Link the Survey to your Business Strategy

If the purpose of an Opinion Research Program is to help improve the organization, then we need an understanding of where the organization is going in terms of its strategic business direction.

We cannot look at an Organizational Survey as simply a tool for employees to tell management where it hurts so that management can take action to alleviate the problems. A Strategic Organizational Survey will help you align the survey with your strategic business imperatives. Once aligned, you can assess your progress toward the PEOPLE, CUSTOMER and ENVIRONMENTAL components of your strategic business objectives. (See also, Strategic Organizational Surveys.)

The benefits of linking the survey to your strategy are the following: Greater buy-in and involvement of management Track progress in meeting your business objectives for the PEOPLE, CUSTOMER, and ENVIRONMENTAL components of your strategy Greater acceptance by employees on the relevance and importance of the survey process Actions are targeted where they will yield the most benefit to employees, customers, and business objectives Reinforcement of the collaboration needed between management and staff to reach business objectives

Articulation of strategy. We begin with an articulation of your strategic business objectives. This is a hierarchical process. We use published materials and the executive interviews as a guide to layout the strategic objectives of the organization. First produce an overall statement of strategy. Then we delineate the PEOPLE, CUSTOMER, and ENVIRONMENTAL components of that strategy. From here we identify the critical success factors for those components. Finally, we translate these into content for the survey. The project manager and Steering Committee will perform a valuable review and critique of this process.