Blog - CircleLytics

We already wrote it here: dialogue is a party because everyone is invited this time! Your invitation already started well, and now we will move on to variants of closing your (open) questions. We have thus captured the first moment when you use language to connect with invitees, and now the last moment: the end of your dialogue questions. With open questions you show confidence and give direction to what you are looking for, without becoming directive, of course.

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We have designed many 1,000s of questions for wonderful organizations, with wonderful results, especially for participants. They also think it’s wonderful what you do, and score dialogues on average with a 4.3 on a scale of 5. Quite proud of that, because people are busy and apparently dialogues do something good with their pleasure, involvement and ability to solve your problem. . So a party! We have discovered 18 principles that you can use when designing strong, meaningful open questions.

Within our CircleLytics platform (and your own account in your corporate identity!) you can use the unique QuestionDesignLab to design questions together with our lab within minutes. You can ask open questions both with and without a closed scale. Just look what happens.

You used to ask these types of survey questions (it still happens unfortunately):

Score the confidence you have in the organization (between 1 and 10).
(the text field for your explanation may be enabled).

But in double-loop surveying (dialogue) you do this:

Would you like to talk about your current confidence in the organization based on a score (between 1 and 10), but especially in your own words? We are curious what we can learn from this.

In the second round of the dialogue, participants see each other’s anonymous answers. They may then rate answers from others and make suggestions on how the organization can strengthen trust.

With CircleLytics you can even set that participants can revise their closed answers (between 1 and 10). Do you know that 60% do that? This makes surveys (one round) no longer reliable for decision-making.

That’s why participants appreciate it so much and it yields more for you than surveys. More reliability and, among other things, the top 5 answers that matter most. So take action: you have the best answers and suggestions for reinforcement.

The simple secret is to use language to connect with people through open questions, to stimulate people to think and really involve them. That is older than the road to Rome, but surveys have rather pushed open questions/answers into a corner, about 80 years ago. At CircleLytics we say very simply: if you are curious about what your partner, friends and family are doing and what they think about something, why not send surveys? Why then to employees, customers, residents, members and patients? Open questions are the most educational and from now on they will process the answers together in the second round. This gives them new thoughts so that you reliably learn how they really think about something and how they solve something together.

Below we share variations on the old-fashioned “Explanation”. Curious which one you use to learn more in dialogue with others from points of view that you did not think of but are useful to you. It will also come in handy for your workshops, interviews and other conversations!

For example, the end of your closed or open question could be like this:

.. and why do you see it this way?

…and how did you come up with this suggestion?

…and would you like to clarify this with an example?

…and can you explain in your own words why you score it this way?

…and what obstacle do you encounter?

…and what obstacle do you think we should and can overcome?

…and would you like to tell us something about that, so that others can learn from it?

…and what makes you choose that?

…and what is your tip in that case?

… and do you want to focus your explanation on what is most feasible?

…and what now?

…and why do you think that is?

…and what is your tip for the first action we can take?

…and above all: why?

… and above all: how do we do that?

…and what do you imagine?

…and what should we not try again?

…and should we keep it that way?

… and what does that mean for our organization and people?

…and how does that distinguish us from the competition?

…and saves a lot of time?

…and thus helps colleagues to work with us more happily and for more years?

We’ll leave it at this for now. Hopefully it inspires you to get started with your dialogue and dialogue questions and get the party started! Preferably together with others, or together with us. Feel free to schedule a design session here.

All leaders are currently engulfed by a business world which is constantly defined by new developments and disruptions. How can business leaders effectively engage with these often overwhelmingly big and complex business challenges? By discovering the hidden potential in your own organization to identify advantageous paths forward.

A recent McKinsey study pinpointed the benefits of such a way of doing things:

“In many organizations, the ideas for ‘little i’ innovation often come from the people closest to customers …. organizations that actively listen and act on recommendations from frontline employees are 80 percent more likely than others to consistently implement new and better ways of doing things.”

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If this hidden potential is readily available in your organization, why withhold the advantage of the creative ideas of your employees and stakeholders to enhance your business practices?

Beyond providing a wealth of novel and actionable ideas, this hidden potential also offers valuable benefits:

• Enabling your business to act with agility
• Increasing your company’s RoI by adopting a process which deliver results quickly
• Revealing new business opportunities via an internal exploration of strategic business issues
• Bringing employees closer to decision-making to strengthen their engagement and stimulate employee retention
• Boosting employee satisfaction by providing a channel to voice their hopes and needs for the business.

Watch the 27 min recording HERE by Jeffrey Beeson, MBA/MA, from Ensemble Enabler, Munich, and Maurik Dippel, co-founder of CircleLytics ACI & Dialogue. Contact us directly, via our agenda.

How do you design your leadership development program? How do you evaluate and – most important – how do you redesign these programs?

Some of the key characteristics of a successful leadership development program are:

a blended approach: mentoring, workshops, group assignments, on-the-job assignments, reading, time to reflect, blending online and offline, on various locations
build a platform of enduring learning and leadership development; the larger part of learning takes place at work, while on the job; create a thriving environment for leaders to deploy what they’ve learned; it’s not a personal development program, but to lead others and drive a successful organizational development; design a customer and workforce-centric program, instead of a leadership-centric program; after all, it’s not (solely) about them but about their value to others and to the company
deploy nowadays’ technology that inspires, engages and provokes people’s thoughts and behaviours; AI, gamification, behavioural interventions, collaborative learning and collective intelligence can all be built-in to elevate and deepen learning from each other
design with reality as well as the future in mind: collect vetted insights, by means of collective intelligence approaches such as CircleLytics Dialogue to learn about priorities, challenges and upcoming changes that require (new) leadership. Stay close to the people who know best what’s needed most, as research show, to become more effective and add more value; for this don’t limit yourself to insights from participants, yet also from employees.

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What do these guys teach us?

A recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review inspired us to cluster and assess our own experiences and those of our customers’. The article was authored by Hannes Leroy Moran Anisman-Razin and Jim Detert.

CircleLytics is applied to collect qualitative, validated insights and recommendations, far beyond what focus groups and surveys can deliver. These insights are essential to your design and redesign. Hence, to answer any question your CFO should ask about the impact your programs make. “Spend only what you can justify” (as the article mentions), and added to that, take opportunity costs into account: what else can be done with the costs that are involved.

The authors highlight that those responsible for selecting such programs often struggle. “Struggle to show how their spending has produced significant, enduring changes in participants’ individual capacities or collective outcomes, yet operating executives continue to fund these efforts without requiring such accountability.”

They further on the topic by reframing and rephrasing evaluative items into meaningful questions. The following table can be found in their article as well. They emphasize better questions to prompt their thinking and improve (re)designs.

Some of our own reflections

Prepare to followup on results of your evaluation and alter your program accordingly. While evaluating, don’t ask questions about things you won’t change. That’s really acceptable. You might have valid reasons beyond participants’ views on the leadership program. Participants might overlook longterm aspects that you as a professional, or outside experts, consider of essential value to the company.

Still, monitor closely how your assumptions work out over time.

By corollary, deliberately identify dynamic aspects of the program that with surety can and will be redesigned, once evaluation underpins its necessity; when working with external vendors of such programs, select the ones that are clearly open for feedback and redesign. Don’t hold back on improving your program, merely by vendor’s argument that “other companies want this”, while your participants’ feedback clearly underpin that change is needed.

LDP managers are more keen on evaluating and redesigning programs once they have the better tool perform these evaluations: surveys nor focus groups pay off sufficiently. You need evidence, a data-driven approach to validate your program and clarity on what to change, how and why.

When evaluating your leadership programs, take into account that up to 80% of learning evaporates in – worse case a matter of weeks to months. Hence, evaluations should be repeated, preferably after 3 weeks, 6 weeks and 20 weeks, but any other cadence that fits your case: go for it. Over time, you can better assess the impact, the strengths and weaknesses of the program.

In addition to evaluative purposes, by asking open questions you can effectively increase (and refresh) participants’ awareness. Basically, remind them of the program, how they acted on that, made alterations to their leadership style, etc.

What prompts people’s thinking?

Here are a few questions to consider, and that have been tested to work. Ask these questions again after some more weeks and months to learn how the program’s effectiveness evolves, grows or diminishes.

❓How did the program change your habits regarding [ ……. ] and can you explain what happened, so others can learn from that?

❓What aspect of the program affected you most, on a personal level, and can you share what this means for your leadership at the organization?

❓How did the program change your thinking about [ ……. ] and can you explain the benefits to the organization?

❓Can you critically reflect on the most striking impact on your team, since and because of joining the program?

❓How would you alternatively have spent 25% of the money on this program, now that you’ve finished the full program?

❓What situation(s) did you encounter by putting to work what you’ve learned?

❓What one suggestion do you have to significantly improve the program’s effectiveness for future candidates and what’s your thought about the benefits of this suggestion behind this?

❓What do you consider an aspect of our company (systems, culture, anything) that holds you back on deploying all you’ve learned?

❓How would you alternatively have spent 50% of the time this program has taken?

❓What did the program bring you, that changed the way you lead, yet diminished over time? Why did this happen you think? Can you change it back?

❓What surprised you most after […..] in the way you lead others to perform? Can you reflect on that?

❓Is anything blocking you from leading others and developing our organization that should be addressed in these programs?

❓What changed in markets, culture or anything, that impacts how we (should) lead the organization?

It’s the people, not the participants ….

Don’t forget, their leadership, hence, your program should bring value to the people and organizational development, with positive customer and revenues driven outcomes. Ask employees of the participants’ departments what’s their reflection on their leadership’s development, impact on culture and quality of management. Since these are critical factors for talent to stay or go, it makes sense to take these aspects into account and become more effective. Furthering on this, employees can be engaged to build more intelligent programs, tailored to talent’s needs. It doesn’t make sense, and CFO’s should question this, if your leadership development program is designed topdown, without sufficient input from employees, especially newly onboarded talents.

❓What do you wish for your leadership to develop better, for the benefits of the whole department/company?

❓What do you see your leadership improving at, and what’s the meaning for the team in your eyes?

❓What’s needed most from leadership to help you develop and commit to the long term at our company?

❓How would you promote our leadership style to job applicants?

❓What do you doubt or don’t like most about leadership in general at our company? What’s the effect right now?

❓What do you doubt or don’t like most about your specific leadership? What would be the positive outcome of changing this?

Evaluation is great, preparation is another…

CircleLytics Dialogue is also deployed to prepare for upcoming programs or modules of your program. This way, you can do check-ins, assign tasks, set and learn about expectations, and more. Consider these questions to ask some days, but not more than two weeks in advance:

❓In a few [days, weeks] you’re invited to module N of the program. What do you expect to be better at, for the people you lead, upon finishing this module?

❓What do you bring to the table, during this upcoming module N and how can you unleash that value or experience?

❓Can you work on the following three challenges to prepare for the next part of program. Others will learn from your perspectives, as you can from theirs.

It’s in your hands

In all of above instances, open questions ignite people’s thinking, and CircleLytics’ unique approach secures their learning from others’ different perspectives. This deepens theirs as well as your learning and understanding. Design, evaluate, redesign based on collective intelligence from employees, alumni leaders and managers and (prospective) participants. Leadership development programs require first of all your leadership, open to multi perspectives to create value that lasts. Again and again.

Plan a meeting in our agenda to exchange thoughts about how CircleLytics can elevate your great work and LDPs here.

Some believe new recruits don’t deliver value in their first three months. Here’s why they’re wrong, and it’s called the outsider view’s value. Since 9 out of 10 new recruits are willing to quit in their first month, and 1/3 actually do quit within the first 90 days according to Psychology Today, it’s time to enhance your onboarding strategy with below-mentioned easy-to-perform big wins. Some of the reasons why new recruits call it a day is the company’s culture and poor management. It’s better to act now and double down on your recruitment and onboarding strategy, then to encounter the loss of value of employees leaving further down the road, as this PeopleKeep‘s post is summarizing. To add to this, a recent studies published in the Academy of Management Journal, revealed that when talented people leave, they inspire others, mostly top-performers to leave as well.

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The why of enhancing your current onboarding strategy and technology choices is clear. Now, here’s a handful of tips for how and what it delivers. And yes, we keep it simple, since your company is running probably a full onboarding program already, and enhancement is all you need.

First of all, new recruits hold the power of a bringing in a fresh perspective, which value depreciates once they are fully onboarded and become emotionally and professionally attached and invested. It’s wise to instantly and regularly tap into this wealth of insights by you as their manager or leadership before it’s gone forever. For example, put some company challenges to groups of new recruits, every three months, and ask for their ideas and let them enhance each others’ ideas as well. This is a strong sign of trust, builds their awareness of company matters beyond their immediate tasks, and connects them to non-like-minded thinking co-workers.

Example questions:

What in our strategy is most compelling to you, given market dynamics and your experiences elsewhere, and why you choose this aspect?

How can you positively affect our company culture, now that you’re part of it?

What do you believe is missing that can or should be repaired, in our understanding of successful growth?

CircleLytics enables you to ask employees to review what others submitted, and enrich this by keeping scores and adding recommendations. This turns asking questions into emergent insights and action.

Second, they’ve just experienced your employer’s branding, recruitment and – still – onboarding process. They’ve learned a lot about these items, and probably can compare this to their previous employers. For sure they can compare notes with their own expectations or expectations that were raised. Now is the moment to listen and learn. It just might give you some fresh new insights to win the war for new talent and streamline your recruitment and onboarding efforts.

Example questions:

What did our company not (yet) live up to in terms of your expectations?

What did you find here, yet weren’t explicitly looking for?

What’s your recommendation to smoothen our recruitment process?

How would you improve onboarding if you’d be in charge? Why this?

Again, CircleLytics can turn your questions into collective insights to move faster forward.

Third, as their manager: don’t be like others, don’t drive them away. You would be hurting them, your team, business performance, and in the end or maybe faster than you know: your reputation. Be open for their immediate and regular feedback and feedforward. Ask questions about and listen to their experiences, learn from their previous accomplishments and network they bring in. Understand how to make the best of that for your department, culture and business goals. Allow people time to digest your questions, reflect on answering these, and provide essential things such as privacy for them to speak up (ie anonymity). Don’t forget you’re perceived as ‘their boss’, hence you are… And even if you consider yourself a ‘people person’ and not the bossy-type, it’s tricky to assume new employees already know you for – without doubts – the great and beautiful person and manager that you are. Anonymity (ie privacy) enables them to speak up, provides the much-needed psychological safety, and enables you to learn more.

Curious about CircleLytics Dialogue and elevate listening to people? Just plan your demo here.

Example questions:

What stood out most till now, that really impresses and motivates you?

What do you need more or differently to do what you’re best at?

What’s your big tip to me as manager to be better for you and the full team? I’m ready to learn!

Help new recruits build their internal networks as fast as possible. Stimulate and check if they are regularly meeting new coworkers, preferably from different departments. Preferably not only the obvious coworkers, but the silent, more loosely connected-to-others as well. Why? Building a strong internal network facilitates knowledge fluidity, yet also increases the value of staying, and the cost of quitting the company. And loosely connected coworkers not only need it most, but are often the smartest kids on the block.

CircleLytics is being applied to structure people to connect to non-like-minded and enable cross-silo collaboration.

As their CEO, as a fourth item, engage them every month or quarter in dialogue to learn what they’ve seen the last couple of weeks, what they recommend, etc. This way you build strong ties with these valuable new talents and gain unique, fresh insights yourself. Invite them, for example, to your sounding board of new recruits (1-12 months at the company). It’s a magnitude different than solely having to rely on HR’s engagement survey reports based on generic questions. And it’s a unique add-on to your one-on-one lunches with new recruits.

Can you imagine receiving a question like this from your CEO during your first months:

What will you definitely do differently when you’re the CEO, why, and how to get that done?

What is the most exciting, beautiful, unique part of our company’s culture, that drives our growth?

What style or aspect of leadership do you believe is most needed the coming years to motivate our talented workforce? Why is that according to you?

