In our last blog article, we suggested that a company’s people are a wonderful source of suggestions and ideas about how to improve what the company does, ultimately leading to better experiences for customers. Afterall, a company with a growing number of happy customers is one that has a bright future.

However, tapping into the Inner IQ of the company is not necessarily something that many companies do particularly well. Whilst many companies already do employee surveys, these are often mostly focused on an employee’s experience and less about how to improve what the company provides to customers. Whilst business leaders are often in a very good position to look at big picture improvements, it’s often the little things that can make a big difference. It’s the people who are doing their job every day, who are closest to the action, who are in the best position to suggest any number of improvements that could be made, but they are rarely asked in any meaningful way. Imagine how many simple and easy-to-implement ideas there might be across the entire company right now!

Our suggestion is to do this by creating what we call a Performance Improvement Drumbeat. Rather than conducting a single survey, think of it more as a repeatable process to help collect valuable information on a regular basis as part of a continuous improvement program. Tapping into your company’s Inner IQ.

The first step is to decide on whether this is something that you are willing to commit to properly. There is nothing more frustrating for team members than being asked to identify potential opportunities for improvement and then nothing is done with this information. People will not participate in the future, and the opportunity will be lost. You are better off not doing anything at all, than conducting any form of data collection and not doing anything with the results.

If the answer is yes, this sort of exercise is something the company should be doing and is willing to take action, the next step would be to communicate this to everyone. It can be as simple as spreading the word through teams and asking them to be on the lookout for things that don’t make sense, or are getting in the way of them doing a great job. You want to tap into the expertise of the entire team, and a great way to start is to get them thinking about these sorts of things in advance of any official activity being conducted. Anything they are noticing is likely to be relevant because they are closest to the action.

The next step is to set up a simple survey in Tandem asking for their suggestions and ideas. The trick is to not create a situation where people are just complaining about things, we want to ask in a way that ensures everyone is offering constructive suggestions that will not only improve their own experience, but also lead to the company creating better products, services and experiences.

Within Tandem, you will find a library of just a handful of important questions that you can ask all team members. These are all open-ended questions, which is a really important because context is extremely important. It’s the only way to do this properly, however the issue with this is usually that it is hard to analyse large amounts of text data.

We at Tandem have solved this problem with our paid membership plans, which come with our text analysis tool. Not only will these answers be automatically summarised, Tandem will also be able to offer suggestions about what to do next.

And of course if you need our help, you can always get in touch with us and tap into the expertise of our experienced team.