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Welcome to the Culture Amp Change surveys
Welcome to the Culture Amp Change surveys

An overview of our change surveys

Jared Ellis avatar
Written by Jared Ellis
Updated over a week ago

What can I learn from this page?

An overview of our change surveys

Who is this guide for?

Account Admins, Survey Admins, Survey Creators

The Culture Amp Change Surveys are optimized for a wide range of organizational changes. They can be run across an entire organization, a single business unit or division, or a subset of teams and departments, depending on where the change is taking place.

Feedback helps organizations understand the views of their people during various stages of any change process; putting real and actionable feedback into the hands of the business leaders and teams that need it to be successful.

What is Organizational Change?

Organizational change is defined as the process of changing the working methods, equipment, strategy, or culture, in order to develop and deal with new situations or markets as an example.

When is it relevant to Measure Change?

The Change Surveys are ideal for organizations that are going through any type of meaningful change or transformation, for example:

  • Merger or Acquisition

  • Restructure

  • Reduction in Force

  • Operating Model Change

  • Strategy Change

  • Digital Transformation / Introduction of New Technology

  • Cultural Transformation

  • Agile Transformation

  • Rapid Growth

Background to the Change Surveys

“When people are truly invested in change, it is 30% more likely to stick.”

Ewenstein, Smith, and Sologar (2015).

With many (if not most!) of our customers planning to implement some form of change in the next 12 months, we knew it was important to create a template that would allow customers to collect, understand, and act on employee feedback throughout change, and to greatly increase the likelihood of success.

The Change Surveys work in the same way as our Engagement Template in that there is an outcome we are trying to drive. For the Engagement Template, the outcome factor is Engagement. For the change surveys, the outcome factor is Change Confidence. The remaining survey questions are driver questions and are asked to assess what most impacts the outcome factor.

The Culture Amp Change surveys use impact analysis calculated automatically in the platform to show which areas are most impacting the confidence employees have in the change taking place. This information supports those across the business, from executives, people, and culture teams, managers as well as employees themselves to take high impact actions, enabling them to successfully implement organizational change.

To make the change a success, aggregate reports can guide action and initiatives across the organization and spotlight employee demographics that require attention, while individual reports support managers to focus and take action at a local level.

Benefits of Collecting Employee Feedback Through Change

Collect employee feedback through change in order to:

  • Give leaders the tools and information they need to lead a successful change

  • Drive a more agile and responsive change program

  • Increase the speed of learning and adapting

  • Understand what employees need/expect

  • Identify blind spots

  • Show that the business is listening and values employee feedback

  • Develop a communication loop / two-way conversation

  • Show empathy towards employees that are affected by organisational change

  • Empower employees to best understand and support the change journey

  • Develop action points (e.g. promises and expectations that have not been delivered)

  • Access suggestions from employees for more successful implementation

Change Survey Factors

The factors in the surveys are unique to Culture Amp and represent the behaviours, processes, and environmental elements that are the most critical to making any change successful.

The change surveys include roughly 40 questions each, and assess the following distinct factors:

  • Company Confidence

  • Customers

  • Leadership

  • Communication & Awareness

  • Enablement

  • Collaboration

  • My Team

  • My Manager

  • Alignment & Involvement

  • Belonging

  • Advocacy

  • Engagement*

The survey is customizable and can be adapted to align with existing change frameworks developed internally at your company. Read more about the Science Behind our Change Surveys.

*Engagement Questions

While Engagement may not be the outcome factor in the change surveys, it is important to measure and track engagement through change to trend over time, which is why you will find engagement questions included in the change templates. It is important to note that engagement questions are outcomes themselves, meaning that you cannot directly impact these items, however, they will appear alongside the other change survey driver questions.

What Point in the Change Process Should I Survey?

In designing the surveys, we have separated the questions into two distinct templates depending on the stage of change you’re in, and when you plan to collect feedback.

Change Readiness (pre-change survey)

The pre-change survey has been designed to use before change takes place, to understand the readiness of your employees. The survey can be launched when the change is in the planning stages or has just been announced.

Change Success (during/post-change survey)

The during/post-change survey has been designed to use when change is in motion or after the change has occurred (in some instances, this can be two or three years down the line for major change initiatives). This survey can be launched at any time when the change is in progress.

Change Retro/Completion

Quite often, implementing organizational change takes time, and has no hard-stop. In these cases, the Change Success Survey Templates outlined above will be relevant to use. However, if there has been an organizational change with a definitive end, and is fully complete, you may like to survey as a retrospective review of the change to gain insights on what can be improved in the future and what worked well.

The Importance of Communication Through Change

Research suggests that regular and honest communication during a change process, even when the change may not feel positive, helps minimize the stress and anxiety felt by employees.

Understanding the effectiveness of your communications during change is an important aspect of our change surveys. We have therefore included five questions on communication so that organizations can understand how effective their communications around change have been.

As with all of our surveys, we’ve provided suggested communications to use when inviting and reminding employees to take the survey which is built into the ‘Communications’ section you can see as an Account Administrator.

This Support Guide highlights the importance of pre-survey communications and has a template that you can use in planning this (this template was designed for planning the launch of Engagement surveys, however, it can easily be adapted to use for a Change Survey). We suggest that you customize this template to address the specific change that is happening and describe why it’s important that employees have their say ahead of, or during the organizational change.

Communications around employee feedback are always important, but much of the research shows it is of utmost importance during times of organizational change. Read more about communication in Science Behind our Change Surveys. Therefore, we recommend that you consider putting extra time and effort into developing your organization’s communication plan around surveying through times of change.

We hope you find using these surveys useful as you drive and embed change initiatives in your organization. As one of Culture Amp's organizational values is 'learn faster through feedback' we look forward to hearing your thoughts as you use and apply these surveys.

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