Converge VoE Process Model

Converge Voice of the Employee process model is based on The Shewart/Deming PDSA Cycle at the center of  Continuous Improvement, Lean and Six Sigma.

The PDSA Cycle is a model grounded in the scientific method, developed specifically for organizations where the goal  is not just to acquire knowledge but to apply it for  improvement.

Recognize

Identify the basic business issues and purpose of the employee survey, ensuring the really good business reason for doing the survey is understood. This will include gathering initial perceptions of issues and concerns, relevant background data and capturing these in a research charter that will guide the research effort.

Plan

As with all sound scientific research, business requirements for the research must be clearly defined and understood. Research must be aligned with the type of questions the business needs answered. Otherwise, the results amount to little more than an elaborate statistical fairy tale. Generally businesses will want to identify:

  • general employee engagement levels and emerging trends,
  • specific causal factors impacting engagement, for good or bad,
  • organizational design and effectiveness issues impacting corporate performance, and
  • evaluating the impact of change on both engagement and corporate performance.

Once the business requirements are defined and properly classified, they are  translated into specific research questions and aligned with appropriate data gathering tools. This may involve using Converge VoE Survey, Converge VoE Integrated Text Analysis and Converge VoE Cloud technologies.

Listen

If you are going to hear the voice of the employee you must listen. Converge VoE gathers employee data and feedback in its raw form – no manipulations, summaries, or degradation of data. This requires sampling methods appropriate to the analytical tasks at hand, proper question design and treatment of response scales.

Converge VoE Survey may use any and all data collection techniques: paper, email, web-based and telephone response methods. Converge VoE Integrated  Text Analysis gathers electronic text information from internal corporate databases arising from call center, field personnel feedback and other sources. Converge VoE Cloud gathers data from blogs, social media sites, electronic media sources.

Understand

Forget about asking what the employee wants. You already know. The employee wants it all, wants it now and wants it free. The trick is not in asking what the employee wants, but rather in understanding what the employee values.

You need to understand how employees feel about your company, the brand, products, services, and programs. Identify what is truly important and how best to design and deliver organizational and related change that maximizes perceived value. Then use this knowledge to identify existing and emerging issues and drive redesign efforts.

This where the value of Converge VoE really pays off, separating the wheat from the chaff. Multi-Analytic Tables, Run/Control Charts, ANOM and similar tools provide the means to transcend statistical significance and identify what really matters to your people.

Act

The value of research is in what you do with it. Converge VoE is designed to support change. That’ why custom reports and presentations are tailored for:

  • The Executive Team, highlighting materially significant enterprise-wide patterns, trends, issues and strengths,
  • Operating Management, detailing materially significant strengths and weaknesses in organizational groups as basis for effective local improvement action,
  • HR/OD/OE Team, detailing materially significant organizational strengths and weaknesses as a basis for longer-term organizational strategy development

Initial high level results are provided within two weeks of survey closure. Detailed results within the month.

Sustain

Sustain the effort by establishing a program of employee feedback based on VoE. This may include a mix of full surveys and tracking surveys, creating and populating your employee performance metrics dashboard and other initiatives to ensure the effort is hard-wired into the corporate DNA.