Gathering your insights is just the first step toward creating business impact and transformation. Once you have your insights, you need to connect these to and engage action. Our Action Planning tools enable you to take your insights and create a step-by-step path to engage and drive action that delivers your desired outcomes and impact.
This article walks through:
- Identify Priorities for Action Planning
- Share the Survey Results
- Identify Areas to Take Action
- Create Your Action Plan
- Manage (& Complete) Your Action Plan
Identify Priorities for Action Planning
To create a successful action plan you need to understand the team’s survey results and explore the data to identify potential topic areas to take action.
Get a general sense of the strengths and opportunities for your groups.
Explore the category level scores. Which topics did employees' rate higher/lower?
Dig in a little further. Which items were rated most favorably/least favorably?
Where did the team score far above/below others or improve/decline?
Explore the Engagement Index and the Drivers of Engagement to focus and prioritize.
Are there common themes that emerge from the list of drivers?
Which are areas of strength and areas of opportunity?
Consider why people may have responded in this way to the program items.
Based on your business context and environment, what surprises you?
What additional information or insight do you need? Which areas do you need to clarify?
Share the Survey Results
Sharing the results of the survey with the team plays a critical role in gaining their buy-in to make improvements. Below are a few best practices for preparing for and discussing results.
Set the ground rules.
Encourage all team members to participate and have an equal voice.
Remind the team that the desired experience must be co-created.
Establish confidentiality for the discussion.
Do not try to figure out who said what.
Ensure the leader makes it clear that they accept the results and intend to use them to improve.
Keep the discussion solution focused and productive.
Create your agenda.
Outline the key results by telling the “story.”
Convey what you have learned from the survey data, including both strengths and opportunities.
Indicate the areas (drivers of engagement) that could be potential areas of focus.
Ask clarifying questions and brainstorm ways to address the top priorities.
Discuss the next steps with your workgroup.
Build your story.
It is important to use your data to tell a story with a meaningful narrative. Showing reports and dashboards can be overwhelming without adding narrative to the data. Summarize the themes from your group’s results so they resonate with the team’s current situation and “speak” to what they are experiencing. Make sure you are answering what is important to them.
Create a list of open-ended questions related to the topics you need additional clarity on.
A successful team debrief is about getting your team to collectively participate in the process and to move from problem-focus to solution-focus. Understanding the “why” but also moving to “how do we improve.” Open-ended questions can help generate dialogue, discussions, and ideas for improvement. Here are a few examples:
Focus Attention:
What’s important to you about the results and why do you care?
What opportunities can you see in (a particular finding)?
What do we know so far/still need to learn about (a particular finding)?
What assumptions do we need to test or challenge here in thinking about (a particular finding)?
Get Deeper Insights and Clarity:
What’s emerging here for you? What new connections are you making?
What’s missing from this picture so far? What is it we’re not seeing? What do we need more clarity about?
If there was one thing that hasn’t yet been said in order to reach a deeper level of understanding/clarity, what would that be?
Create Movement Toward Action:
What would it take to create change on this issue?
What could happen that would enable you/us to feel fully engaged and energized about (a particular topic from the survey)?
What needs our immediate attention going forward?
If our success was completely guaranteed, what bold steps might we choose?
How can we support each other in taking the next steps? What unique contribution can we each make?
Are there other teams in our organization doing this well? How can we leverage what’s already working elsewhere?
Prepare for the Leader Debrief.
Keep in mind the following points as you work through survey results with business leaders:
Always start with the business context in mind and speak “the language” of the leader.
Provide the major observations before using any filters or comparisons or drill down.
Know that leaders can react differently – some are resistant whereas others are open to the process.
Don’t let endless investigation stall action!
Encourage your leaders to schedule a team debrief – and think about ways to support them.
It’s important to keep in mind both the leader’s style and strengths as well as his/her experience with the survey process and whether they have participated in the Team Debrief process previously. Reflect on:
What is the natural style of your leader? How might they react to the results?
Are there aspects of the results that you might anticipate resistance to? What are they? And how might you deal with that?
What is in it for the leader? Why should they engage in this process?
What are the two things that you will put in place to help facilitate the leader's debrief?
Below is a list of potential questions to ask your leader:
What were your initial reactions to the data?
What surprises you and why?
What does not surprise you and why?
Can you share a specific example of when this has occurred?
Can you share the initiatives that are taking place that led to this positive result?
What kinds of things are happening that led to this lower score in this area?
Tell me about your team dynamics. What are the (3) things regarding current team dynamics that concern you? How do you think your team will react to the results?
What priorities are you already working on that might help address this?
What ideas do you have already to help improve in these areas?
Complete the team and leader debriefs.
Identify Areas to Take Action
As you are sharing with your teams, collect ideas for areas to take action. Action planning is a collaborative process – everyone on your team should be involved in co-creating the desired employee experience or the path to meeting a team/company goal.
Perceptyx encourages leaders and managers to use a simple 1-2-3 approach to action planning. We designed our Action Planning tool to guide you through these three steps:
Identify one issue from survey results that if addressed would drive important change.
Plan two actions to address the issue.
Talk about it with the team three times.
Within these steps, we encourage you to use the SMART method:
Specific:
What will be accomplished? What actions will you take?Measurable: What data will measure the goal?
Attainable: Is this goal doable? Do you have the necessary skills and resources?
Relevant: How does this goal align with your development? Why is the result important?
Timebound: What is the timeframe for accomplishing the goal?
A few considerations as you work through the action planning steps:
When identifying a focus area, consider focus areas that are shared with other groups in your area/function. Try to connect and collaborate.
When selecting two actions, consider selecting one that can be accomplished quickly and one more long-term.
When planning three conversations, consider aligning these to meaningful, planned communication events and use these opportunities to explore how well work on the focus area(s) helped toward goals.
Create Your Action Plan
Once your team has identified the areas to take action, you can use the Action Planning tool to build out your Action Plan. The Action Planning tool is designed to reflect the three steps in the Perceptyx action planning approach. It also provides a place to add notes and save the action plan. You create your action plan using the Start/Edit Action Plan tab, or by selecting Take Action next to a particular survey item on the favorability report.
You can quickly add action steps, choose three dates to discuss the action plan with your team, and add other pertinent information. Email reminders will automatically send a few days prior to each data selected to help prompt the action planning discussions.
Refer to the Create an Action Plan article for the step-by-step to build your action plan.
Manage (& Complete) Your Action Plan
Creating your action plan is just the first step. In order for there to be consistent progress, you need to take consistent action. Consider incorporating the following in your team routine:
Review your progress at the beginning of regular meetings (e.g., monthly or quarterly).
Connect the dots between feedback provided and action taken.
Maintain visibility, talk about it, and adjust plans accordingly.
Be sure to recognize and celebrate when goals are met and plans are completed.
Refer to the following articles to help manage (and complete) your Action Plans:
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