All coworkers should be aware of the necessity to onboard new recruits. I remember at my previous jobs, that onboarding new recruits was tasked to specific people, while letting others ‘of the hook’. To me, that didn’t make any sense. It’s everyone’s responsibility to make onboarding a serious, lasting success. Invite new recruits, have lunch, share obstacles on your projects, exchange experiences. Learn rapidly from what they see and know differently for that short time they have the power of possessing an outsider’s view. Share your network, introduce them to non-like-minded, make sure they find their way. You both win, else nobody does.

We recommend HR to have regular check-ins with new recruits and tap into their collective experience and intelligence re typical HR coined topics, eg:

What do you recommend to improve collaboration between [……] and [……] to accomplish […..]?

How do you experience “trust” till now, and can you reflect on what’s driving trust from your perspective?

How would you express our company culture in your own words to applicants?

What – if any – do you perceive people struggling with when it comes to their wellbeing and workload?

What approach, support, technology, or anything would you recommend HR to reconsider and why?

Furthermore, we would recommend new recruits to instantly work at least 40% of their time on tasks that allow instant performance. Getting onboarded is not a fulltime job, and it shouldn’t be. Nobody’s off the hook, or put differently, everyone is relevant and able to bring value to customers, or to coworkers. Performance motivates. Adding value engages. Makes sure you as a new recruit ask for these tasks: already during your interviews. Show your maybe-next-employer that you care and want to know what you can work focus on from day one.

Ask employees open questions, as their manager, CEO or HR. This way you show you care, listen effectively and with empathy. Moreover, you will collect unique insights that can make a true difference. Towards them, towards the company.

Stay curious, stay in dialogue.

Curious about CircleLytics Dialogue and elevate listening to people? Just plan your demo here.

Sometimes the sting has to be removed. We regularly experience this when new organizations start working with CircleLytics Dialogue. There are simply quite a few challenges (or sometimes old-fashioned real problems), sensitive issues or significant history that stir up emotions. While there is a pressing issue that is hindered by this. Or put differently: the issue exists because stakeholders were not seriously listened to and involved.

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If involvement is too weak, and the leadership to actively involve people has not yet developed in your organization (and by that we mean that you go a level further than sending surveys), serious bottlenecks can manifest. Absenteeism, mental breakdown, departure, low confidence are just a few problems, but see them mainly as symptoms.

You can then certainly offer a good deal of privacy, instead of hiring a moderator who starts by explaining that “you can tell everything safely with me”. It is often better to enter into dialogue, and in our way this takes place in several steps with each interval and therefore time for reflection. In the steps you go through with our dialogue, you as a participant have time and space, equal to those others have, to contribute something yourself, to share a perspective, to describe an experience. And in the next step you can see the perspectives of others, learn from them, and take the time again. They score between -3 (complete rejection) and +3 (complete support) and explain this with a recommendation, action point or something else if you request it. Participants learn that their perspective matters to others and other perspectives matter to them. Mutual, collaborative learning. So approach people as a network instead of as individualists. Together you are simply stronger and smarter: we need each other every day, even when there are problems.

This slowing down method, so to speak (intervention or just dialogue is also possible, whatever you want), gives space for any emotions, and then you can do something with them, or move on from there. This is necessary because getting stuck in emotions does not yield enough results. The Dutch-Portuguese philosopher Spinoza spoke about the three forms of human intelligence that he believes apply together and in context: emotions and images, reason and instinct. You need all three and that distinguishes humans from animals.

The power of dialogue therefore brings people a number of important benefits:

you get time, which makes you think better and react less primarily
others are given equal time, which guarantees equality
with complete privacy, keeping you safe and making yours and others’ content count
and you therefore have no incentive to ‘assert yourself’ (because it is anonymous)

And in the second round the benefits are:

you learn from the opinions and perspectives of others who think differently
without losing face you can score differing opinions positively (i.e. support them)
without hurting anyone you can score other opinions negatively (no support)
You can provide recommendations, tips or something else if requested

And if you do work with a moderator, or the manager, a coach, etc., the results are immediately and continuously visible and usable. So you can combine it with other working methods such as a meeting.

We would like to share a selection of a number of anonymous cases from recent times: strike, employment conditions, conflict between two locations, forced departure of manager and vacancy, angry residents, members who cancel, customers who leave and employees who leave within a year. Other non-anonymous cases can be found here.

Strike: this is how you break it (and how you prevent it)

The difficult thing is that as a director you have to deal with unions that often have a stronger seat at the negotiating table than the foundation for this of the supporters. In other words: unions too often do not know exactly what drives, wants, desires and demands their supporters. They use polls and surveys, and add a well-intentioned dose of ‘touring the country’. Those polls and surveys have now had their day: responses are disappointing and you simply cannot do anything with a polarizing approach to a poll. What does it mean if 70% are against in such a poll? The practice of CircleLytics Dialogue shows that if you do not use a double poll, but old-fashioned single polls, you are wrong by an average of 60%. That’s a painful amount.

CircleLytics’ double poll is one of the first features we offered. It works like this: you present one or more statements or choices and ask the target group what their position is, but immediately what their substantiation is in their own words. Did you know that on average 90% tell this in detail? Then there is a second round in which you present all answers to each participant in diverse groups of 15 each. They score this positively (support) or negatively (no support) and explain why. They then vote on your statements again, with 60% changing their position in that final poll. This way you prevent polarization, get a 2-10x higher response and increase the connection with your target group. Then you know what you’re talking about!

Back to the strike… Our first advice to managers, whether employers or trade unions, is to learn to work in an evidence-based manner. What exactly is it that the supporters want, not approximately. Do you have statistically reliable information, not just data, but informative data, information. Research such as surveys and polls with a low response rate, and a tour of a ‘number of people or locations’ is not sustainable, nor a foundation for an argument or position. So not for a demand at the negotiating table. In the case in question, management took back the initiative by asking all employees directly, during a strike that had already started:

“What are we overlooking that is really important to you and can you explain that?”

What did management learn from this?

don’t wait for HR’s (pulse) surveys to measure satisfaction, because they really don’t seem to know what’s really going on; a rather costly mistake that organizations, and especially HR, still make every day; Generic questions do not reveal specific insights
you make yourself as leadership immediately visible to all employees, not through a trade union, which does not use sufficient evidence-based research, with a limited support base (members only), with a low response rate
do not wait to listen specifically, regularly and qualitatively to your own employees; they share everything you are honestly open to with your open questions; This way you will learn everything you need to develop people and organization synchronously
it really prevents misery: financially, your reputation, relationship with employees, trust, loss of customers, etc.

How did this continue? The employer learned by listening that their grievances, wishes, dreams and demands were fundamentally different from what the unions were saying. The wage requirement even turned out to be lower because various other topics were more important to employees.

CircleLytics’ dialogue ensures that employees saw each other’s different answers after the first round. In the second round they could give scores (support, positive scores or rejection, negative scores) to each other’s answers. The employer therefore immediately measured the sentiment and therefore support in the same survey of employees.

They experienced that they were taken seriously, they were listened to, directly by the director, and they were allowed to help separate the wheat from the chaff. And the director took decisive action on it the same day. The strike was immediately ended with a significantly different package than the unions demanded. They simply had no insight into what employees wanted. Neither does HR, nor does the Works Council.

Dialogue and co-creation are also regularly used for employment conditions and collective labor agreements, primary and secondary, etc. Insight into what drives employees and what hinders them is indispensable for leading an organization. It is better to obtain advice from your 1,000 employees yourself in a week, based on your genuine curiosity, than via expensive external advice, generic HR surveys or vulnerable data from your trade union. There are more and more HR leaders, as well as trade unions, who use the power of collective intelligence and dialogue to stand strong and connect with the people who make or break the organization every day.

Conflict between branches or departments

Another organization with dozens of branches had been dealing with a major conflict for a long time. After many months, the damage to employees, reputation and customers was enormous, amounting to many €100,000. External parties had now made attempts to find out what was going on and how this could be broken. The working methods they chose were traditional and fell short: interviews, surveys, meetings.

The most difficult thing about these working methods is the following:

interviews: small-scale, lead time, subjective (processing of) data
survey: individualistic approach, no interaction, subjective processing
meeting: too many emotions, social pressure, risks of consequences (no privacy)

The moderator was put on the trail of CircleLytics Dialogue by management and asked the following questions within a few days:

“What can you do today to restore trust?”

In the second round they were asked which suggestions from others they support and what their significance will be for the customer.

“What have you done so far to find solutions?”

In the second round they were asked what they appreciated about what others had already tried and what their reflection is on how this could still work, or why they thought it had not worked so far.

“What obstacle is preventing solutions so far or even causing this situation?”

In the second round they were asked what they recognize or do not recognize about what others see, and what their concrete recommendation is to management to break this.

“What bothered you most in your work or private life because of this situation?”

In the second round they were asked what they recognize from what others say and what that means for themselves.

Numerous other questions were possible, and several subsequent interventions could also be deployed with new questions. Now that was not done, because the yield was already extremely high with these questions.

So everyone involved had complete privacy (anonymity) and days. To reflect yourself, but also to talk and think about this with others. That peace and privacy combines wonderfully and takes out the high emotion. It invites rest and – indeed – reflection. The invitation, i.e. the introduction and embedding of these questions, pays rather close attention. You invite people to think calmly, to be aware of a situation, and to achieve results together, as a collective: to express emotions and then think about what to do next.

The result was that the conflict ended and cooperation agreements were made, as well as a number of interventions in the distribution of costs and revenues, mutual recruitment and exchange of employees. The employees experienced an enormous relief: no one wants conflict and real space and time for emotion and reflection has never been offered – on this scale and in this way – until now. The organization now holds regular dialogues to jointly identify and improve challenges in a timely and positive manner, in any atmosphere or subject. They have stopped using the (pulse) surveys that HR used to send out.

Angry citizens because emergency post closes

A regional partnership of healthcare institutions was faced with the need to close the emergency room some time ago. The workload, the shortage of staff and the increasing flow of patients made this intervention necessary. Citizens have started making noise, complaining and protesting in various ways and through every channel available to them. Easy to understand from all kinds of emotions, considerations and needs. What now?

The partnership announced that it would hold a town hall: a physical room, with hundreds of residents, a story about the organization and passing around the microphone for questions. They asked us what they can do with dialogue & co-creation. With such high emotions (healthcare affects everyone’s body and mind) you must give space, time, but certainly also reason must be addressed, balance and a solution must be achieved. You don’t achieve enough if you only offer a limited percentage of residents a few hours to be angry and sad, without taking a step further than that.

The focus of the use of dialogue was to appeal to collective wisdom and consciousness, after giving space to emotion. How does that work?

An online, asynchronous (everyone at their own time and from their own place) dialogue was immediately started
with questions and a context to make people aware of the underlying bottlenecks with questions like the following and what smart thoughts or ideas they had
Access was widely communicated through many channels, so everyone could participate
This immediately provided many insights, (short) stories and experiences
of many, many more citizens than could fit in the room.

The meeting was then held, where attendees were immediately given the opportunity to participate if they had not already done so. This gave them an immediate outlet and they did not walk around with sky-high emotions. They were immediately taken seriously. They were then asked if people wanted to speak and quite a dozen did so. But just like a few hundred, a dozen inhabitants are completely inadequate to speak of representativeness. Then it is not surprising that directors cannot do much with such a meeting: it does not provide reliable information. The dialogue then started and residents could now participate in the second round on site, as well as those who were absent, from home or anywhere else.

In that second round they read stories, suggestions and ideas from others who thought differently than themselves. So many 1,000 residents went through many 1,000 opinions together, each with a set of 15, for approximately 4 questions. They score between -3 and +3 for the level of support. The 100s of residents in the room therefore also saw opinions from residents who had already participated in the days before. They were allowed to support each other’s opinions or not, and enrich them with their tips. In this way they could express emotion, but awareness of the problem was increased, they were made co-owners of ‘what to do next’ and management was prevented from having to base itself on the small group of ‘angry group of attendees’.

Questions were something like this:

“What do you already know, have you heard, read or learned about the problem, as mentioned in the introduction, and why the emergency room has to close several days a week?”

In the second round: what do you recognize about what others say or don’t say, and what thoughts does that evoke in you?

“What affects you most about the emergency post closing (several days a week) and why?”

In the second round: what do you recognize about what others say or don’t say, and what thoughts does that evoke in you?

“We mentioned above in the introduction how hard we are working on solutions and what they are now, but all of you together probably also have solutions that we have not yet thought of. Our question is therefore: which solution direction do we still need to explore? Why that ?”

In the second round: would you like to positively score the solutions of others who receive your support and explain how this can be successful? you may score solutions that you do not support negatively.

Prevention is better than cure. Our advice is to take your stakeholders seriously, engage in regular dialogue and identify emotions and bottlenecks in a timely manner. And above all: solve together, faster, better. This prevents problems from worsening, where situations can get out of hand and solutions are further from home. In that respect, healthcare has many difficult challenges for which the brainpower of large groups is important.

New manager after departure

The last case is a common one. Managers who leave the field, due to an insufficient match with their role or team, poor performance or otherwise (such as simply another job). For employees, their manager is incredibly important for the enjoyment they experience at work and how long they remain motivated at your organization. Research varies, but dissatisfaction with the direct manager is not self-evident and is one of the most important reasons employees give when they leave somewhere.

Considering – i.e. – departure, but also absenteeism (increasingly mental), low confidence and lack of involvement, you can say that this is a very charged and also emotional theme. The strange thing is that a new manager or director, especially in large departments or organizations, certainly does not speak to everyone during the first 100 days and learn what matters to them. Strange, what they become is the driving force behind the success… or the failure.

That is why we would like to share these cases, and especially examples of questions, which were asked to groups of 100s to 10,000s. In just a few days, with two rounds, which allowed for prioritization, but also made support/sentiment visible for what was given low priority. The design of your questions depends on how many degrees of freedom can be offered to employees:

There is already a well-defined profile for whatever reasons. Organizations then submit these types of questions:

“Take a close look at the attached profile. What is most important for the [department, organization, … ] and our multi-year plan, and why?”

In the second round you can ask what employees support (score positively) or do not support from what others said in the first round, and how that relates to that plan.

“And about that same profile. What is the most important thing for the people and the culture we have here?”

In the second round you can ask what they support (positive score) or not (negative score) and ask what tip they give to the new manager/director on this point.

If there is already a draft profile, this question can be added:

“What do you think is missing from the draft profile and, above all, why do you think it is so important to want to add?”

In the second round, you ask again about what is supported or not, and ask them to explain their scores.

In these cases, the outcome was a ranked, valued list with which the profile is tested and enriched. The qualitative results were used to prepare the recruitment and selection interviews. Immediately upon appointment, the manager/director was presented with the complete result, which gives him/her a detailed view of how all employees see their role, expectations and the relationship with the people who work here and the plans that are in place.

Of course, if there were no plans yet, additional questions were asked:

“What do you want to give the new manager/director as a priority and, above all: why this point?”

If nothing is yet on paper, the following was (is) asked:

“What is the most important thing we look for in the new manager/board for the [department, organization, …] and our multi-year plan, and why?”

In the second round you can ask what employees support (score positively) or do not support from what others said in the first round, and how that relates to that plan.

“And what is the most important thing we look for in him/her for the people who work here and the culture we have here?”

In the second round you can ask what they support (positive score) or not (negative score) and ask what tip they give to the new manager/director on this point.

Those were the cases we wanted to share with you now, when emotions are running high. The striking, or even logical, thing is that employee engagement, trust and longevity are under considerable pressure in many organizations. Moreover, (mental) absenteeism is high. So you could say: there is a lot of emotion and tension in organizations and people and it is time for new leadership that pays attention to, knows about and prioritizes:

deep, high-quality listening: irreplaceable by surveys, hear-say and going for a walk
the power of people who work together asynchronously on (difficult) issues
reliability of collective intelligence and prioritization by the group (60% better)
high speed of decision-making, precisely due to delay via two rounds (90% faster)

We have seen or helped design 1,000 qualitative issues at more than 400+ organizations, so feel free to plan your introduction, demo or design session (if you are already a user). And again: prevention is better than cure. The time is long gone when residents, employees, members and patients quietly wait for decisions to be made top-down. They make themselves heard, want to be taken seriously and have a degree of participation and influence on what happens in ‘their’ organization and society. So: structure that listening, enter into dialogue and above all: stay in dialogue.

