enhance the quality of insights gathered.
If you look at these through the lens of HR, I am sure you’ll start to see some points in common, and some advice starts to emerge when you really want to capture employee feedback:
hypothetical questions are likely to give you hypothetical, non-actionable answers
loaded questions will give you biased answers
debating breaks the flow of honest feedback
problems and pain points are more important at that stage than solutions
How to do Employee Interviews, then?
Lucky for us, many tools and frameworks can help us have these important conversations that deliver valuable insight. Some of the sharpest tools in our toolbox to design a prime employee experience are Design Thinking and User Experience.
Design Thinking, which is a very ductile methodology for problem discovery, has become particularly useful for HR practices and teams.
In a nutshell, design thinking is a human-centric, iterative problem-solving methodology that focuses on understanding users' needs, fostering creativity, and validating solutions through rapid prototyping and testing. By employing empathy, collaboration, and constant iteration, design thinking leads to innovative solutions that address real-world challenges and create meaningful experiences for users.
User Experience (UX) is a multidisciplinary field focused on understanding user needs, pain points, and aspirations to create positive and meaningful interactions between users and products or services. By prioritizing usability, accessibility, and aesthetics, UX professionals aim to craft intuitive and delightful experiences that align with business objectives. Through iterative design, user research, and testing, UX enhances customer satisfaction, fosters brand loyalty, and creates emotionally resonant products and services that stand out in today's competitive landscape.
One of the common tools used both in Design Thinking and UX is User/Customer Journey Mapping.
And since we established before that anything designed for Users and Customers can be easily leveraged for employees, it is only natural that there are many examples of this same tool, but tailored to the Employee Experience:
In essence, the Employee Journey map tracks all the key moments across the employee experience, but not in a linear way like an Employee Lifecycle Diagram would. Instead, it follows the multiple experiences of the individual employee, which can happen and any time, and be simultaneous rather than successive.
A Comparison of Employee Lifecycle Diagrams vs Employee Journey Maps
Employee Lifecycle Diagrams:
Presents a structured and linear representation of the employee's journey.
Outlines sequential stages of an employee's employment, such as recruitment, onboarding, etc.
Focuses on HR processes, operational activities, and administrative procedures.
Ensures compliance, consistency, and efficiency in HR practices.
Provides an overview of the organization's HR activities throughout the employee's tenure.
Aims to streamline internal workflows and align HR practices with organizational goals.
Employee Journey Maps:
Emphasizes the emotional and experiential aspects of the employee's journey.
Focuses on understanding the employee's perspective and feelings at each stage.
Represents various touchpoints and interactions employees have with the organization.
Identifies pain points and opportunities for improvement in the employee experience.
Aims to enhance overall employee engagement, retention, and satisfaction.
Provides insights into moments that matter and key factors influencing the employee experience.
OK, I’m sold…Where do I start?
There are different approaches and tools and resources to help you build a faithful representation of your Employee Journey that you can use to help you understand the pain points, and prioritize what to work on first, guiding you step by step in your effort to design and implement top-notch employee experiences.
Here are some resources that I found to be useful:
https://surveysparrow.com/blog/create-employee-journey-map/
https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/employee-journey-mapping
https://www.zendesk.com/blog/employee-experience-journey-mapping/
Also, the team at Pyn (who have published a lot of resources about this and other topics on their website) is working on a soon-to-be-launched Employee Journey Mapper tool. Make sure to check it out!
In summary
Employee Surveys are great tools for scaling the gathering of feedback, but usually, they do not go deep enough when it comes to understanding the pain points of your employees, and they can even be counterproductive if you can’t build sufficient trust and authenticity, or if you set untenable expectations about the follow-up to the survey
Product Management and UX deal with some of the same challenges, and they come to the rescue with tools like better user interviewing techniques (e.g. see the book “The Mom Test”) and Design Thinking.
Employee Journey Maps, in particular, can be especially useful to understand the quality of the experience your employees are receiving and recognize the opportunities for improvement.