Moving your Employee Feedback program over to Culture Amp from another provider can appear daunting to various stakeholders - but it doesn't have to be difficult!
To help make it as straightforward as possible, we've put forward five important considerations that will help make your transition successful. Thinking through your approach to these considerations will help you manage the change process internally and enable you to minimize the disruption to your employees.
What driver questions should you ask?
If you're transitioning from a different provider then you will have a legacy set of questions. We routinely work with customers to compare these legacy questions to our Engagement template and decide which questions to add, remove and/or edit. This process also considers which of the final questions will match to our benchmarks and which have evolved into some new and unique to your survey.
This process allows customers to ensure they continue asking the right questions to trend over time, connect with Culture Amp benchmarks, and address emerging strategic priorities.
We recommend the earlier you begin the survey design process the better. You can start by asking yourselves;
Which questions from our previous survey do we absolutely need to continue measuring?
Which Culture Amp template questions do we absolutely need to benchmark externally?
Which questions from Culture Amp's Engagement template don't make sense for our business?
Are there any areas of strategic importance to our business right now that we need feedback on?
Should you compare engagement scores between Culture Amp and your previous surveys?
Yes. In fact, many transitioning customers include historical comparisons in their first Culture Amp survey. Though, we do need to first conduct a mapping exercise in order to understand which comparisons would be valid. Comparing scores between surveys is simplest when the question intent and the scale remains the same. Culture Amp uses an industry-standard five point agreement scale.
If the scale of your previous survey wasn’t five points or used different anchor points, indicative comparisons may be possible but they are more complex. In these situations we can advise on what may best be an ‘indicative’ comparison after you applied any relevant transformations. Culture Amp works with many customers coming from a wide range of providers and therefore has much experience helping customers have these conversations, regarding what is and isn’t valid to compare.
It is worth mentioning that there will be situations where you may be better served by focusing on your new survey and forgoing historical comparisons.
How does Culture Amp calculate Engagement?
The good news is that Culture Amp is model agnostic and favors a simple model that is easy to communicate. The benefits of using Culture Amp’s questions is a pre-existing and scientifically valid approach with external benchmarks. We find many successful transitions ask the Culture Amp engagement questions along with past questions where needed for reporting and KPI purposes.
Our Engagement template uses the following five Engagement questions;
Pride: I am proud to work for ACME
Recommendation/Net Promoter Style: I would recommend ACME as a great place to work
Present Commitment: I rarely think about looking for a job at another company
Future Commitment: I see myself still working at ACME in two years’ time
Motivation: ACME motivates me to go beyond what I would in a similar role elsewhere
These questions give you a good representation of how engaged your people are. Culture Amp calculates Engagement as an average percentage favorable response from your engagement questions and reports both the aggregate score and the responses to each item.
Some providers calculate their Engagement score in a ‘black box’ method, making it difficult to understand exactly what goes into the calculation. Naturally, this makes it difficult to compare past engagement scores with Culture Amp’s reported engagement. In these scenarios, it is more reliable and valid to look for question level comparisons as they can be made with greater confidence.
What kinds of reports will I need to create and for whom?
Culture Amp’s online platform will be your primary destination for survey results. Customers can use our platform to view simplified manager reports, deep dive into specific questions, look at difference across Teams, Departments, etc. while also observing overall key trends. Reports can also be exported to spreadsheets.
Our report sharing functions give customers the ability to generate customised reports using our platform that can be shared with any employees with data filtered to any level. Typical reports include CEO reports including all company results, heads of departments reports limited to responses from a specific department and team reports for managers.
In addition to customized online reports, editable presentations can also be exported in PowerPoint format. Customers in HR and People Ops find this very useful, as it saves a lot of time in preparing presentations for the business. Managers also love the ability to generate ready-to-present slides for their teams.
It is an important stakeholder management exercise to ensure that their expectations are met in terms of what access they receive. While sharing results widely and giving access to managers, leaders, etc. often contributes to greater ownership and transparency, not all organizations are ready for that yet. Ensure that receivers of reports clearly understand what they are meant to do with the reports once they have access. Here are some considerations for how to decide what to share with whom.
Key changes from your alternative providers tend to be;
Speed of reports. If your previous provider generated reports for you that were delivered weeks after survey close, you can look forward to results being available real-time. Watch the participation rate climb minutes after launch!
No more manual results packs. We have customers that used to spend weeks manually generating packs for leaders, whereas they can now give leaders' access to online reports with a few clicks.
Greater demographic breakdowns. Customers love the ability to see results at all levels of their business. The consequence is you need to be deliberate about the demographics you add to Culture Amp as well as which demographics are included in Manager reports.
CA's tips for transitioning your Engagement approach
The complexity you will face in transitioning to Culture Amp will depend on your previous processes and the expectations of your people. That doesn't mean you can't make it an enjoyable and empowering experience! Here are three important considerations that will make your transition more successful.
Show your people that moving to Culture Amp will help you create a better place to work. Focus on communication and how the transition to Culture Amp will facilitate simpler insights, faster focus on action and shared ownership.
Ensure the people metrics your business looks for are covered. If you report on Employee Engagement in your balanced scorecard or similar, the question-mapping process will be crucial to give yourselves and your leaders confidence that you can continue valid reporting.
Incrementally create transparency and ownership. Culture Amp has a lot of great features that can help increase transparency with employees and empower managers to own their results to take action. As important as it is to avoid the HR blackbox, you need to ensure you aren't attempting to do too much too soon. The customers who've been most successful in creating a strong culture of feedback have done so by incrementally sharing with managers as appropriate and slowly sharing more with the business.
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