If you’re interested to convert from survey (one-step) based listening and move up the listening maturity ladder, to introduce dialogue (two-step) based listening and drive actionability? Just let us know, and trust us: it is easier than you imagine.

Just bear in mind a few things:

employees are ready (for a long while) to leave behind survey fatigue and lack of action
managers are ready: they want to listen to employees, yet, it should be tailored and related to business
you can take with you any question from your previous platform and re-use these, after some re-designing that we showed you in part 1 of this blog; you can even keep the closed-end part to keep on collecting scores and compare notes with previous years and cross-departments
you can also choose CircleLytics Dialogue as add-on to your current platform and connect our data to your existing platform to leverage insights and get to higher quality, more actionable data.

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We share this Ventana Research outcome, showing the absence of convincing satisfaction with regard with current technology, and surveys being the dominant technology in the current arena.

Now how about adding dialogue to complement and elevate surveys

Let’s now take a few different questions, from Qualtrics, and examine and explain how strategy 2) would work out: adding-on dialogue or separate, followup dialogue based listening, for the situations in which your company wants to keep surveys for some purposes but recognizes survey results alone fail to deliver.

Why would you do so by the way? We can imagine, in addition to the reasons mentioned in the above, you might want a transformational phase: experiment with new listening solutions, while not giving up on incumbent ones. Maybe for rational reasons to compare notes, ie. compare outcomes of surveys and CircleLytics Dialogue.

You can compare this and learn about dialogue:

respons rates are usually higher, in less time, without pushing employees to fill in stuff
employees invest heavily in writing/explainging via textual answers and recommendations
dialogue is rated 4.3 out of 5 by over 50,000 employees now, on a consistent basis
dialogue gets you to action 90% faster: simply compare cycle times of surveys vs dialogue
ask managers: they’re not burdened with post-survey meeting requirements but turn recommendations from dialogues instantly into results; this will be seen by their superiors.

So, let’s examine some survey questions, and see how you can build dialogue on top of that.

Two more Qualtrics questions are:

“What is our company doing well?”

“What should our company improve?”

Here’s a few alternatives if your survey platform allows you to edit these questions.

“What is our company doing well and why is this meaningful to you?”

“What is our company doing well and how does this impact you?”

“What could our company improve according to you, and can you explain us in your own words?”

“What should our company improve and why do you pick this?”

This way, you accomplish two important aspects of open-ended questions:

make people think harder and this way invest themselves deeper
make results more valuable, by avoiding short-cutted answers or just one word

Now it’s time for dialogue!!

If your survey platform allows you to change the generic questions into – for example – our versions, you can simply export those open-text answers from the survey audience. Import these in the CircleLytics Dialogue platform, or use an API for a (semi/full) automated process. Start the dialogue. All respondents now receive first your personalized message inviting them to the dialogue. They will see others’ differing answers and let them vote these up and down. Our AI is driving the distribution of 100s or many 1,000s of answers in varying sets of 15 answers. People will also add recommendations to enrich their (up and down) scores. This way respondents learn to think even deeper and you increase their awareness of the challenges of some of the answers from coworkers.

CircleLytics’ AI and natural language processing techniques first read all open answers, compare and cluster these, upon which unique, varied sets of 15 answers are produced and offered to each respondent. This increases their learning, engagement and gets you their up/down votes ánd enrichments via recommendations, hence, gets you the much-needed actionability.

Management and HR will receive an instant, vetted-by-the-people result, contextualized by by the intelligence of the crowd of employees. This is way more valuable and significant compared to the mere result of natural language processing. Only humans, by reading, interpreting, reflecting and voting up/down, can produce natural language understanding. After all, it’s their value system and collective experiences that give specific meaning to language. That’s the power of dialogue: it’s the understanding of what people say and mean, that helps management to understand what to do next.

What did we examine and learn in this latter part?

if for whatever reason, you keep your surveys, then we recommend to consider adding the open-ended part of any closed-end question
this way you get more relevant, valuable insights to run the instant dialogue as followup
with full respect of privacy for employees, you collect contextualized, vetted results and leading recommendations via the two-step dialogue process
instead of mere language processing, you leverage your results to collect language understanding and prioritized recommendations, hence, what actions to take
this two-step dialogue process proves to be highly engaging and appreciated by employees and managers.

And now let’s, finally, see how to followup your survey by dialogue, via a separate step.

For this, let’s learn this Philips case, explained in his own words, by one of the directors.

“At Philips, we conduct bi-annual employee engagement surveys. These are standard questions we ask Philips employees worldwide. This survey is intended to gauge the ‘temperature’, asking ourselves, ‘are we still on the right track? It does not yield any qualitative answers that drive my decision making today, because these are closed-ended questions that never vary. The textual answers remain unweighted: I don’t know what importance or sentiment others attribute to them, so I can’t derive reliable, decision-making value from it. We wouldn’t be able to make good comparisons with previous surveys if the questions were varying, so these global engagement surveys with generic questions make sense. But this also means that you cannot put forward specific topics to ask questions about for superior, faster decision-making. You will have to come up with another solution. The survey platform and surveys do not answer the ‘why’ and ‘how can we improve’ questions, to summarize it.”

and furthering:

“In a word, the survey is good for its purpose but not for decision making purposes. At Philips, we have high standards and strong ambitions, also when it comes to taking action where necessary. I wanted to gather more qualitative feedback that I could use within my team. So, I took the initiative to use the CircleLytics Dialogue. The Employee Engagement global team supported my choice because the engagement survey is not used for qualitative deepening, let alone co-creation, to tackle and solve (local) challenges together.

I used CircleLytics to ask concrete questions from two perspectives:

I wanted to dive deeper into some (of the many) topics from the global engagement survey where my region achieved insufficient or very high scores. I wanted to understand the why of it all and learn what decisions are crucial.
I wanted to tackle some issues in my own management agenda. I used CircleLytics for co-creation sessions with my people to make them aware, involve them in these issues, understand the root causes, and create solutions.”

Read here about the complete case, to learn how to followup your generic survey by two-step dialogues to dive deeper, and engage people in vetting others’ answers, while learning from these differing perspectives.

Now we’ve examined all instances:

1) replace engagement surveys by engaging dialogues and, if needed, keep surveys for focused research including external benchmarking,

2) followup your survey’s improved questions by an instant dialogue, and followup your survey’s result by a dialogue for specific items, and even for specific groups.

What triggered your thoughts most about our vision on people, listening and collectively move forward? What experiments are you open to? Reconstruct surveys, replace them, add dialogue, or other ideas?

Please contact us to exchange thoughts and analyse your company’s ambitions. We’re curious about your view on people, collective intelligence and why you want to step up your listening game.

A while ago, I was more closely introduced to a range of leading survey-based listening platforms such as CultureAmp, Qualtrics, Enalyzer, QuestionPro, Effectory, Survalyzer, Perceptyx, and a bunch of their friends. Mostly seeing them through a lens of measuring employee engagement.

I was very impressed by their capabilities and ease to set up surveys, and send, collect and compare the data. CultureAmp for example has a massive amount of data and benchmarks to explain how your scores compare to other companies in your industry. Qualtrics has enlarged its capabilities to analyse open texts, by a 2021 acquisition of Clarabridge. Lattice enables nudges, as does Perceptyx via their recent acquisition of Humu. By the way, while admitting having lacked actionability for over a decade.

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This blog’s focus is not to hone in too much on the differences between surveys and the CircleLytics Dialogue, other than sharing and explaining the following.

A three-step dialogue approach vs a one-step survey

Dialogue is a structured three step approach via two rounds, compared to surveys that are designed as a one step approach. Via surveys (mainly closed-ended) questions are sent, answers collected and graphs, natural-language-processing-based textual analysis and reports are produced.

During the second step of a CircleLytics Dialogue, however, employees are more deeply engaged to read and learn from coworkers’ diverse answers to your open questions. They score these answers and as a third step, enrich these by saying what to do next, ie they give meaning and understanding to others’ answers. This way seriously co-create a company’s next step and basically: solve your question. Moreover, they will come closer to decision-making and feel involved in what’s going on at the company: this will positively impact their acceptance of and commitment (read this BCG article). Your question about fostering trust, increasing retention, simplifying work, progressing on DEI, reducing costs, innovating the company’s offering, etc. Anything. People literally spell it out. It’s the question you ask, that drives the answers you get. Managers love it, and employees love it. And that’s worth a lot. That’s the result of collective intelligence.

To us, nowadays listening is driven by the need for an increase of bottom-up decision making, asynchronous collaboration, collective instead of small-group intelligence, elevate people’s engagement and to induce people’s openness to (constant) change (see picture).

You can read here more about our view on people, on change and on leadership (we’re included in this human-first approach to change IDC paper). You will read here about our view how qualitative listening, through dialogue, fosters an engaged performance culture and elevated decision making. Qualitative listening via a two-step approach gets you a 60% more reliable result than through surveys, about what’s really going on, why, where and, most important: what to do next. This reduces time to action by 90%. Furthermore, dialogues score high on experience for employees, whereas surveys are dealing with survey fatigue and most of all fatigue caused by a lack of action. Dialogues score a 4.3 out of 5, by many 100,000s respondents by now.

Why are surveys still here?

Reasons for companies and HR leadership to still apply survey (single-step listening) technology may vary, but usually consist of things such as:

internal reporting systems are technically interconnected with this platform
benchmarking throughout the years with previous results
availability of external benchmarking (sector, country)
HR and others are used to this platform
there’s more stuff going on on the listening platform, eg CX, etc
the contract is still running.

And one reason we were recently told about, by an insider in the HR Tech industry: “survey based technology masks that leaders don’t really want to listen to what’s going on to avoid addressing issues“. What we instantly added: well, then these leaders neither want to listen to opportunities, ways to move the needle, solve problems… Listening to employees does not equal ‘listening to more problems’ nor ‘doing what they say’ but it does mean listening to solutions, listening to things that will risk your strategy, listening to things that can be more simple or reducing costs, etc. It’s the power of the questions asked, the framing of the context, that determines the outcome. As well, as when you step up your listening game, and add qualitative listening & multi step dialogue to your listening portfolio.

We never read nor hear back, nor have found any academic research that:

employees simply love surveys, feel taken seriously and invest themselves deeply
managers can instantly, seamlessly make decisions based on survey outcomes
CFOs underwrite the high and explicit return on investment of money spent on surveys
retention, trust, engagement, etc are significantly increased by survey-based listening.

Unfortunately, the investments in survey technology to engage, commit and retain employees remain unproven, except for incidental cases, exhibited on survey platforms’ websites.

We do believe that upon introducing qualitative, forward listening, connecting people with others, and them to true company challenges, companies can reposition periodical surveys, framing it as ‘doing research’, since that’s the primary focus. This might induce employees to check all the survey questions with even some pleasure, simply because they’re helping out their employer to do research, while they know that voicing their opinions is done elsewhere, in an other way.

The history of surveys explains today’s ways of doing

Did you know that surveys versus interviews and open-ended questions were, some 80 years ago, already the lesser means to an end to collect better data? Surveys gained traction only because of the speed and ease of processing closed answers, to measure the population’s sentiment; as input for government policy making during war. Not for reasons of quality, not for reasons of depth. Nor were surveys ever meant to make impact in any way on the respondents themselves: not on their thinking, not to spark creativity, not to rethink and learn from each other. Doing research is the primary, and maybe only, focal point of surveys.

After the war, surveys gained further traction to “measure anything” and find new markets post-war, as many companies had to do. War propaganda agencies turned to PR. Oil companies influenced building infrastructure to boost the automotive sector. Nowadays, people demand more than surveys and fatigue has set in, quite strongly. People want influence, co-creation, to be taken seriously, to learn from others, to better collaborate, and move forward collectively to keep their job instead of losing it. And technology is finally available to convert one-way-street surveys into interactive, qualitative dialogues, hence creating a new category of listening to people, and to build better companies with, through and because of employees and customers.

Nowadays we know to by increasing self-efficacy, empower people, and allowing (some level of) influence on decisions that concern their work or work circumstances, research (re job control, job-demand-resources-model) shows you will gain:

higher success rates for your change initiatives and strategic goals
lower experienced stress, burnout risks and cynicism, and higher satisfaction.

The old top down model failed, here’s our take from now on

We believe (and witness at many customers’) that bringing employees closer to what’s going on, diagnose problems, predict market trends, design solutions, simplify complexities, etc, not only increases trust and engagement, but also brings companies and leadership closer to success.

Take a look at this traditional ‘old’ model of leadership, listening and getting things done:

And what it brought us: disengagement, attrition, survey & meeting & change fatigue and a lack of trust.

Then take a look at this new model of leadership, co-creation, dialogue and to bring employees and customers closer to the company’s purpose, decision-making and daily improvements:

Given this latter, new model, listening to us means active-forward listening. In this context, you will understand why we redesign the way companies’ leadership, management and HR listen to and co-create with people.

Two strategies to elevate your company’s listening

We will examine and explain how to do this via two different strategies.

stop surveys and move listening forward: combine specific and generic closed, specific open, and specific closed/open ended questions in platforms such as CircleLytics Dialogue
keep surveys for now, with generic closed-ended questions, yet combine with dialogue. Either via a separated approach: survey results are used to select and prepare separate dialogues; either via a (zero, semi or full technically) integrated approach: survey results trigger a dialogue

Our collective intelligence and AI driven employee listening is, compared to surveys, a much-needed and timely step for HR, leadership and management to take, also considering Josh Bersin’s latest, quite shocking research (picture).

After all, it’s these days all about co-creation with employees and processing business-and people critical insights faster than competitors, to obtain high-quality employee data tailored to solutions to enable managers and people to perform. To engage as a verb, more than measuring engagement as a noun. Collective intelligence emerges when respondents are enabled to interact with each others’ thinking, solutions and ideas. This aspect of collaborative and network-based learning is what differentiates CircleLytics Dialogue from literally any single step survey technology and has put us seriously on the map and on our customers’ and analysts’ radar.

Stop survey-based technology and shift to dialogue

Let’s examine the above-mentioned first strategy (1), hence, to stop survey based technology, and move your listening spending forward and elsewhere.

CircleLytics Dialogue offers a unique, intelligent QuestionDesignLab with 3,000+ open-ended or open/closed-ended questions, covering all business and people critical topics and themes. Any question can be deconstructed and re-constructed into a better one, more specific and tailored to your people, your business, your customers. After all: everything is specific, and in specificity lies the uniqueness of what you do and sets you, your employees and company apart from the rest.

For this reason, CircleLytics Dialogue does not believe in external benchmarking, nor do we offer this as a consequence. How can you add specific value for your people and company, based on generic information about how other companies score? If trust scores 7.4 in your company, and 7.6 is the external benchmark, how can you compare these apples and oranges? Is there at least a clue? Or is 7.4 ‘high enough’? It is people and business critical to know what théy say and feel about trust, and what théy recommend to raise the bar at théir company. You don’t need an external benchmark to take them seriously and select leading recommendations to improve trust. And people certainly don’t need to be ignored for their recommendations to improve trust, just because the generic question scored above some industry benchmark. That’s not about listening, that’s about ignoring…

So let’s zoom in on a question. Let’s pick this one, from the CultureAmp much-promoted engagement survey.

“I have access to the things I need to do my job well.”

A few things we notice:

this changes throughout the day, the week, depending on tasks and project phase
this depends on my role, that might have changed a number of times
this depends on my coworkers and manager(s) that as well change over time

More important:

it’s an important question to be asked by my manager, eg throughout the month
it’s an important question to follow up on in, let’s say, days since it impacts performance
it’s a question to ask ‘in the moment’, about a present situation.

Remember, we’re biologically wired to forget things that happened. Not to remember. Asking people for input about things that happened weeks or months ago, is just a recipe to outcomes you can’t rely on, nor consider it reliable input to judge managers.

Our question design team suggests to change this question into:

“Do you currently have access to the things you need to do your job well, and can you explain or express your additional needs?”

And …. have this question asked by managers regularly, not via HR’s generic and periodical survey. Managers can this way show they care and know what actions to take. This saves 90% time to impact. Employees feel this action-focused listening, commit to answering these questions and vote up others’. Everyone is set to go! And employees love this approach and rate it 4.3 out of 5.

