If you work in an organization - any organization - you
probably received periodical emails with links to opinion surveys. The email
message would say something like "your opinion is valued" or "your input matters" and kindly asks you to take few minutes of your day to complete a survey. So
what do you do? Click on the survey link? Postpone to action on it? Or simply
ignore- or even delete the email?
Opinion surveys have many benefits. They are widely used to take the pulse of the organization, make management decisions, explore areas of improvement and generate positive changes from within. In change management, the guiding principle is simple: Use every possible channel, especially those that are being wasted on nonessential information. But are we using this channel wisely?
In the huge amount of emails sent within an organization, opinion surveys are easily overlooked, especially if they trigger an unpleasant experience in the survey taker. However, all is not lost. According to statistics reports, email remains the most pervasive form of communication and is the most ubiquitous form of business communication. Business users sent and received on average 121 emails a day in 2014, and this is expected to grow to 140 emails a day by 2018. So how can use this technology for best results and make opinion surveys more appealing to frontline staff in healthcare?
This is my recent experience with opinion surveys: Like any nurse working on
a busy unit of an urban hospital, I do not have an allocated desk with a
computer, or "office time". I have patients who need surgical procedures, my presence,
and medical treatment on time, regardless if the unit is short staffed, a chart got misplaced, or that the instruments needed are not available. Checking
emails is not a priority, and should not take priority over patient care.
But then, we all find a minute to check the work email
(usually on a coffee/lunch break). Once in, you have to go through a list of
emails informing about the latest menu change in the cafeteria, campaigns
raising money for different causes, unit related information emails,
newsletters of different departments and on the odd days, the opinion survey sent with high priority importance.
And I believe that if you care about the work you do, you simply cannot pass the
chance to contribute with an honest opinion for the greater good.
So if I am willing to offer my precious time (and my precious opinion, so they say), it better be worth it, or at least let me
think it was worth it. And after my recent conundrum, here are some suggestions
on how you could turn an opinion survey from "chore" to "more":
1. Mean
what you say. Telling me that my input matters sounds like an overused cliché,
and it reminds people of the recorded voice in call centres saying, "your call
is important to us". If the call would be important, you would probably NOT put
me on hold? On a parallel note, if my input would matter, you would make me
feel it does. Positive feedback and recognition of staff (all free!) have been
widely shown to improve employees’ engagement, but they are still immensely
underutilized in healthcare. Simply spending 5 minutes in a morning unit report
to honestly tell nurses they matter would send a more genuine message than an subject line that normalizes deviance.
2. Respect
my time. The body of the email contains 450 words! You just lost another big
percentage of busy workers who will not get to your important survey link. Only
reading this amount of information brimmed with QI terminology would use up part of my break,
and unless you love QI, looking up extra documents on standard logarithms,
accreditation SET times and other organizational standards will make any nurse
run (for coffee instead). Once you click on the survey, you are being served
with 25 (twenty five) sections, each containing 2 to 8 questions. Added to my
time I just spent deciphering the 450 words, this means that my coffee break is
not enough to complete all the sections (and not sure I want to spend my lunch
on this, no matter how much I love QI).
3. Content and results matter. Keep it concise! If the survey mentions that it is
related to one specific area (such as perioperative care), the sections should
be relevant to that area. Asking me about a nursing task that is simply not specific
to my work, and not giving me the option to choose N/A will not only skew your
results, but also frustrate me. Remember, I just spent time reading the body of
the message, and got slapped with 25 sections (time requirement was curiously
not mentioned in the 450 words?). If - regardless of the points above - I still
think my input matters, you just sucked my last drops of confidence by asking
me questions I cannot answer.
4. Disclosure
hurts. The body of the message mentions that all you need are 5 (five)
individual responses to this survey to receive a site-specific report. In my
calculation, if your survey requires the input of only 5 people out of 90
(approximate amount of nurses on my unit), then a response rate of 0.05% is not
only an extremely low expectation of staff engagement, but also a provider of hugely
skewed results. It also hurts, and it does not make me feel special that I
could be one of those 5 people. On the contrary, it makes me sad to think that
many of my colleagues who have valid points and great ideas will keep quiet. I
still want to believe that finding areas of improvement (and QI efforts in
general) should stem from those in the frontlines, faced with the everyday
challenges, and not from 5 people who have a desk with a computer.
If you wonder, yes, I did complete the survey. Did it
make me feel that my opinion mattered? Not so much. Having to fly through
questions and not finding the right response was not exactly self-fulfilling. With
good intentions (but in a sadistic way), I even tried to convince other nurses
to complete it. The reaction I got? "I didn’t even notice the email". And: "This
won’t change anything, it’s just a person in some corner office who is paid to
send this and then analyzes it (!?)".
I am a believer though. I believe in improvement and as long
as there are solutions, we should try them. Technology is available as a tool
to help and simplify our work, and not to bog us down and disconnect us.
So
next time you ask for an opinion, ask yourself: do you really want that
opinion? And if so, are you using just one, simple guiding principle?
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