Running a team satisfaction survey is a prelude to taking action. Without action there is no progress, and without progress, there is no satisfaction.

When Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer analysed the work diaries of hundreds of employees over a three-year period, they found clear indicators of what made for a good day at work and what made for a bad day – progress and lack of progress. On days when employees recorded prominent events associated with making progress, they felt more motivated, happy and fulfilled. On days when they suffered setbacks, they felt frustrated, downhearted and negative. No surprises there, perhaps, but it makes it abundantly clear that the success or otherwise of a team satisfaction survey rests fair and square on whether or not you make headway with what’s troubling the team.

At The Colour Works, when we run team satisfaction surveys for our clients, there are six clear stages we go through that ensure making progress is top of mind and much more likely:

1. Sharing the results
2. Making sense of the results
3. Agreeing on priorities
4. Committing to action
5. Reviewing progress
6. Measuring outcomes

1) Sharing the results

It’s a good idea to send survey result reports out a good week in advance of meeting to discuss and make sense of them. People need time to read and digest the contents, reflect on the scores, and begin to form a view on what they’re saying. The more introverted members of the team will particularly appreciate having time and space to do this before being asked to comment and discuss possible actions.

Along with receiving a report, each member of the team should be clear about what the next steps are.

2) Making sense of the results

Meeting to discuss and make sense of the results should happen as soon after the survey has been completed as possible and ideally no more than a week after the reports have been given out. The idea is to keep the momentum flowing and make sure as much of the discussion around the results as possible is done in the more controlled environment of a team meeting. Informal discussion is to be expected and encouraged, but prolonged delays can lead to aimless speculation and diminishing energy and commitment.

By the time the team meets up, they’ll have a pretty good idea of what the results are saying, but there probably won’t be consensus around what exactly is behind the scores and what action should be taken. Priorities may differ, too, so there’ll be plenty to discuss.

The results should matter to the whole team, so make sure everyone contributes, not just the boss, the extraverts or the opinion leaders. If people sit on the sidelines too much, get them involved! As always, discussions should be inclusive and psychologically safe, but they should also be robust and leave no stone unturned when it comes to understanding what the central issues are. 

But beware – in no sense should discussions turn into a witch hunt! Trying to identify or belittle people who might be responsible for low scores goes against the whole idea of working together to improve team performance. In fact, studies show that the lowest scorers are often those with the greatest commitment and their scores indicate that they’re frustrated, not that they’re saboteurs!

3) Agreeing on priorities

The only thing worse than doing nothing when survey results come out is to embark on a grand programme of trying to fix everything all at once. It never turns out well. Teams invariably have plenty going on already, so overloading them with improvement initiatives will only make matters worse. Whether there are all sorts of problems coming out of the woodwork or your results highlight just a few must-fix issues, train your sights on two things only – low-hanging fruit and the one or two things at most that will make a major impact on the team’s performance. Once those things have been fixed, move on to priorities lower down the list.

Low-hanging fruit

As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer discovered, employees get a huge amount of energy from making headway on things that matter to them and it’s essential the team sees progress as soon after the survey as possible. Low-hanging fruit offers the best opportunity to demonstrate that things are happening in a meaningful way.

What do we mean by low-hanging fruit? Stuff that’s easy to reach, easy to get done. Photocopier’s broken? Get it fixed. Printer’s old and slow? Get a new one. Staff need access to systems instead of asking others for help? Give it to them. Low-hanging fruit is usually about fixing the niggly stuff, the things that irritate and demotivate us day in and day out, and it’s amazing how often they’re allowed to build up and slow performance down.

Care needs to be taken to know what constitutes low-hanging fruit and what doesn’t. Take the question of whether everyone knows what the objectives of the team are. Resolving doubt around something like that is never as simple as sending an email out with the team’s objectives clearly stated. Dig deeper and you’ll find confusion about written annual objectives versus day to day priorities, or differences between what we say is important and what we actually focus time, attention and resources on.

Major impact priorities

Your top three major impact priorities might be clear and obvious from your lowest survey scores, but it isn’t always that simple. The team will need time to discuss and reflect on what might underpin scores at the bottom of the table and maybe even identify links with items not scoring so badly. 

A low score on “There is open two-way communication within the team” will take time to explore. It’s important to take the team offline for a day and let them dig into the results until you have consensus or a strong majority around what to focus on. Again, doing less and doing it better is the wise way forward; making visible progress on the No.1 priority is far more important than tackling too many issues at once.

4) Committing to action

It takes commitment, time, energy and resources to change things for the better and without the first of these the other three will always be lacking. Yes, the team is really busy already. Yes, it’s hard to spare the time. But ignoring a critical issue or tackling it in a half-hearted way sends all the wrong signals to the team, plus you’re still left with the problem you started with. Leaders must lead. It’s vital they display and build a high level of commitment around actually, physically doing something to act on the problem. 

5) Reviewing progress

If people can’t see things are happening and changing for the better, then all manner of talk, meetings and good intentions will not convince them that progress is being made and motivation and trust will diminish. It’s important to keep reviewing progress to make sure your plans are on track. As Lou Gerstner, ex-Chairman and CEO of IBM said: “People don’t do what you expect, they do what you inspect.”

6) Measuring outcomes

Running the survey again after six months is a great way to find out whether the team’s actions have made a positive impact. The true answer to that, of course, will hopefully have been felt directly within the team, but re-running the survey provides an objective before-and-after comparison. We would call this a temperature check – an interim measurement before a third survey one year after the first, that tells us where we’re making progress and what still needs our attention.

Running a team satisfaction survey isn’t rocket science but it’s so important to approach it with a degree of rigour if commitment and progress are to be maintained. Teams need to work through the survey process in a structured fashion and stay tightly focused on the outcomes that will bring the greatest reward. Quick wins keep energy flowing and motivation high but it’s making progress on improvements that will have a major impact on performance that really fires the team up – get that right and the rewards are considerable.