Ask employees to score this question (the same as for the original CultureAmp question). And enable them additionally, through the power of dialogue, to vote coworkers’ textual answers in the second step up or down, and add tips/recommendations for specific actions to take.

Employees get to:

express their opinions (as we know, this directly impacts their engagement and trust)
learn from coworkers how they see things differently and experience this connectedness

Managers get:

answers that were supported up by the group, with their tips/recommendations
opinions that were rejected by the group, and reasons why.

Everybody happy. Managers can implement things to improve, and avoid things that are rejected by the group (voted down).

To make HR happy as well, this improved question can be asked by HR and they facilitate these type of action-oriented questions being asked on behalf of all managers of all teams or departments. The scores and overviews in the dashboard still help HR to track scores over time, and the CircleLytics Dialogue dashboard creates meaningful reports and insights based on these vetted qualitative employee listening data. HR tailors to managers’ needs and enables them to engage their employees.

Look at this other (beautiful) question from CultureAmp’s set:

“My manager (or someone in management) has shown a genuine interest in my career aspirations.”

CultureAmp mentions you should be worried when scoring below benchmark (65-75% range). We say, you should be worried when you score below what C-level has set as ambition with HR, and you as a manager of that department or team. Given the talent shortage, I must say I don’t care how other companies treat career development of their talents, as long as wé as a company do it our way.

Our take on this question to run via CircleLytics Dialogue:

“Do you experience that I show a genuine interest in your career aspirations. Can you score this question first, and then add your explanation or recommendation to learn from.”

The manager can add the following text in the second step via CircleLytics Dialogue:

“Here’s your invitation to read what coworkers think and feel about my interest in their career aspirations. Which answers do you support, which don’t you support? Any additional tips so I can change things for the better, or keep things that should be kept? Thanks in advance!”

The manager receives a Top 5 and Bottom 5 of answers to the question, including employees’ recommendations. There’s not even a need for managers to sit down with your whatever-number of employees. They were given an equal voice in this anonymous dialogue to help out with this very important question and subsequent step to learn from, reflect on and vote up/down what others say. This phenomenon of collective intelligence (two step dialogue) goes beyond individualistic intelligence (one step survey) by a 60% higher reliability and 90% faster time to action. The manager is instantly helped, employees learned from others, felt trusted and taken seriously. Ready for action.

This whole dialogue process is securing employees’ constant privacy. All is treated and processed anonymously. Why would you send engagement surveys that people can join anonymously and take privacy away from people when you want to deep-dive? After surveys, why would you require from managers to solve the red flags from survey outcomes “with their team without any privacy for people”? To us, that does not make sense for a few reasons:

if privacy is needed for the survey, then have employees explaining in a team meeting, facing their manager, why they take a negative stance on something is for sure something that requires privacy. It doesn’t make sense to take away their privacy at this most vulnerable moment
psychological safety is of the essence, and most leaders, HR and managers still have to tailor listening and other work processes to this much-needed thema
dialogue and collecting diverse thoughts and perspectives is best served by anonymity. A good read is “On Dialogue” by David Bohm, or take a look at this video by Lorenzo Barberis, PhD, or the academic “Collective intelligence in humans: a literature overview”, by Salminen.

Do you know it takes companies on average 8 weeks or longer to followup on survey outcomes? This while the essence of listening and feedback is to put it to work within days and followup, not put it aside. Do you know on average no more than 1 out of 5 managers actually followups on the results? For this reason, we recommend deconstructing employee survey based listening, and reconstruct it again in the way we’re showing your right here.

In addition to CultureAmp, let’s examine a few questions by Qualtrics, ie the EX25 list of questions, on which list we notice:

“I feel energized at work.”

“I have trusting relationships at work.”

Here’s our redesign, but first of all we note that the question itself is influencing employees’ respons by stating ‘feel energized’ and ‘have trusting…’ instead of formulating these in a neutral way like this:

What can we learn about your recent level of energy at work, and can you explain this in your own words?

[at any closed scale of ‘low energy’ to ‘high energy’ and add a text field]

Or:

“I currently feel (yes/no) energized at work and my main reason for this is ….. ”

[at a scale of for example -3 representing no, to +3 representing yes, and add a text field]

Our design team at CircleLytics Dialogue strongly recommends to always ask a deliberate open-ended question, to extend and deepen your closed-end question.

So, instead of “I have trusting relationships at work” you better ask: “I have trusting relationships at work, at this moment, and here’s what it means to me.”. And include the second step: ask employees if they recognize/support what others say, and ask for any tip they might have.

Again, people can’t look back for weeks, let alone for months (let even more alone … a full year). To correctly compare results between responses, it’s consistent to ask everyone for their recent experience. Your results will then be comparable, since time frames are comparable. It doesn’t make sense to collect survey results without knowing what time frame employees are referring to when scoring your question low (or high). Can you imagine how unrewarding it is for managers to receive survey reports and they can defend themselves nor reconstruct textual (negative) feedback? The impact of feedback should be close to ‘in the moment’ to enable people’s brains to reconstruct what situation occurred and how the feedback induces learning. This loop is basically absent when receiving feedback late (or even extremely late), inconsistent and unclear in terms of situation it refers to. Can you image the opposite? Receiving precise recommendations, close to the situation and timeframe the brain can handle, and show employees that you took them seriously and be able to thank them? Feedback will turn into active forward listening. That’s the essence of our dialogue platform, elevating AI and the power of qualitative listening to drive actionability and move people and performance forward.

What did we examine and learn till now about our consideration to stop survey based listening technology? Please contact us if you don’t follow or think differently.

make questions specific instead of generic, except for maybe a few and frame these as research instead of listening and clarify the purpose of doing research
have questions asked by managers or at least from their angle to humanize listening
phrase questions in the ‘here and now’ or ‘future’; there’s where change and performance happen, not in the past: stop looking back unless you’re evaluating some project
introduce a deliberate open-ended part in your question to spark people’s thinking
add the second step to have open answers prioritized ánd enriched for fast actionability and benefit from the power of dialogue, hence learning from each other.

Please click here for Part 2.

We already wrote about your most compelling opening line to start the dialogue. Dialogue is fun: you can invite as many people as you and your issue want and need. Everyone can join whenever they want and they have privacy if they want. They learn from each other and rate your dialogue with a big eight! For your question design we have a whitepaper with 18 design principles, designing your question with our unique QuestionDesignLab and inspiration for the best completion of your question.

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In addition, we share here some complete texts as an invitation to your dialogue. Some of these were literally or near-literally deployed by organizations in previous dialogues. This means that 100,000s of people were involved, challenged and activated to think along, solve the puzzle and initiate change, collectively! Real change and transformations are a people-centric activity: whether the change is small (new working methods, new schedules) or major (energy transition, reorganization). Leadership of teams, departments and the entire organization, municipality, healthcare institution or other type of company thus embrace the power of people thinking, reflecting and increasing each others’ opening up to change. Quite a bit different from listening to people delegate to HR who delegates it to a survey platform. Everyone now admits that surveys have not delivered what they promised (even the CEOs of these types of platforms), that follow-up hardly takes place, and involvement, trust and connection have become weaker. Gallup currently measures that in many countries only dozen(s) % of employees consider themselves actively engaged.

We all need to move towards a new model of ‘listening’. One that we believe should be based on trust, dialogue, connecting and performing together. Close to work, close to change, close to action and above all: together. Driven by managers and open questions, supported by HR, instead of driven by HR surveys, with reports sent to managers. This applies not only to government organizations, healthcare, education, but also to commercial organizations and governments. And not only with their internal people, but also with their external people: patients, customers, members and residents.

Back to your dialogue: how do you compose your invitation? What can you even learn from your regular opening of a team meeting for example, such as in this blog from INSEAD. What do you need and want to say in it? How do you involve and touch your target group? How do you provide context and inform them?

What do we say in CircleLytics itself, when you draw up your invitation for your dialogue:

What is the call to action? What do you ask them? So that opening line…
What is the context, what information do participants need?
Who else do you ask besides the invitee who reads your invitation?
What is your intention to do with the results?
What would you like to share about the follow-up after your previous dialogue with this group?
How does this working method work, online, asynchronously, via two rounds?
What is the power of privacy, i.e. anonymity for participants?

We share below some invitations for your next dialogue, for your inspiration. Are you inspired by what others have designed? What will you change about these texts? Does it help you compose your dialogues faster and better? Whether it concerns challenging your team and preparing it well for a meeting next week, or inviting 1,000s of employees to make a change process more successful.

“More and more people are combining their job with caring for a loved one. Usually things go well, but the combination of work and informal care can also be challenging. We therefore ask you four open questions anonymously, to learn from all of you. What are we going to do with it?

Your opinions will be sent back anonymously to the rest of the participants in a few days. You value the opinions of others and in this way we know what we together find most important within the theme of informal care, and what not, and what could be improved. We will immediately return these action points to all managers, with instructions.”

“We are switching from our periodic survey to this dialogue. Much more fun, because there are only a few questions, they are open, because we are open to your opinion. And: you will hear back immediately about the results: you will receive an invitation to the second round, in which you can appreciate answers from others and enrich them with your recommendation to realize it.

This way it becomes fun, action-oriented and you together indicate what is most important and what is not. This allows us to send each manager a to-do list on the same day the dialogue ends!

Everything is anonymous and from now on we will do this every quarter on 3 to 5 topics maximum. From now on, we will involve you in topics that really matter and take action together. We are extremely curious about your ideas and solutions.”

“In our increasingly complex working environment with increasing workload, we, as HR want to continue to dialogue with you together and with the works council. In this way we learn together to know and pay attention to our energy, cooperation and the continued development of our organization, for our customers.

So no survey, because we work with open questions after which you can read the (differing) answers of others, learn from them and appreciate help. As a result, we know what really has support and we will discuss this result with the management in two weeks. We would like to emphasize that all contributions and results are anonymous. We want you to see the results concretely in your work. Thank you in advance.”

“Thank you for participating in this online dialogue for the new policy for ABC.

When creating this new policy, the patient is central and that is why we take your opinions into account when creating this new policy. By participating you directly contribute to improving care for people affected by ABC.

This dialogue consists of two rounds: in the first round you will be asked 3 open questions and 2 profile questions. Then you get to see the answers of others, then think differently than you. You can then respond to this; Do you agree with the others, do you agree with their ideas? Why, what is your advice on what we can do with this? As soon as round 2 starts, further explanation will follow in the invitation you will receive.

Privacy is well regulated with this working method: you participate from wherever you want, at your own time and it is anonymous.”

“Prior to our meeting next Friday, in which some of you will also participate, we would like to ask two questions to everyone who has to do with ABC. We have opted for this working method, anonymous and composed of two rounds. All answers from you and other participants are then selected and sorted using smart software and offered to you again. During the week, the second round starts and you can read and assess the answers of other participants. Which one do you think is best, what is your action point? Which one? If you don’t like it, why not?”

“In order to be able to have a concrete conversation with all managers during our quarterly day, we will also ask you this quarter to answer the open questions (and two closed) in this dialogue anonymously. This is possible until Thursday. After that you will be invited to to participate in round 2. You will then have the opportunity to respond to the answers of your colleagues and attach a score to them: what do you support and what do you not, and what is your specific suggestion? When the second round is concluded, a valuable ranking, with support!

The results are discussed in detail during the quarterly meeting. This way, managers can immediately start working on the best results and actions in their teams.”

“Your input as a new employee at ABC is very valuable. In this online dialogue we will look together for the best ideas to present and profile the organization as an attractive employer based on a unique set of values that you find important.

We conduct this dialogue online, in an equal and anonymous manner. It will provide important ideas and insights into how ABC can better attract talent on the labor market and therefore be less affected by the staff shortage.

We have 5 questions ready that you can answer in no more than 10 minutes. Thank you again for making some time for this! In the second round you can learn from others again, and they from you. We are curious to see what will come of it. At the end, you will personally receive the results with the most highly rated contributions to our issue by email.”

And if they are used to this working method, you can limit your invitation to, for example:

“As you know, there is a major shortage of nurses. 20% more training places are needed to guarantee emergency care in the future. From September we will therefore train more students than now. We are very happy that many colleagues are have shown interest for our training. How great would it be if we kept them on board after their training.

Welcoming, coaching and inspiring these nurses-in-training is a task for all of us. We need your help too. We would love to hear what you need and what ideas you have to set this up properly together. The better we know what is needed, the better we can help each other. Will you participate again? Anonymous of course!”

Or even shorter:

“Many thanks again for our meeting last Wednesday. Not everyone could be there, and of course time was limited in such a meeting. That’s why now a few more questions for you and the entire Top 50. Anonymously and at your own time. After you have answered a few questions yourself, and the first round ends, you will be invited to the second round, in which you can appreciate and supplement the opinions of others. So listen, learn and formulate actions together.”

And if it is a follow-up dialogue to a previous one….

“Thanks to the previous dialogues, meetings and decision-making, we have implemented the new management structure. We are curious whether you are already noticing the effects of this change, both in a positive sense and in a critical sense and where you see improvement possible or necessary .

This time we will ask you three open questions through this online dialogue. In the first round you answer the questions and in the second round you can view and rate the answers of your colleagues. All responses are anonymous, so your input in the first round counts equally, and everyone’s support for others’ contributions in the second round counts equally. The results of the dialogue are immediately available and therefore immediately scheduled for the following week. This way we can quickly achieve improvement and action together. Thank you again!”

“We are curious about your opinion about the tasks of the role of ABC. In order to listen and understand you as front line employees in our region, we will regularly have these online, anonymous dialogue with you. Unlike a survey, you can read each other’s answers, learn from these and vote these up or down. Unlike a meeting, we offer privacy, time to think and we can all really participate and have influence.

So see this dialogue as an online way to work together smarter, securely. The results will be shared with you through your manager and this has already been planned and agreed upon. You can access the link to answer the questions from your laptop or phone, 24 hours a day. So choose your own moment. Thank you in advance for your contribution.”

“You have been working with the existing roster arrangement for several years. This is currently being evaluated and perhaps revised. We are curious about your input. How do you experience the rosters? What is good or could be improved. Tell us now anonymously, respond to the input from others and together, in this online way, show what the ‘new schedules’ project team should pay attention to. In this way we do our best to include as many wishes as possible. So please join us and tell us and tell us tell us what we should pay attention to?”

“As announced, you will receive the online dialogue with which you can give your opinion and ideas to make our team day a success. To get a good idea of what we consider important together, we have four questions for you. In the first round you can you can give your response and in the second round you can view the contributions of colleagues and indicate to what extent you support or reject this idea or opinion. You can immediately give a recommendation so that we can take action together more quickly. This way a supported prioritization will be established, which we will further elaborate during our team day.”

“How is team-based working currently developing for you and for your team? We want to learn from your experiences in this new phase of team-based working. With this dialogue, as a change project team we want to hear from you through open questions how you view different aspects of team-based working and where you need more or different support. This allows teams to learn from each other and we learn how further implementation from teams can be relaxed and improved.

As after previous dialogues, the project team ensures that the results have a direct impact on the acceleration, deceleration and reinforcement that the teams need. This is how we build change together.”

And who also sees these types of extremely short texts, if this working method is used regularly? It therefore replaces a meeting, which is often expensive, more difficult to plan, not everyone comes, and usually does not offer time to listen to each other and reflect. Managers save a lot of time but also improve quality.

“I would like you to think about the following so that we can quickly solve and prevent this. You know how it works: two rounds, anonymously and I will come back to our choices based on the results on Monday.”

And if your issue is quite sensitive, or it is in a very early phase:

“We have started the ABC project, to achieve …. We want to understand in this early phase, what initial thoughts you have about this. Would you like to share them anonymously and then indicate what you think of others’ opinions, and why? We do this with this online dialogue, via two subsequent rounds. As a project team, we are curious about this first dialogue and do not yet know what we can do with it in concrete terms: first we want to listen! We may do it more often do with everyone involved at ABC.”

And if you want to go through decision-making with your target group:

Through previous dialogues and workshops with different groups, we have learned that there are four main topics. The dialogues also made it clear to us what we mean by these topics and what steps are required. This means we can now make decisions with you. Very nice to work together with so many people in this way!

