To Interview or To Survey, That is the Question...
How do you best gather feedback from your people to establish a true impact analysis for an upcoming change? Do you look at data, conduct a survey or sit face to face with your people and conduct interviews?
There are, of course, advantages to each choice. Let's have a look at each!
Data: Sometimes, there just isn't an option to chat to people who will be impacted by the change. It could be a time constraint, a sensitivity constraint or not culturally acceptable for whatever reason within a specific organisation. Sometimes quantitative or process data is all we have to analyse.
This risks so much in relation to misunderstanding the 'current' and 'expected' ways of working. Whilst businesses can establish 'best practice', the reality is employees will always find their own ways to do things once something is deployed. Especially without great adoption processes, people will work out how to make a structure, process or technology work for them and their role. This means analysing data without the ability to ask questions will nearly always miss impact and fail to allow us to build a comprehensive change plan.
Surveys: Often due to time or company size, surveys can allow us to quickly gather information from a large group of people. They can help us establish the baseline sentiment which we can use to compare to a post-change survey to assess project success. They allow us to reach a larger group.
More information is always better. To survey allows for more data points which can provide a more accurate representation of the target audience.
The downsides are that survey completion rates are often low. Some organisations have strict rules around who can send surveys and when so that employees aren't flooded with questionnaires from many different areas of the business. Responses can also be quite simple and we fail to get to a deeper understanding of the impact.
Interviews: Where possible, interviews are the best way to get into detail with people who will be impacted by the change. Interviews don't mean you need to share any detail of the upcoming change as they can be framed under the context of user experience or leadership feedback or similar to avoid early-notice of changes. But sitting face to face with people and with an attitude of curiosity allows for follow up questions and the opportunity to learn about 'what we don't know that we don't know' rather than just putting numbers to thing we already know.
The issue with interviews is they are time-consuming and as such can mean less people are captured in the process which in itself can mean gaps in the analysis which informs the change plan.
In an ideal world, a combination of all options can help to create a complete and detailed picture which represents the entire organisation. My personal opinion, though, is that to skip interviews is to ignore a deeper level of information your employees can share with you which can allow you to take better care of them throughout your planned change.
So, to interview or survey? Ideally both, but if you have to choose, interviews ensure your people are at the centre of the change, exactly as they should be.