What can I learn from this page? | A guide to driving action through the use of survey champions |
Who is this guide for? | Account Admins, Survey Admins, Survey Creators |
A Survey Champion is an employee who, during the process of running a survey, takes a leadership and enablement role to help drive their organization’s post-survey action goals by facilitating communications and acting as an agent for positive change.
Champions help teams implement their Results To Action plan and a key task is working with individual departments and teams to Generate Ideas for Action. By design, they are not necessarily a manager or HRBP, but a person who is influential within their organization and passionate about improving workplace culture.
💡 Tip: Prefer to learn from a video instead? Check out our Quick tip on action champions in Culture Ap Training.
What is the Role of a Survey Champion?
A Survey Champion can take a local enablement and leadership role that might include:
acting as a point-person for answering survey-related questions
coaching managers on how to access and interpret results
working in partnership with a HRBP or local department leader
running workshops with their team to share and discuss the survey results and areas chosen to focus on
facilitating ‘How-Might-We’ sessions to surface and test potential solutions from employees
getting feedback on proposed solutions to elevate the most appropriate and supported solutions to the HR team
promoting initiatives and acting as a voice of change with their team (i.e. championing the survey process) and this could be as simple as encouraging staff to come to workshops.
Why Use a Survey Champion?
Accountability and intentional processes support action, and action drives outcomes. Typically where as a People team may work more closely with an organization’s leadership and managers, a Survey Champion has a focus on amplifying the voices of employees by supporting action planning and idea generation at a business unit and team level.
Survey Champions also help with scalability of initiatives, effective communication, local support for questions, as well as encouraging ownership of results locally.
Survey Champions help keep organizations accountable on the Action Questions which are:
“I have been provided an opportunity to see and discuss recent employee survey results”
“I believe action will take place as a result of this survey”
“I have seen positive changes taking place based on recent employee survey results”
“My manager, or someone else, has communicated some clear actions based on recent employee survey results”
If a Survey Champion is an employee selected from amongst their peers - e.g. an engineer or salesperson without direct reports, or an employee who works on a factory line or retail floor - then they may be better suited to understand the challenges of their peers. As such, they have on-the-ground influence, and they are bought into the process so they can help connect the dots for people.
Are They an Individual Contributor, HR, Manager, or Department Leader?
The person who acts as a Survey Champion differs by company size. This is typically a factor of how well-resourced the People & Culture team are, and how involved they want front-line employees to be in the results-to-action process.
At Culture Amp, we drive action on our own internal employee feedback surveys, by selecting an individual contributor as a Survey Champion from within each business unit.
In a larger organizations however, a more involved version of the Survey Champion may be a HRBP or manager who acts as an internal coach/consultant for each business unit or department. They perform more advanced roles such as:
help make the business case for employee engagement
assist with testing the survey, especially translations or kiosk mode
answer basic technical questions
drive participation while the survey is open
helping other managers interpret their reports
complete action plans
In these larger organizations, they are often the regional - or functional - go-to person for questions related to employee engagement and the ones responsible for disseminating information through semi-formal and informal communication channels.
To learn more about how you could enable Survey Champions, see: `Survey Champion Resources: How to Identify, Support and Reward Your Champions`
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