For each decision we will ask whether you agree with it, together with your substantiation. If this is not the case, we would like to hear what objection or alternative you have. In the second round you see the reactions of others and you can support them with your scores or not. Everyone can then give a new and definitive answer to the question of whether you agree with the proposed decision. We will find out whether many supported objections can still be taken into account. Everything is anonymous, and in three weeks you will know the result. Thank you!

That’s it for now. We design hundreds of invitation texts this way every year, and so do our customers! Follow our blogs and posts on Linkedin and stay informed of new cases, inspiration and more about the power of people who think, experience, learn and solve together. Are you planning an appointment with us to get acquainted, for a demo or to help design your dialogue?

A dialogue is a party! Especially online and especially asynchronously. Different from a workshop where most people are not invited. Because how many really fit in such a meeting room or Teams session? And unlike a survey or poll that does not offer any interaction between participants who think differently than themselves. There are more people and therefore more brainpower than a meeting allows, and we learn much more from each other than a survey tool understands. Online dialogue combines all that: any number of people, learn from each other and then tell them what you think about it again, and participate at your own time and from your own place. Collaboration at its best!

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Dialogue is fun!

At a party you have music, a drink and a snack. That connects, that invites. In dialogue, language is the music, time to think and learn from each other is the drink, and (privacy) anonymity is the bite!

How do you apply language to connect invitees to your subject, your challenge, your issue? What do you want to see answered, why, by whom and what are you going to do with it? This also feeds the unique QuestionDesignLab, which enables you to design strong, specific open questions, jointly with the CircleLytics platform.

You will have to delve deeper into these questions, into your issue, the context, the limitations, the degrees of freedom. And you have to think about the people you invite. Why do you do that, why do they participate, what, for what? You probably enter into online, asynchronous (any moment, any place) dialogue because other working methods do not do justice to your situation, your issue, nor your talented audience. Depth, importance, different perspectives, giving people time, showing trust, necessary anonymity, increasing awareness among participants: and there are even more reasons to choose online dialogue over other working methods such as surveys or meetings. If you list a limited number of keywords as to why you are inviting them, you have come a long way. Now that you have written down the why, you are ready for the next step.

Then write what you are inviting them to. To discover or analyze something together? Or to solve something, be creative or even innovative? Or to predict something, to think about something that still lies (partly) in the future? Or do they look back, do you want to evaluate something? Clearly connect to the phase your issue is in. Suppose you are working on a complex change process, and you are in the “knowledge” phase of, for example, the ADKAR model, then focus on that and be clear. Demarcate. A customer organization (that does not exactly follow a specific change model) recently deliberately asked questions that did not provide definition (such as the components of PDCA or ADKAR). They learned that different groups appeared to be in different phases of these models, and that these different groups could learn and accelerate from each other through each other’s experience. Or think of a very open question as to why employees would choose this organization again today. So the message is: know what you choose: how sharply you demarcate or not, what degrees of freedom you have to offer.

And then, on to the preparation of the party!

Where do people come from (mentally, intellectually, background of the company, etc), what is their context, what do they already know? What do they need to know from you about the issue before they can respond to your questions? And in addition to being able to do so, they must also want to do so. Are they busy, rushed, stressed, why? Are they loyal, absent, disinterested, committed, why? Fortunately, we are all curious and the participants share that they work at your organization, department or team, or live in the same city or district, or belong to the same association: there are always similarities, as well as differences. Write down in a number of key words what your target group ‘looks’ like. For example, you can describe a number of personas with keywords. Hold this up to a few colleagues: do they recognize these personas and descriptions?

What will you do afterwards with the results of the dialogue? Tell them, write it down in your concept dialogue! It may be that you don’t know that yet: then say so. You may have a management meeting two weeks later with the results and then you want to communicate what the follow-up actions are. You may use it as input for a meeting with a project group and come back later in the quarter. Make sure it matches reality, your reality. Under promise, over deliver. In other words, be precise about the expectations you create and don’t want to create. People want clarity about why they participate, and not just what and how. That’s why we say: when designing your new dialogue: start at the end. What is planned, or a concern, an ambition, a bottleneck, a duty or a goal? Reason back from there to give people clarity about what is being done with it.

You already notice it. A workshop with a group or a survey with roughly 20-30 questions is simply set up and carried out faster. But not better, usually worse. And the good news: you can learn to design a dialogue! And our opinion is: you should always make this preparation: for every working method or intervention, but those other working methods are chosen without thinking, and out of habit, while this is not always the case with dialogue. Always prepare well is our starting point: it takes time, but you will be rewarded in quality, visibility, engagement and in faster and more precise decision making.

It is important and necessary to think hard about all these things. Your brain delves into the other person and the issue and how you connect them together. The easy way simply yields less. The path of dialogue is more meaningful but tougher. That’s why we do it together 🙂

How will participants join this CircleLytics Dialogue? Tell them that you offer privacy (anonymity), give them some days of thinking time. And explain that they are rewarded by the second round, in which they will see answers from others who think differently than them. They will have meaningful influence this way.

And for the leaders among us (as far as we are concerned, we all are, because we open ourselves up to people who think differently!): people expect quite a bit from you! In fact, it can make them stay or leave. Or for your dialogue that you are now preparing: it can make them participate or drop out. This is the perfect opportunity to show that you listen and want to involve people in issues that are also theirs and that can be solved better together. Our reading tip is “How to Listen” by Oscar Trimboli or listen to the Deep Listening podcasts.

Now let’s share and experiment with language.

Opening lines:

We seriously need you to understand how […] came about and more importantly: what we can do about it together.

Or better yet: I need you for the following.

That’s even more personal. But you can also do it more informally:

How nice that you want to participate. Important too, because […] is about all of us.

or …

It’s great that you took the time and are interested in […]. Important too, because with this we ensure that … .

Alternatives, depending on context, where you and everyone come from (see our introduction above):

As you heard, we stopped doing surveys because we couldn’t do anything with them, although we tried. Measuring via surveys turns out not to be knowing nor learning. Now we are going to listen much better in an innovative way: through this online dialogue.

We finally want to get started on improving […] and we can do that more intelligently together.

We have been hired to guide the management and department to […] accelerate, and we want to do this by involving the entire department: all of you.

Do you know how […] it can be delivered to the customer in a shorter time, say in 10% less time? Then take part in this challenge now.

As MT, we want to know what we can feasibly tackle to reduce workload, while we want to maintain and achieve our commercial goals. That’s not easy, so join in!

What do you think about […] and what is needed to achieve […] within two years? Will you please help us figure this out together?

You can emphasize the help you need from people. That’s nice, because when you ask others for help, they are happy to offer it. This is reflected in their response, both quantitatively, qualitatively and in terms of diversity.

Other alternatives:

What are your thoughts about […] and would you like to share them anonymously and learn what others think about […]? Then we challenge you to participate in this online dialogue through two rounds.

This is not a survey: we really want to know what you think about it and therefore ask you open questions. There are only three, but serious questions about an equally serious subject that we all have an interest in: […].

Discussions we have had with various colleagues show that […] must be given priority. Together with you, we want to understand why and, above all, what this will mean for all of us, and especially: the customer.

What have you learned in recent months or years about […] that we can all learn from?

Be precise, keep your sentences short, and realize that you can place more or less emphasis on feeling, relationship, process, content, etc.

Just compare:

The management wants to understand your feelings and impressions about the newly announced cost savings and therefore anonymously asks you some open questions about it.

Versus this:

The management explained the need to save costs last Tuesday and this can be read via this link […]. What additional cost savings can you think of?

If you choose to enter into dialogue but also to stay in dialogue, you can beautifully refer to a previous dialogue:

Thank you for your suggestions and openness to the previous dialogue about […], which has allowed us to achieve […]. This month we once again present an important issue to you.

And how and where in your text do you talk about privacy, hence anonymity? Depending on the mood and confidence surrounding the issue, its context and the target group involved, you can dedicate different sentences to it, such as the following:

Your contribution to this dialogue is anonymous.

So, nice and clear. Short and sweet. Sometimes you have to start talking about that right away, in your first sentence.

And what if a breach of trust recently occurred? For example, because during an employee survey rumors spread that “managers knew who did and did not participate.” Unfortunately that happens. We hear it from the agencies themselves. Of course that’s morally wrong of them. Your text might need some extras, when turning to CircleLytics Dialogue as your new listening solution:

Your contribution to this dialogue is anonymous. Nothing can be technically traced back to you as an individual and this is established in contracts. If you have any questions about this, you can reach our privacy officer via this email address […].

Or in relation to the culture that exists in your organization:

We want you to be able to think completely freely and independently about […]. For that reason, this dialogue is anonymous: nothing can be traced back to a participant. Also, take your time.

In order to really include every colleague in the policy for […], in addition to meetings, we want to hold this online, anonymous dialogue. Every thought and contribution is good and this anonymous working method has been chosen to remove all barriers.

If people are under pressure and so is your issue, addressing the delay now through online dialogue is critical. Showing even more haste is not exactly what is needed. Slow down.

It is important to solve the problem together as quickly as possible and to understand how we can prevent this from happening in the future. Therefore, take a few days to think about it or discuss it with colleagues, for example.

We’ll leave it at this for now. Hopefully it inspires you to get started with your dialogue and start the party! Preferably together with others, or together with us. Feel free to schedule a design session here.

The essence of CircleLytics Dialogue is that you apply the power of language to connect people with each other, and to your challenge, through the power of open questions. This requires first of all your leadership, a clear context and compelling open questions, and last but not least, the best online solution to make this all happen. We have for this reason, now developed QuestionDesignLab (QDL), with many, many 1,000s of questions that are intelligently suggested, based on your preferences and on anything you’ve typed about your dialogue, such as an invitation, subject, etc. Below we explain how you can reveal and finetune these preferences, so that QDL continues to provide better suggestions.

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We also recommend that you read why you start designing your dialogue from the end and then go back: what do you want to see answered and what do you want to achieve or bring about with it? We published this earlier article at CHRO.nl about the power of people as one big brain.

Preferences: pay attention to the order

What are those preferences that are read and understood by QDL? When listing and briefly describing these preferences, you need to remember two things: they are in order of importance, and for that reason there is some kind of weighting factor behind them. So the first preference that we explain to you below counts more than the one that comes after, et cetera. We also apply an analysis of scarcity of words: some are more unique and relevant than other words. So, the best and fastest thing is that you do something with all those preferences! It gets you faster to the question you’ve always been looking for! Important, because it – to say it like that – forces you think hard, have doubt, try again, rethink and start writing. What is the context, why are you inviting them and what are you inviting them to? What is the specific thing you are inviting them to? What is your intention to do with it? We wrote about this earlier when designing the opening sentences in your invitation. We recommend that you read this through.

The text field for the question

When you are in your Question tab (see image), you immediately start formulating your question there, or at least put in a number of keywords in the text field for the question. The more specific and the more you type there, the better. What you type here will be remembered when you then click on the icon: the QDL icon is located to the left of your question field: that chemistry bottle! Then the lightbox opens. But first, these steps to clarify your preferences!

Subject of your dialogue

See the screenshot above. Don’t forget: you apply language in all these places to bridge the gap between your intention and dialogue purpose and your target group. The topic can be substantive such as: home work, training, diversity, reorganization, agile working, etc, etc. But it can also be a different angle, eg. Quarterly Dialogue, The Dialogue #1, Follow-up to Workshop, Question of the Month, etc. etc.

Specific context for a question

For each question, you may write a specific question, in addition to the general explanation (invitation). This helps the respondent to focus even more clearly on the precise purpose of your question, and also feeds into the QuestionDesignLab’s intelligence to suggest questions to help you in designing.

General explanation

In your Context tab you can then formulate your general explanation for your dialogue, for the first round. In that text field (see screenshot) we shared our advice about what you would like – or even should – to say there. This also really encourages you to think about what you want to achieve with your target group of invited people. And so it directly feeds the QuestionDesignLab to provide more intelligent suggestions.

Type or select words

If you click the QDL icon next to the question field in your Questions tab, you will end up in the QDL lightbox. If you have expressed one or more of the above preferences, you will immediately receive appropriate suggestions. You can then refresh these suggestions with the arrow icon (see screenshot), on the right side of the suggestion. You can click and select words that will appear in the text field above. That also feeds QDL for your new suggestions! You can also add a suggestion to your favorites list with the heart, which you also see in the screenshot (right side, tab). You can draw on this for subsequent questions or dialogues, and QDL will only show you a relevant selection of these favourites, depending again on all you’ve filled in in other text fields, such as context, question field, etc.

Interests and Models

In your dashboard, your homepage, you can activate Interests and Models, see the screenshot below. These preferences then feed the QuestionDesignLab to provide more intelligent suggestions. When you are in the QDL lightbox itself, you can also search very specifically for suggestions by clicking the Interests or Models tab (see screenshot below). You will then receive suggestions that already belong to those Interests or Models. If you stay at the suggestions tab in the QDL lightbox, we will ensure that the suggestions shown take your interests and clicked models into account. We are going to add many more models by the way.

And furthermore, good to know

if you often request new suggestions from QDL, we will show a message to specify some more preferences as described above, so that QDL can perform optimally with and for you
you can select a suitable suggestion with the button that appears next to it, and then click this Apply button and further edit it yourself: you can add closed scales, set the second round or not, etc; don’t forget to design a very strong ending to your question: just take a look at these tips
When you leave your QDL lightbox, make sure you click Apply so you don’t lose what is in your question field.

And: book a session with us to carry out or continue the design together. It’s probably included in your contract. There are no costs involved for partners.

Lots of fun and success with QuestionDesignLab and especially with the people with whom you will work on your problem. If you already have questions, book an appointment using this link.

In today’s rapidly changing work landscape, the relationship between employees and employers is undergoing a significant transformation.

With increasing layoffs, more network-oriented approaches to managing companies, and new technological developments, such as the uncertain impact of AI on our jobs, trust has become critical in fostering productive, collaborative, engaged workplaces. Traditional listening methodologies, which often relied on passive, individual-focused, and point-in-time surveys along the lines of the organizational chart, no longer suffice. To continuously build trust and create thriving organizations, a new approach to employee listening is needed — one that embraces transparency, safety, and continual dialogue at the heart of matters: getting purposeful work done together.

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In this article, we explore the importance of employee voice, the role of leadership in fostering trust, and the potential for dialogue-driven organizations to drive business value. Furthermore, we provide a model for human-centric listening practices that organizations can adopt.

The Breakdown of Trust

The employee and employer relationship has shifted in terms of power dynamics. Pre-pandemic, the power in this relationship was held by organizations. Yet during the Covid pandemic, we observed a shift of power to the employee, as organizations had to adapt to a world that kept employees safe and healthy at all costs.

Today, the relationship is shifting yet again. Amid difficult market conditions, and a constant need for change, organizations are demanding more from employees, and many have to reassess the viability of their workforce. Over the past few months, we have seen many layoffs while rising inflation levels and cost of living continue to create anxiety for employees. Some organizations have tried to step up and amend salaries and provide a cost of living allowance or once-off bonus. This requirement put even more pressure on an already constrained budget for most organizations.

As the debate around remote work, flexibility, and AI dominates conversations, it’s essential to recognize that the conversation goes deeper than work models or technologies.

The conversation is about belonging, safety, and trust.

A sense of belonging creates an environment where employees can authentically voice their thoughts and opinions. Safety is essential for employees to feel secure when speaking up, knowing there won’t be negative consequences. Finally, trust is the foundation that enables a continuous relationship between employees and the organization, allowing ongoing listening and dialogue.

Employees need to feel heard and valued as humans while at the same time being empowered to influence direction and contribute meaningfully to their organizations. Research reveals that these debates are sometimes less about the outcomes and more about the “fair process that allows for people’s voice” followed to get there. Recent examples in the Return to Office domain confirm that organizations that involved employees in finding solutions to this new reality are adapting better. [source]

Traditional listening methods are coming up short

Unfortunately, traditional (survey) listening methods have often fallen short, lacking the ability to engage in ongoing, qualitative dialogue, often being treated with suspicion, and employees feeling uncomfortable and not taken seriously when they voice their views in the ‘comment field.’ Even though traditional surveys have a place in organizational practice for generic reasons, a mature listening strategy cannot function effectively without the underlying relationship of trust, a sense of safety, and the opportunity to voice your opinion authentically and learn from others. Listening as a means to collectively move the company forward creates a sense of belonging, collaboration, and experiencing co-ownership of the company’s success.

