More and more, employers are embarking on a workplace review instead of a full-blown investigation, when trying to map a course through team conflict or where ‘noise’ of misconduct keeps surfacing.
While a workplace investigation will normally focus on a single complaint, a review allows you to gain a broader view of what is going on in your workplace by engaging with more team members on a wider range of topics.
Workplace reviews, if conducted objectively and carefully, often provide opportunities for early intervention to get team members back on track and re-aligned with company values. The added advantages of reviews include:
- causing less damage to existing workplace relationships than a workplace investigation can typically cause
- revealing valuable insights for improvements that extend beyond what investigating a specific complaint could achieve, and
- the investment in listening to employees can lead to increased employee engagement and trust.
Of course, a workplace review is only as good as the information the reviewer can obtain from participants. In our view, one of the best ways to obtain information is through individual interviews. Quantitative, online digital surveys of employees simply do not provide the depth or richness of information that a skilled reviewer can obtain during individual interviews.
Conducting a workplace review utilising individual interviews in smaller teams is fairly straightforward, but what if you are tasked with conducting a review involving 50 or 100 participants?
Our experiences with large-scale workplace reviews have led us to develop some tried and tested methodologies, which make large-scale reviews manageable from a time and cost perspective. Here are some tips on how to manage large-scale reviews to better meet quality, cost and time expectations:
- Reviewer team. To complete 50+ interviews in a reasonable period of time, you are going to need a team of reviewers so you can conduct multiple interviews at the same time.
- Consistent approach. Having a team of reviewers means you’ll need a consistent approach to interviews, including obvious aspects, such as using an introductory script at the start of interviews and set interview questions. Other less obvious matters that equally require consistency include a shared understanding of the purpose of the review, the use of terminology, how information provided during interviews is gathered and shared.
- Project manager. You’ll need a project manager for your team of reviewers, to ensure consistency, keep an eye on time, budget and logistics, and ensure a single point of contact with the client.
- Use technology. Online software such as Calendly or Acuity Scheduling that allows for easy scheduling of interviews will save valuable administration time and need not add much to cost.
- Compare notes. After the first 10 – 15% of interviews have been conducted, it is valuable for your review team to compare notes, and make any adjustments that may be needed early.
- Have a plan. A streamlined approach to extracting material information from interview records needs to be established early on, and be consistently applied, to avoid the risk of valuable information being overlooked.
- Point person. At least one reviewer should have an overall view of all the information collected during interviews, to enable synthesising of the themes as they emerge from interviews.
- Report writers. It is important that all reviewers make a contribution to the final review report provided to the client, but it is more efficient to only have one or two main writers of the report.
- Report back. Having engaged with your team and gathered information from them, it is essential that you have a plan for reporting the results of the review back to the workforce.
Our team at Q Workplace Solutions has conducted numerous large-scale workplace reviews across different industries. For more information about our services, please contact us.
