Responsibility is often clear for running a survey and sharing results, but less clear for deciding, delivering and reviewing action.
The easy way out is to say “everybody is responsible for culture” and ask everyone to pull together. The problem is, this leaves accountability out of the equation, leading to stalled action plans, endless chasing and little to show for all the activity that went into getting the survey live in the first place.
This blog is going to work through the following: who owns listening and insight, who owns action, where survey/listening channel owners come into this, and how to hold people accountable. We’ll identify where survey action falls and how you change it.
This is important, as it’s an area that most organisations can get better in. In our report, we find Ownership & Accountability scored 55.3/100. Managers understanding their responsibility scored 60.2, but managers and leaders deciding for themselves whether to act, rather than having defined accountabilities, scored 44.5.
This shows that most organisations are not defining accountabilities for leaders and managers effectively.
Surveys are often run from HR/People or insight teams, and they are accountable for choosing the right technology, managing the process, and getting the survey distributed to the right people. They will often also have responsibility for receiving the full results and analysing some of the findings.
But even at this stage, there are clear responsibilities across the organisation:
Internal communications and operations teams – advertising the survey and pushing for higher response rates by explaining how the survey will be used, another thing helped by clearer responsibilities.
Senior and executive leaders across the organisation – sponsoring the listening efforts and outlining what they need to understand from the survey to aid their decision-making.
Line managers – encouraging completion and reassuring people about any concerns around anonymity and how they are planning to use the data.
It’s important here to differentiate between ownership/accountability for action, and who should own the actions themselves.
Executive leadership, not HR, are accountable for culture. If action off the back of any listening activity isn’t taken, the buck stops with them.
If this accountability isn’t clear, focus your, and your Chief People Officer’s, efforts here. The more leadership feel the accountability for culture, the easier everything else in this blog becomes, as they will be pushing it from the top.
The people with responsibility for action are those who have control over the action levers. Here are some examples:
If local line management style is an issue, the responsibility sits with line managers and their managers, assisted by HR where needed.
If line management capability across the organisation is an issue, then it is those within HR with L&D/Performance responsibilities who need to look at line management training and enablement.
If local decision-making speed is an issue, the responsibility sits with local leaders to empower those underneath them to make decisions, or to improve the speed at which decisions are made on their desk. Whereas, if it’s executive decision-making, it falls to this group to look at their own processes.
If equipment issues are causing problems in one part of the organisation, it is the responsibility of local budget holders for that equipment to get it fixed. But if it’s across the whole organisation, it’s a supply chain/maintenance leadership responsibility.
When thinking about who needs to take action, the first question should always be: “Who has the ability to change this?”
This doesn’t let all line managers off the hook, though, as they will have to keep their team engaged while bigger changes are on the way, as well as tackling local challenges.
Line managers are also the lens through which the rest of the organisation is viewed, and their positioning of the broader organisation can affect perceptions of everything from communications to leadership and vision.
In short:
Line managers have accountability for their team’s culture, and so have responsibility for action in their teams.
Executive leadership have accountability for the organisation’s overall culture and have responsibility for making sure actions are happening in the right parts of the organisation to improve it.
Individual teams and leaders have responsibility for areas such as equipment and maintenance, L&D, operations processes, etc., and so have a responsibility for action when action is needed.
If accountability sits with executive leadership and line managers, and responsibilities sit with senior leaders and line managers, what are survey owners responsible for during the action process?
Survey owners have an important but challenging job, one step removed from the actions themselves:
Survey owners are responsible for telling the story of who is responsible for what, and building capability, accountability and support to help managers and leaders take action.
This could look like video guides to the platform, top tips on taking action, KPIs in managers’ performance reviews, and influencing senior leaders about what is expected of them and their managers.
You will need to ensure the right managers have easy access to their results, and that the senior leaders with accountabilities for specific areas of your culture are given either the data or the insights derived from that data.
You’ll also likely be asked to provide insights to executive stakeholders, either yourself or through your listening provider’s consultancy team.
Action from employee listening is a means to an end.
Holding people accountable for their areas of responsibility, such as local team culture, parts of the employee experience and leadership, and using employee listening as the feedback mechanism for whether actions are successful or not, is much more effective than chasing whether people have made action plans.
Do you have KPIs within managers’ and leaders’ performance frameworks that use listening activity? Do you regularly discuss responsibilities for creating a great culture? Are interventions staged by more senior leaders when culture within teams isn’t right?
These are much more effective avenues for accountability than focusing on the input of employee listening activity.
Ask yourself: If a manager already has a great culture, do they need to make an action plan?
Action becomes more consistent when roles, decision rights and follow-through are explicit and linked to outcomes, rather than dependent on individual goodwill.