Trust is crucial for relationship-building, navigating uncertainties, and driving corporate performance. It involves instilling confidence that leaders will act in ways that do not harm employees and creating an atmosphere of psychological safety while co-shaping the company’s next steps. Procedural justice, characterized by fair decision-making processes and openness to employee input, plays a vital role in building or detracting from the trust relationship.

Leadership must establish trust by actively engaging employees in understanding and addressing uncertainties, problems, market threats, internal weaknesses, etc. This approach involves acknowledging vulnerabilities and co-creating solutions collaboratively. By involving employees in problem analysis, predicting trends, and even decision-making processes and valuing their input, leaders demonstrate trust and ensure that uncertainties are not solely their burden but a collective challenge to address. Listening becomes management’s strategic tool instead of HR’s siloed survey.This inclusive approach builds a sense of ownership, empowers employees, and fosters a collaborative environment where everyone can contribute and thrive to the company’s strategy and operational goal setting and attaining [source]]

To address the trust deficit, organizations must embrace authentic listening strategies that tap into the collective wisdom within their ranks or company-wide, and even with external (customer) groups. Passive and siloed approaches to employee listening via surveys are no longer effective unless serving generic purposes. Instead, leaders must take ownership of the process and foster an environment where employees feel safe to share their perspectives and enable leaders to take multi-perspective decisions driven by the diversity of thoughts of the many. By creating opportunities for continuous dialogue, organizations can unlock valuable insights, cultivate a sense of belonging, and empower employees to contribute their expertise. All in one go.

The components of an effective listening strategy:

A robust listening strategy creates an environment where authentic conversations can occur between employees and the organization, benefiting everyone involved. While many organizations have some form of listening practices in place, there is still work to be done. Most listening strategies are survey-based and focused on the employee journey instead of business performance-centered dialogues.

Sometimes, organizations get caught up in the analytics, tools, and platforms, which are indeed important. However, it’s crucial to remember the underlying purpose of listening and be critical about why survey-based listening strategies didn’t deliver on their promises, hence, decreasing engagement, retention, and trust. Mature, strategic employee listening is not just about metrics and disclosing topics they mention a lot. Instead, it’s about leveraging the wisdom of the organization, collectively making things better, and surfacing key or even new insights to thrive.

To implement a robust listening strategy, six key components need to be in place:

Clear focus and purpose: Clearly define why you want to listen and engage employees in the conversation, ensuring transparency about the goals and intentions of the listening strategy.
Multi-channel approach: Embrace inclusivity by recognizing that employees have diverse needs and preferences when raising their voices. Explore various channels and methods to reach them authentically.
Continual two-way dialogue: Solicit qualitative feedback and embrace active and passive listening. Foster an environment of open, collective, and transparent dialogue that facilitates collaboration and validation of feedback and feeds decision-making to drive the organization forward.
Moments of value: Identify the key topics and experiences that matter to the organization and the employees. Engage in meaningful conversations about these moments to gain insights and understand their impact.
Mixed data methods: Balance quantitative and qualitative feedback using both data analysis approaches. Generalizable findings are important, but so is diving deeper into specific topics to uncover their underlying meanings to drive specific results.
Action and feedback: Ensure your listening strategy emphasizes action and feedback. Avoid the trap of passive listening followed by delayed communication. Instead, prioritize continual listening, reduce time to action on insights, and circle tangible results back to the organization.

However, these ingredients can only flourish if built on the three fundamental pillars we discussed earlier in this article: belonging, safety, and trust. Working collectively, the listening strategy contributes toward achieving business outcomes, such as performance, productivity, or engagement, to mention a few.

Conclusion

In the face of changing work conditions and a trust deficit, organizations must recognize the power of employee voice in building strong, engaged workplaces to move forward together. Authentic listening, continual dialogue, and shared decision-making are essential for creating an environment where trust thrives. By integrating employee voice into daily workflows and strategic decision-making processes, leaders can foster collaboration, inspire commitment, and drive business value. In this new era of dialogue-driven organizations, trust, safety, and belonging are the foundation for success.

This article was written in a collaboration between Dr. Dieter Veldsman (Academy to Innovate HR, AIHR) and Maurik Dippel, MSc. (CEO/cofounder Circlelytics Dialogue).

Plan your exchange of thoughts or demo to CircleLytics Dialogue here.

The advisors of The Growth Lab (TGL) have years of experience in improving team and organizational performance. With data-driven and people-oriented insights, they transform employee experiences in a way that also positively influences customer experiences. Particularly with strategic change tasks, it is important to involve employees as much as possible in the change. They use various methods for this. Increasing the well-being and involvement of employees is leading in their projects, says Bas van ‘t Eind, partner of The Growth Lab. Van ’t Eind: “Happier people deliver better services and successful changes. How do you keep employees happy? We investigate under what circumstances people work, how they work and we actively involve employees in change processes as much as possible. We focus on employee satisfaction. If they are happy in their job and do not become overburdened, it will have a direct effect on the primary goal of the change project. And that works out well for everyone.”

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Measurable, collective opinion formation with 600 teachers

The Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industry of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences has asked The Growth Lab to (re)assess the workload for teachers. To this end, calculation models are set up about, among other things, the workload. However, it is difficult to measure the extent to which these correspond with practice. The board and participation council of the university of applied sciences (sub-council) wanted to investigate this together with the more than 600 lecturers in permanent employment. They then enlisted the help of The Growth Lab. Van ’t Eind: “In the past, the board and the district council consulted together to arrive at the new calculation model that indicates the task load. Then it was implemented in the organization. But because so much has changed at the same time in the forms of education, the roles of teachers, the organization and teamwork, a new approach is needed.

Schedule your appointment or demonstration here to find out how the platform and dialogue advance your goals and people together.

Actively involve supporters

We have advised to exclude the bias of each person, and to avoid decision-making being determined by a small group, of which you do not know whether they represent the entire group. We advised that the entire constituency be involved in thinking about the issue together. In other words, active involvement of the collective, which is what The Growth Lab stands for. Teachers – just like any employee – certainly need to express their opinions. The challenge is, you don’t get that many lecturers together in a room, if that is even feasible from an organizational point of view. And a video meeting with more than 10 people is already quite a challenge. Often in plenary, inhouse meetings, the most vocal attendees predominate and there is little time and space to collect good ideas and to really have time to listen and to reflect. An average survey form is also too limited: you don’t get the deeper, qualitative layering from the open answers and the validation of the results is missing. After all, something that is mentioned the most does not mean that it has the most value according to the group. Participants have not listened to each other’s answers, so you don’t yet know what they think of the answers of others: better or less good than their own? In addition, we also notice a survey fatigue among employees in general and a need for dialogue. At The Growth Lab we use different working methods and we have now used CircleLytics’ online, asynchronous dialogue twice at this faculty. The most supported contributions, those that receive the most support from others, determine the result. But also the contributions that are most rejected by the rest provide indispensable data for smart analysis and decision-making.”

Frank Kresin, dean of the faculty: “Turner and The Growth Lab have broken through an impasse that had arisen in recent years. We are pleased that with their help we have found a supported solution for the complex problem of task load.”

Successful online dialogues

The CircleLytics Dialogue consists of two rounds. In the first round, a number of questions are asked. Participants answer these (mostly open) questions. In the second round, participants are invited to rate the answers of their colleagues. They each get to see different answers from others, which are also as different as possible. This really increases the diversity of the dialogue and everyone’s thinking. After this, it is immediately clear which proposals or ideas are warm to the heart of the majority of employees and which are not. This anonymous dialogue can be completed at any time during a number of set days. Van ’t Eind: “The board and district council initiated this dialogue. We used the dialogue to identify the requirements that the new system for determining the workload had to meet. In this working method, employees are really given the space to share what they think of something, they learn how others think about it and they are therefore allowed to think about it again and make choices. The outcome of the dialogues was a success: 200 teachers contributed to answering these questions and collectively gave thousands of appreciations to the answers of others. That is a response of 33%, which is unprecedented for an online tool at this organization.”

Ask the right questions

Van ‘t Eind continues: “Most of the work is in preparing for the dialogue. Asking the right questions will provide answers that you can move forward with. In order to arrive at the right questions, we held various design discussions with stakeholders. This is how we came up with four open questions for the first dialogue.

It immediately became clear that some terms used are not known to everyone and we were able to respond to this. Participation in the second round shows that teachers like to join the discussion and build on the ideas and opinions of others. Ultimately, this makes the answers more complete and specific. Exactly the intention of the dialogue on this issue.

In the second dialogue we presented proposals for improvement to the teachers. The reactions help us enormously to fine-tune the design to what is important to the teachers. ”

Also read what other organizations in education achieve with CircleLytics Dialogue, such as Salta Group: “Participants have a few days, so you do not have the rush of a focus group, but you do have the proverbial night’s sleep, which is necessary for reflection. That reflection on our questions and reflection on each other’s (other) answers (and scoring up/down) guarantee in-depth and validation. They are also allowed to change their closed scale if they wish and a high percentage do so. Unlike surveys, you therefore get high reliability .” Read more here.

Learn from each other’s differing answers

As expected, the answers were mixed by AI. However, because the participants in the second round could judge the answers given, The Growth Lab got insights into which answers received the most support or least support, and why. Van ’t Eind: “Only because of that validation process, can I interpret the answers properly, not because a word is mentioned a lot. The second round makes this dialogue a guideline for coming up with supported advice and you also learn from people what they reject and why. The open questions also gave us answers that we would never have wanted or dared to ask for in closed questions. We also got some very good ideas from these dialogues.

Structured, people-centered working method

My biggest concern with the project was not so much the content, but much more how we could achieve a supported result. No one likes fake democracy. It will work against you later on and will lead to resistance and loss of involvement. This has been prevented with the use of dialogue. The evidence is on the table. These are reliable, data-driven results that you can back up. Our client sees the added value of solving complex problems together in a fast, structured way. However, it is always important to determine the timing of the dialogue in the process, and how you design the questions. The dialogue is easily scalable and can also be used for very large populations or in smaller parallel sessions to run multiple asynchronous workshops for example. This working method is an enrichment of our toolset. We have now used the dialogue fairly early in the decision-making process, but you can also use this working method to monitor and make adjustments during the implementation phase.”

Creating reliable support

The client is very pleased with the use of the online dialogue. Gerald Stap, chairman of the faculty’s sub-council: “Thanks to the contribution of The Growth Lab and Turner, we as a sub-council gained a better insight into what our lecturers think of this complicated issue. Questioning the teachers was important to the project in order to identify the question behind the question and thus address the actual problem rather than just the symptoms. This made it possible to convince management and steering group of possible and feasible scenarios. (You can listen to a podcast about the project here.)

Because the lecturers are involved in this process (both during the questioning and the elaboration in working groups), this helps to create support for approval from the participational body.”

To learn more about The Growth Lab, one of CircleLytics Dialogue’s partners, click here. If you would like to speak with CircleLytics further and see a demo, click here and schedule your appointment.

Surprising insights at Spaarne Gasthuis

Participation and influence are important pillars within the hospital Spaarne Gasthuis. They want to get all perspectives on the table, and especially diverse ones, so that well-considered decisions are made based on knowledge and supported points of view. About two years ago, Spaarne Labs came into contact with CircleLytics’ online dialogue. Saskia Haasnoot, Senior Business Partner Development HR&A at Spaarne Gasthuis, says: “Through my colleagues in the innovation team (Spaarne Labs), I and colleague Priscilla Verwoert started to delve into the dialogue. After 30 dialogues I can say that the dialogue is a revelation, I am very excited about it. We have never used a method before, in which so many colleagues can simultaneously question and talk to each other online, at a time that suits them, from a place that suits them. Secure, simple and anonymous. The Spaarne Gasthuis has about 4,500 employees spread over three locations and has a great diversity in professional professionals. Finding a way to reach many people in our 24/7 work environment is challenging to say the least. Our team has since experienced that this dialogue successfully provides balanced answers in a short time, is received positively and can lead to surprising insights. The reason why we often use the dialogue.”

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Using brainpower: colleagues solve problems. Read here what Spaarne Gasthuis previously shared about the approach and impact of dialogue.

Dialogue helps with decision-making

The dialogue can be used for many challenges. Each challenge is suitable for a dialogue where everyone can share their expertise and experience, provided that the questions are well formulated. The latter requires thinking time and sparring time, which immediately pays for itself in the results of a dialogue. A well-posed question yields actionable answers that aid decision-making. Thinking about the question in advance forces you to understand the essence and to define an issue. Moreover, asking open questions forces you to use language to involve and touch people.

Haasnoot: “Transparency in communication is very important to me. There are many hierarchies and dependencies in relationships in our organization, which make expressing your opinion quite difficult at times. A good example in which the dialogue once again proved its added value is the following: in a department, we had an alarm that repeatedly went off wrongly. The smartest solution was sought through the dialogue, in other words in co-creation with the people involved. The outcome with a large (majority) support was different from what we suspected and was initially mentioned by most in the first round (“invest in a new system”). We ended up betting on good instructions to set an alarm instead of asking a colleague to release himself to every times to check the alarms (which was mentioned a lot in the first round of the dialogue). This dialogue saved us a lot of time and money, as we were able to immediately switch to the best solution and avoid the one that was mentioned a lot but didn’t get support on second thought. It proves that what people initially say is not what you should blindly consider to follow up on. You invite them to the dialogue, the second round: please (re)view what others think about it. What do you learn from that? How do you feel about it now? And what will come out of that? What do you think on second thought?

Salta Group: The good of qualitative research, but on whatever scale you want: from 10 to 1,000s. Read more here.

People-centric, time for reflection

The dialogue is completely anonymous and works asynchronously, offering the chance to really say what you think, at your own time. People can show their vulnerability through this online dialogue, which makes it a very human tool for me. Technology can therefore be people-centric and that is important in our culture. As a result, people start talking to each other – anonymously – and this leads to better and supported solutions: we stimulate everyone’s active open mind, sharing information and critical thinking. The limited number of characters to explain your answer stimulates people to get to the point and makes them take a little more time to think. And it is precisely in the second, subsequent, round that people jointly indicate what they consider most important on second thought. This produces the supported solutions that administrators can use for their decision-making. It emphasizes new leadership in our organization: asking open questions creates a culture of genuine listening, of openness, involvement and better decisions. Particularly at a time when the labor market is under pressure and the concern for an important transition, leveraging collective wisdom is essential.

If there are ideas that are widely supported, but cannot (yet) be implemented or not in the short term, you must also communicate this. It remains crucial that you do not use the dialogue as a sham to get a say and then do nothing with it. People’s trust in the dialogue, because we act on the results, contributes to the power of listening and the power of CircleLytics dialogue.”

Dialogue encourages trust and generates creative ideas

Haasnoot continues: “In the past, surveys were also used. We observed survey fatigue. And we have noticed that surveys can have a polarizing effect, you are either for or against something, there is no in-between or space to explain your choice nor rethink or change your own opinion. The response was low and an analysis of the answers quickly took a long time to complete. We had to interpret what is said and meant, usually based on what is often mentioned or driven by our own preferences. That’s risky, and that’s why we have chosen dialogue as the next level, going far beyond regular single round surveys.

The dialogue is anonymous and promotes creative, different ideas. The response rate of the dialogue is high and we notice that the percentage only increases as people participate in a dialogue more often. The second round of the dialogue encourages reflection on yourself and others’ different views, and stimulates a learning organization. Being able to continue learning is an important reason why people enjoy staying with the organization longer, as well as getting a say in what needs to be done in the organization. It is a conversation that takes place online with many people at the same time. This yields a wealth of insights that we can use.”

Rapid wins and sustainable impact

Haasnoot says: “In departments where we have now used the dialogue more often, we see that the number of participants and the number of answers that participants give in the first round are increasing considerably. Some people need to gain confidence that the online dialogue is indeed anonymous before giving their opinion or reviewing other people’s ideas. We ask a few key questions. We deliberately keep the dialogue short so that it does not take much time. Often only 3 to 5 questions. If a manager or initiator comes up with a question, we dive into the questions together, until it is concrete, or we use the library of 1,000 questions and open questions in the CircleLytics environment. Our experience shows that clear formulation of questions helps with a good demarcation (and vice versa), and leads to more answers from participants and to answers that you can use. The appreciation of employees is always a solid 4 on a scale of 5. That is important, because you cannot bother employees with things that take away the pleasure. Control, anonymity, learning from each other and convenience go hand in hand.

Read our white paper with 18 design principles for your open questions

We also communicate what we are going to do with the results. We can implement some quick wins quickly. For example, there was an ICT thing that could be easily remedied and which emerged when asking what makes an unpleasant working day unpleasant. This had not been reported en masse at ICT, and yet the dialogue showed that many people experienced this as annoying. Our ICT department quickly resolved that. A quick win that we would never have discovered without the dialogue. In any case, the duration of the dialogue can be short, as long as it is clear what the problem is and good questions are asked. The answers of a dialogue are easy to analyze: the fundaments are done by AI and by the participants. So an impact is quickly possible by using the dialogue to get the collective strength of employees on the table.”

Are you interested in dialogue and collective intelligence as a working method? Then schedule an introduction or demo

PGOsupport works from the conviction that care, welfare and research must meet the needs of the people concerned: people with a disorder or disability. It helps patient associations and other patient movements to increase the impact on the quality of life of the specific patient group they focus on. PGOsupport is an advisor to many patient associations and research centers in order to reach the target group and thus bring the collective voice of the patient or client to the fore. Dries Hettinga, director of PGOsupport, adds: “These associations use the experiential expertise of patients themselves to improve care and well-being based on their voice. We have been assigned by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport to help patient associations in this. We have organizational consultants and trainers who help them with matters such as strategy, volunteer policy and fundraising. We also offer a suitable range of training courses and PGOsupport advises on constituency consultation. As a patient association, you need to know what is going on with your target group in order to keep people involved, to attract them and to tailor your offer accordingly.” And that also applies to an organization like PGOsupport; in order to gear our services properly to the questions of our patient associations, as a director I need to know what is going on among my stakeholders, those very patient associations. Those insights helps me as a director to make choices in our range, to focus and thus to work towards our own impact.

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Consult background

The CircleLytics online dialogue has been developed from the need to collect weighted answers based on in-depth, open questions to a large group of people, completely anonymously. The answers given in the first round are learned from and assessed by the participants in the second round, so that it is clearly measurable after this round, which answers and ideas are appreciated the most but also the least. Moreover, the participants build on each other’s ideas, emerging new, leading perspectives and outcomes. This is impossible to accomplish with regular single round surveys. Unique AI ensures that they do not have to read and appreciate all the ideas of others, but a group of 10-15 that is as varied as possible. In this way, the best solutions are created through this use of the collective intelligence of the participants and based on maximizing diversity of thought. Insights also regularly surface that would otherwise remain hidden, if you limit listening to workshops and surveys, and would therefore remain undiscussed.

Spaarne Gasthuis: “The dialogue is anonymous and promotes the development of creative, different ideas. The response from the dialogue is high and we notice that the percentage only increases as soon as people participate in a dialogue more often. The second round of the dialogue encourages reflection in yourself and others.” Read more here.

Use dialogue for multiple purposes

Hettinga: “We have various methods to reach target groups and advise our clients in this. One thing is crucial here: Which question do you want to be thought about and answered? We have now used the dialogue for some time to gain input about and support for our own services, the internal organization and we also offer this to our customers as a method of consulting their members and patients. As a director, I therefore ask open questions to understand what is (most) important, what is considered important, and what is less important. Results from the dialogue provide a solid foundation for decision-making and prevent unnecessary mistakes. Knowing what people reject and why, is as crucial as knowing what they support.”

If you want to ask a broad audience and if brief answers or simple closed answers suffice, a static, regular survey is fine. However, we also notice that the number of members of patient associations is declining, and surveys didn’t help to prevent that. How do you know precisely what is going on with your members and stakeholders if only a small part of your target group is a factually still a member of your organisation? Why are they leaving in the first place or considering to do so? What do they need and in what form do they want to see it? As an association you want to be able to respond to this, so that you keep people involved and enthuse new people to become a member. You want to fulfil a sustainable and relevant role. In the short and long term.”

Online dialogue for deepening

Hettinga continues: “At such a moment it is appropriate to talk to each other online and ask in-depth questions that provide more insights, collect ideas and stimulate participants to (re)consider. That is why we offer the online dialogue to the associations we work for, where participants join at their own preferred moment. We have devised questions that fit well with patient associations and, based on our knowledge and experience, we guide them in using this elevated dialogue solution. A good question invites, challenges and makes you think. Not only about your own answers, but also about those of others who think differently.”

If you want to know more about how CircleLytics Dialogue works, schedule your appointment here. If you are reading this because you are involved in a patient organisation, please contact PGOsupport directly. You can do that here.

Keep in touch online

PGOsupport would like to continue to meet the needs of their customers and understand what they consider important and what not. She therefore uses the dialogue to collect ideas based on customer needs. Hettinga: “We have invited various customers to structurally think about our own services. First we need to understand where the needs lie. The response is high and we elaborate on the most valued ideas, so that participants see what we do with their answers. For example, one of the results of a dialogue held among our stakeholders was that they missed an offering for advanced professionals. We suggested a course, but there appears to be a need for some form of intervision. Now we look at the form in which we can deliver that intervision. Because we enter into a dialogue and it is very easy to use, we can make choices more easily and design matters that fit what our customers want. Exactly what our mission stands for. And as a director I avoid making decisions that don’t land: I’d rather know in advance than afterwards. As far as I’m concerned, making a good decision starts with listing the most important options. I list these by being open to the perspectives of others who (may) think differently than I do.”

Well-founded analysis

Hettinga continues: “Our first own internal dialogue was about working from home, the pros and cons. I have also experienced it myself, the second round makes your participation more active, it stimulates your own thinking. You read answers and ideas from others and that increases your creativity. In the case of a survey, as director I receive the answers from the survey and I have to make an analysis of this. In the dialogue I have a more well-founded analysis, because the participants have already given a certain interpretation to the reactions of colleagues. The dialogue has already taken into account the collective knowledge and experience of colleagues and as a result I am better informed, I know what feeling prevails and what they really think is important. The chaff has been separated from the wheat. By themselves. Based on that, I can better decide what the next step should be. Isn’t that what every leader wants?

You can reach PGOsupport here and ask questions about consultation, dialogue and involving members in your association or other questions. If you would like to get acquainted with CircleLytics Dialogue and schedule a demo, you can do so here.

Rudi Crabbé, director of Eten+Welzijn, came in touch with the online CircleLytics Dialogue in 2020 as a participant. He really liked the way in which opinions are collected, and through dialogue and reflection turned into validated outcomes and emerging perspectives. Due to an assignment from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, to solicit opinions on sustainable nutrition in healthcare, CircleLytics was selected to apply dialogue for this purpose. As far as he is concerned, the dialogue that resulted was an indispensable step to learn a lot, and relatively quickly, with a large group. It drove the speed and quality to make substantiated choices.

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Dialogue promotes steering for an integrated approach

The Eten+Welzijn Foundation works on the creation of a more healthy and sustainable way of living, with people and their well-being as a central focus point. She translates knowledge and proven solutions into concrete applications in practice. That means, for example:

help administrators with the sustainability issue for healthcare in the field of nutrition,
facility managers with nutrition policy and its implementation and with
caregivers, chefs in the health care sector, and dieticians: discuss and conclude new regulations regarding nutrition.

The foundation also organizes cooking workshops for people who suffer from a loss of smell and taste. Eten+Welzijn focuses on sharing knowledge about healthy and sustainable food by means of training and education in the workplace, combating food waste and customized food.

Maartje Vervuurt, project support and communication at Eten+Welzijn says: “We have a large number of target groups with whom we want to keep in touch. The integrated approach is important, because the entire chain must move in order to bring about structural improvement in nutrition in healthcare. The first online dialogue was about “The urgency of sustainable and healthy food in healthcare”. With this dialogue we have been able to reach all chain partners who contribute to sustainable food in healthcare, from farm to fork. Within a few weeks, 255 participants provided qualitative insights that we would not have collected otherwise. The response was high at 71% and more than 2,600 opinions were shared. The second round ensures a multitude of online interactions and learning moments from each other. This is structured by CircleLytics’ unique AI. This affects people’s ability to examine and revise their own opinions. The question was broad, precisely to find out where people see opportunities and what possible obstacles are. In this way, many people have been able to give their opinion based on their expertise. Subsequently, in the second (dialogue) round, they jointly determined which opinions they considered valuable and why. You also get a lot of information from the explanations to the opinions. Sometimes we expected these answers, with some we are pleasantly surprised. They also indicate which opinions of others they do not support and why not. This usually doesn’t come easily to the table, but it prevents us from drawing inaccurate conclusions about what they think is important.”

Concrete results from dialogue

Vervuurt continues: “The results of the dialogue held in 2020 have contributed to the content of the Green Deal, in which healthcare organizations and the government make agreements about the contribution that the healthcare sector can make to improving the environment. Concrete conclusions are:

that there is still little awareness about sustainable and healthy food.
developing a vision, structural knowledge transfer and implementation at all levels are the most important opportunities.
sustainable food policy is an integral policy, we have to do it together.

We have taken certain lines of action from the dialogue, which have given us direction in which initiatives we will set up and who will be part of them. Chain partners per action line must continue to talk to each other, work together and come up with solutions from a joint perspective. We shared the results with all participants and indicated which opinions they valued the most as a group. So not “who were mentioned most often” but carry the most weight on behalf of the group. That feedback is important and shows the urgency that we as a chain as a whole must work together to achieve the intended objective.”

Share opinions anonymously and asynchronously

Vervuurt: “Putting this broad question to so many people asynchronously – so at their own time from their own place – is something we simply could never have done in any other way. You cannot physically get these people into a room, offer a limitless freedom to openly express an opinion and have so many reflection and listening to others taking place. After all, they are your colleagues or partners who look at the same issue in a different way, but this takes time to unleash. The dialogue means that we, as a foundation, can better advise and act towards our stakeholders with these supported answers and make choices not about them, but with and through them. We as a foundation do not make final decisions, but contribute to steering via policy and through the activities and initiatives that we develop as a foundation. Because of the dialogue, we know that we meet the most important needs of different parties.

CircleLytics guides us through dialogues according to our needs, such as designing questions and explaining new possibilities to make analyzes fast and clear. The reports and dashboard give us instant clarity and we always feed back the results to the participants. That enriches their insights as well. I always coordinate the question with CircleLytics, because they have a lot of experience with this. By asking the right questions, the dialogue yields more useful answers. As soon as questions are open, challenging and relevant, you achieve the most with the group. The second (dialogue) round is crucial and the outcomes are valuable for our choices. People should feel free to give their honest opinion. We have noticed that this works very well with the dialogue, partly because of the anonymity and the time they have to think about their opinion and that of others. It’s important to make sure you trigger that in participants. That is why we always do a check with the CircleLytics team for the optimal duration.”

Also read what other organizations achieve with CircleLytics Dialogue, such as Salta Group: “Participants have a few days, so you do not have the rush of a focus group, but you do have the proverbial night’s sleep, which is necessary for reflection. That reflection on our questions and reflection on each other’s (other) answers (and scoring up/down) guarantee in-depth and validation. They are also allowed to change their closed scale if they wish and a high percentage does so. Unlike surveys, you therefore get high reliability .” Read more here.

Strategic health issue

The Health House program helps hospitals to comply with the National Prevention Agreement: “In 2025, the food supply will be healthy for patients, staff and visitors in 50% of the hospitals. By 2030 at the latest, the food supply in all hospitals will be healthy. In addition, there is a focus on a healthier food supply in other types of healthcare institutions.”

Vervuurt: “Our foundation Eten+Welzijn, for example, helps chefs in health care to put together a full, more plant-based menu. There is often a lack of knowledge about healthy nutrition, which makes it difficult to deviate from routines. Above all, dishes must also be tasty, we help healthcare institutions in all kinds of ways.”

Schedule your appointment or demonstration here to find out how the CircleLytics platform and dialogue impact your goals and people, together.

Ideas from practice

Vervuurt: “A question we investigated within this program is: how do you get more vegetables, fruit and water on the menu in a hospital? In a dialogue we asked all restaurant and catering staff in three participating hospitals about their ideas on how to consume more fruit, vegetables and water in the hospital restaurants. We were curious about all the ideas of people who deal with nutrition in healthcare on a daily basis, so that they can inspire other colleagues.

Change is slow and many people find it difficult. Nudging (steering attention to choices people make) can have a positive effect on increasing the consumption of healthier food, such as offering sliced fruit or poké bowls rich in vegetables. Always ask yourself: How can you make healthy choices easier for people? Successful examples from the dialogue that work well in practice are: placing healthy products at the front of the shelf, including more healthy products in the range, having toppings put together yourself and adding flavorings such as lemon to water. And free tap water was made available in the restaurant. With the latter promotion, sales did not decline and people did drink more water. This is a good example of how an idea is successfully put into practice. An important signal from the dialogue was: don’t patronize. Let people make the healthier choice themselves by introducing more diversity in the range of healthy food. And we can only confirm that: by making the choice yourself, it is also sustainable and therefore a structural change.”

If you would like to speak with CircleLytics further and see a demo, click here and schedule your appointment.

Jan Vrencken focuses on integrated organizational development with MoJa Potential Activation. They detect and activate the true potential in the organization. Employees that experience a higher job satisfaction and work smarter achieve better results. This also results in more satisfied customers. Part of its approach is the CircleLytics dialogue that they have been using with their customers for about four years to collect input from employees and engage them at the same moment.

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Vrencken: “With this approach you offer and get involvement from your employees and at the same time you create ownership of your company’s challenges and opportunities. You literally give the entire organization a voice within a few days to two weeks via the online dialogue, within the context provided by management and the current challenges. Ideas are delivered bottom-up and validated, so it is truly a joint effort. As an employer, asking the right question provides you with an amazing pile of validated, ranked insights, that you otherwise would not have been able to obtain. You can reach anyone you want in just a few days to weeks. One of the responses of a management team member to the results of a dialogue always sticks with me: ‘This is just a goldmine’. And he couldn’t have said it better.”

Inclusive approach

The dialogue consists of two rounds. In the first round, one or more questions are asked and in the second round, the participants evaluate the answers given in the first round from each other. Algorithms ensure that they learn from colleagues who think differently, and that makes them think a lot deeper and deal more consciously with the challenge you presented them. The management team of our clients is well aware that employees can make or break decisions. In other words: if employees do not understand, support and are not involved in the decisions and changes, you will hurt their commitment. Alternatively, now, you can involve them via employee dialogues, activate them, let them think along with you and thereby win their support and loyalty. Employees participate at their own time, from their own location, so simply during and between work. You can reach anyone you want in just a few weeks and listen seriously to what they experience, know, think and feel. This is a truly inclusive and collective intelligence approach.

Best wishes card

Recently MoJa Potential Activation deployed the CircleLytics dialogue with an mid sized company at the beginning of the year and they asked only one question: What do you wish your company for in 2023? Management wanted a better insight into what was going on within the organization, among the employees themselves. What topics do they find important? Why?

Vrencken: “In January, best wishes are flying back and forth, but what does that mean for every employee, those best wishes? What exactly do you wish and why? And does the management team also know what people need or do they make assumptions? And what decisions do they base on non-validated assumptions? An employee satisfaction survey is often mainly based on scores and individuals’ input, without you knowing whether the other employees see it that way as well or change their minds because of someone’s input. The single (only one) round of such old survey technology simply does not provide a basis for making decisions. And it is impracticable for members of the management team to speak to everyone face-to-face, let alone on a regular basis. You want the involvement that brings about personal attention, proximity. With an online (anonymous) dialogue you do get those insights and at the same time you feed a more positive spirit and culture.

Answers to that one question provide great insights into what people think, see and experience and where they want or find change necessary. This allows the management team to get to work immediately, for example for the new annual plan, a project or a bottleneck. After all, she knows where the accents should be and why. Within five weeks instead of five months you will have a strategy that you know employees want. After all, they contributed to it themselves. That is five times faster and a lot more effective.”

Voice from the organization

The online dialogue is a modern, meaningful working method for management teams, change managers and HR. In the first round, one or more questions are asked and in the second round, the participants assess the answers given in the first round. This makes it immediately clear which answers are preferred and which are not. In this way, the management does not have to think for the employees, because they retrieve answers directly. An example is that employees answer that one question: ‘What do you wish for your company in 2023?’. Other examples of questions are:

“What do you think is an important idea to ensure that [….] becomes successful?”

“How do you think ABC can best be accelerated?”

“What is your experience/tip that others could learn from to deal with the high workload?”

“What do you find most difficult to do in a good way at home instead of at the office?”

“What can managers in our organization do smarter or differently to increase job satisfaction?”

The CircleLytics Dialogue unique QuestionDesignLab helps to translate your challenge into solid open-ended questions. You can also ask as an open + closed question in one or just stick to a closed scale question: the platform is this way a one-stop-shop and you don’t need a separate survey provider anymore. Vrencken: “We design a lot of custom work and tailor questions and the frequency of dialogues to the specific situation of the organization. For example, every quarter, you can present a smartest set of 3-5 questions to employees and cover this way a number of topics.”

Representative answers

Vrencken: “We always coordinate the questions in co-creation with the customer, but we ourselves have extensive experience with questions that challenge, inspire and encourage thinking along. Only with the right questions will you receive targeted answers that you are looking for and employees will learn from each other’s inspiring words. Because the results are reliable and representative, you can arrive at a higher quality of your decisions after those two rounds. The participants themselves are asked about their experience with the dialogue, and, as in the example above, the dialogue scored a 4.5 on a scale of 5. Important, because you want to do things that positively influence the experience of employees. Giving them a say and taking them seriously are two things, but make sure it’s done in a way they appreciate and find interesting. That creates high engagement ánd commitment.

Important to know: ask only a few questions, but very relevant ones. This creates focus and avoids employees being distracted by questions and topics that are beside the point.

A lasting gift

The dialogue gives a go-ahead for concrete improvement in the field of organizational development and the great thing is that these topics come from within the organization itself. Vrencken: “We will share the results in a presentation with the management team and we will elaborate on some of the most supported answers in the integrated way that MoJaPa works. It is of course great that there is such a high level of commitment from the staff. In the dialogue, they immediately indicated other topics on which they would like to explore and think along. A good time and a great springboard to continue and to use the joint knowledge and experience on these new subjects as well. With the results from the dialogue you have a data file from which you can define improvement processes in all areas that are supported by the organization. That is also what working smarter is about. Create time, increase efficiency and do the right things that contribute to the goal. The dialogue is rightly a gift that you benefit from immediately.”

If you would like to know more, please contact Jan or his colleagues. You can also schedule an introduction or demonstration with the CircleLytics Dialogue team.

Salta Group has a clear mission: to make lifelong development possible for everyone. Together with its 26 educational organisations, it forms the largest private training organization in the Benelux and annually provides more than 1 million people with knowledge and skills. Salta Group wants to continue to develop, as their mission also conveys. Alex van der Weide (Director of Communication) and Annemarie Jans (Manager Expertise Center Operations) talk about the intention and impact of conducting research into customer needs and their experiences with the CircleLytics dialogue for qualitative deepening and co-creation and move beyond focus groups and surveys.

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Jans: “We are interested in the experiences of each student from registration to the moment a course or training is completed. After every course and training, we test standard topics via online surveys in the online learning environment to evaluate whether and how we can improve. Quantitative studies like this give us information, but do not show the underlying reasons for the answer. Then it is difficult to make precise decisions that really matter to them ánd our company. We used to perform annual focus group sessions with students from various study programs to collect qualitative feedback about the entire journey a student takes with us. However, these focus groups are time and labour-intensive and limited in size and therefore, apart from often very expensive not in-the-moment, also lack reliability. We were looking for an additional research method that is less time- and labor-intensive and allows for a larger sample size, hence representativeness. We got in touch with the CircleLytics platform and immediately saw the potential of the dialogue for Salta Group. We started working on this.”

The perfect start

Under the name ‘The perfect start’, the trainers of Salta Group have the ambition to offer students the best possible start to their education. The first dialogue was initiated to find out what the selection of 700 students from different long-term programs with the same starting time think fits a perfect start of a program. Jans: “We received a demonstration from CircleLytics on how the platform works and then started working on the questions ourselves. Together with our team, we determined the right tone of voice, conducted an internal pilot and asked for feedback. We tested the final questions with the CircleLytics team to arrive at the best possible question and that version was sent to the students.

We chose two closed and two open questions. The closed questions were: ‘At what level do you study?’ and ‘What did you think of our perfect start and can you explain that?’ Participants could rate the latter question with a number from 0 to 10 and substantiate it: the why behind it.

The open-ended questions delved deeper into how perfect they thought the start was. “Which things do you think are needed for a perfect start?” and “What suggestions do you have for us to improve the start?”. We were especially curious about the qualitative reactions of course, and they came!

Operation of the dialogue

A dialogue is anonymous, online and consists of two consecutive rounds. In the first round, participants are presented with a number of questions that they can answer. Questions such as: multiple choice questions, closed questions, valuation questions and also open questions. You can also combine closed and open questions, so that you really design and ask a deliberate open-ended question and not just add a text field with ‘comment here’. The number of questions should be carefully determined so as not to overload the participants and to keep focus on the topic. How a question is asked is important in order to receive the right responses, in other words: what answers are you looking for? Can the question be explained in only one way and is the question formulated objectively? Does the question provide enough direction and structure? In the second round, all the answers of the participants from the first round are presented. Participants can now rate and explain or supplement the anonymous answers of the other participants. The smart thing about the algorithm is that participants get to varied answers from others, and they can see as many different answers as possible. This leads to new insights among participants and allows them to think along again. Qualitative answers are rated this way and collect sentiment scores between -3 and +3, expressing to what extent other participants also support or rejection this answer? And why? Learning what they reject is also incredibly valuable: after all, you don’t want to make choices that you know people don’t want. They have a couple of days for each dialogue round, so you don’t have the rush of a focus group, but you dó have the proverbial night’s sleep, which is necessary for reflection. This reflection on our questions and reflection on each other’s answers ensure deepening and validation. They are also allowed to change their closed scale answers, if they want, and on average 60% of participants indeed submit differing final scores. Unlike surveys, you get a high reliability.

High response

Van der Weide: “In our opinion, the response to our first dialogue among the 700 students was high at 30%. We notice that respondents in round two are triggered to respond to ideas of others. That is the power of this system. People are curious about the answers of others and show what is important to them. Participants rated the dialogue at 4+ out of 5 points: also a high score. Of course it has to be fun for them!”

Jans adds: “For us, the big advantage is that everything is weighed in the second round. This makes it a qualitatively weighted study, making it easier and more reliable to create a report with the focal points. We did not see any extremes, but we learned lessons from various themes. We are currently working on implementing those points for improvement in our workflow, so that we have fine-tuned ‘The perfect start’ for the next starting moment. We now have a better understanding of the needs of the students who follow a multi-year course.”

The first day of class

A concrete example that came to the fore was the experience of the first day of a course. Jans: “Despite our communication beforehand, not every student was prepared down to the last detail. We notice a different desired information flow that can differ per education level. We have identified concrete points for improvement from the dialogue, which we are now applying in the next starting moment for students.”

Van der Weide: “We notice that working people, who have had a degree some time ago, sometimes find it difficult to articulate exactly what they expect from a trainer. Quantitative research then provides a too brief picture. Qualitative research is more refined, because in such a focus group you can keep asking questions until you get to the real core. You then use sentences such as: “Other respondents said …” not to direct them, but to give them ideas. However, focus groups are limited in numbers and even then you do not have a complete picture.

The CircleLytics dialogue gives the best of both worlds: The questions and outcomes correspond to qualitative research and the dialogue can be carried out on a large scale. The advantage that everyone can participate at their own time and from their own place is also important. Objectively and without putting words in the mouth, with the CircleLytics dialogue it is faster and with an unlimited number of people to find out exactly what people mean, even on closer inspection after such a second round. Improvements often come in nuances and by knowing them, and knowing what the most important and unimportant points are, you can meet the needs of students. That combination makes the dialogue so interesting to use.”

Would you like to know more about how the dialogue works and how it can strengthen your change processes, research, making, implementing and monitoring plans? Contact us here for an introduction or demonstration. Online or at the office.

Karolien Niederer has extensive knowledge and experience of innovation, communication and strategy in the field of major transitions and complex systems. Previously gained in the field of labor market communication, she is now committed to the food transition at Foodvalley NL. Niederer: “Foodvalley is located in Wageningen. We have been working on the food transition for 20 years and our goal is to have a clear picture by 2050 of how healthy and affordable food will be available for 10 billion people on our planet. We mainly focus on the practice, the people in the field. And that’s a diverse field, but highly involved, each with their own specialisms. Only together can we make great progress. It’s not just the farmer or the supermarket that needs to change, it’s about the entire system: “from farm to fork”. Typical for major transitions is that it takes a long time. Across entire generations, because the real change takes time. One of our roles is to find out what the different experiences and views are, and connect the stakeholders with each other and with each other’s different perspectives. To make sure they start speaking the same language. We do this by asking carefully structured open-ended questions. We want to achieve collective understanding and collective intelligence to realize Foodvalley’s goal. We have used the online dialogue & co-creation of CircleLytics for this.”

Schedule your appointment or demonstration here to find out how the platform and dialogue advance your goals and people together.

Determine language via the dialogue

Niederer: “We communicate both offline and online. Offline is slower than online communication, and usually less inclusive, interactive and reflective. For example, we once interviewed 120 individuals to arrive at a shared understanding of a complex issue re food transition. It is hardly possible to do that together in an interactive, learning, adaptive way. So, learning from each other, influencing and enriching each other’s thought formation has been very limited. Due to the complexity of the subject and the diversity of stakeholders, it is valuable to let people talk to each other, so that they learn from each other and knowledge and perspective, and therefore intelligence, evolve. The strength lies in bringing expertise together, interacting and moving forward together. We want to appeal to the collective intelligence of this diverse group, which is usually tens of percent higher than the sum of the intelligence and ideas of the individuals. Everyone sees topics from a specific, own angle and the dialogue brings all those angles together in a process where the group’s collective angles emerge. If we use the online dialogue, we get (mainly) qualitative results that show which angles are widely supported by the group of participants, or are clearly rejected by the group. The time available for the rounds of dialogue and the anonymity make it easier for people to share their opinions and even formulate them more emphatically than in a physical meeting. The second round quickly shows which opinions are widely supported and the explanatory notes explain why. The online dialogue removes barriers for people to let go of their previous opinions and learn from others, and be inspired by the most meaningful opinions.

Also read what other organizations achieve with CircleLytics Dialogue, such as Hogeschool van Amsterdam: “Thanks to the contribution of The Growth Lab and CircleLytics Dialogue, we as a sub-council gained a better insight into what our teachers think of this complex issue. Questioning the teachers was important to the project in order to identify the question behind the question and thus address the actual problem rather than just the symptoms. This made it possible to convince management and steering group of possible and feasible scenarios.” Read more.

A good example from one of our dialogues is how people from various disciplines see the word ‘investment’. One talked about a financial thing and another indicated that it is also about time and energy that you put into something. Investments are about trust in each other, a good relationship and yes, also a financial commitment. It would have been more difficult for us to figure that out otherwise. This is also part of my point of ‘speaking the same language’ and learning from each other’s language and interpretations. This, to come to one narrative.”

Collective action

Niederer continues: “We also get the sentiment about an issue from the results of the online dialogue. There are also surprising insights into shared opportunities and obstacles. This is an important start, because everyone must speak the same language in order to arrive at a joint approach, for example. We put the right people in touch with each other, they collect ideas and develop them together. This results in initiatives in which organizations that work closely with the various experts get to work in practice: testing, monitoring and analysis. It is precisely this collective action that follows on and through the dialogue that is important for a successful sustainable solution for the food transition.

The biggest challenge remains to convert collective intelligence into collective action to progress food transition: what is the right dosage for the right solution? And is that in behaviour, technology, training people or a combination of these? A start-up involved in an initiative often has different goals than a corporate or a province. Everyone has to work together, enter into dialogue in order to arrive at a supported solution and steps to take. We therefore continue to involve the entire field, repeatedly: we stay in dialogue. We can only solve these complex issues together. That starts by identifying the real issue and everyone’s role in solving it.”

Partnership with CircleLytics

Foodvalley has used the online dialogue multiple times and plans to continue to use it regularly. Niederer: “We like the method. We continue to need a lot of coordination and input, now and in the future, and the output provides us with valuable information and a valuable dialogue and learning process with the group. The collaboration with CircleLytics is going smoothly. They also keep moving forward and regularly make new additions to the dialogue platform. Innovating together is what we like to see in a collaboration partner.”

If you would like to exchange thoughts with CircleLytics and claim your demo, please click here and schedule your appointment.

Learning organizations need to rethink their approach. Developing employees requires more than a good personalized, online learning offer. Collective learning – in interaction – naturally suits us humans best. Organizations should make more conscious use of this.

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Organizations want to understand how to create a learning culture and provide employees with a wide range of learning & development opportunities to develop individually. Employees confirm that they want to learn, hence, personal development is a much-ticked requirement for working and staying at an organization. In practice, however, the motivation to learn and walk that talk proves to be a tough subject.

At school we already like to consult with each other, chat, share information, discuss things, challenge, play, copy, talk, disagree and agree. Learn together, instead of alone.

It is not without a reason that many HR leaders are making an effort to further develop the learning & development (L&D) offering in the organization. Data will be used even more in this and the coming years, for in-the-moment, asynchronous learning, with content for exactly your profile. Personalized. For individuals. But aren’t we first of all social creatures?

Personalized L&D does not just yield returns. Studies show that scrap learning, or the loss of what you have learned, is between 45-85%. The human brain is not very good at remembering data without regular repeating what’s been learned. Learning in practice often is said to count for 70%. And in practice means also with others, in interaction with coworkers and even customers.

Our brains forget quite a bit overnight, and that’s a good thing, because that way the brain stays tidy: we let go of weak information and weak connections. Maybe you remember the forgetting curve from Ebbinghaus? To forget is human. Interaction with others and putting to practive what we’ve learned, strengthens our wiring and indeed makes perfect, or at least better!

No time, too little relevance

Incidentally, employees regularly do not even use up the training budget. Research shows that this can be as much as 40%. No time or too little relevance are often the reasons. Strange, because they demand L&D capabilities from their employer, and you provide this, to keep them happy, productive and improve retention.

One of our customers is currently conducting qualitative research & dialogue with 8,000 employees to understand why this also happens there, what hinders them, what would help them, what the organization could do differently, how they can learn from each other, etc. Open questions provide valuable and organisation-specific insights to understand deeply how L&D can do better.

The solution is not only to further personalize learning, and break up the learning content (short learning moments, limited amount) in small pieces, and bring it online, although I support this very much. However, I add to this the power of collective learning and intentionally plus interactively put things into practice and get that above mentioned 70% going. Do you know that employees themselves indicate they prefer to learn in interaction with each other?

Individual learning is not a holy grail

At school we already like to consult with each other, chat, share information, discuss things, disagree and agree. But very often, that’s called ‘cheating’ and ‘being easily distracted’. However, the emergence of project-based and team working, and collaborative learning shows that individual learning is not a holy grail.

When crossing the road in traffic with groups of usually complete strangers, recommendations for new movies on Disney+, solving challenges at work with crowds of colleagues: two know more than one. Collectively you learn more and faster. So why and how can we put collective learning more at work?

The book Superminds by Thomas Malone, but also a completely different book, Natural Intelligence by Leen Gorissen, show wonderful examples of how human learning systems and networks function and evolve. Collective learning enhances and connects each individual with others and new perspectives.

In connection with others

An example. If you want to learn Spanish, an app like Duolingo allows you to learn online, at a time of your choosing, personalized little bits at a time. Yet we all know that you only really learn to speak the language if you connect with others. By interacting with others, sharing stories, and really applying the language within a meaningful, real-life context.

Collectively, together with others, and in context. And not just apply it unilaterally, because through interaction the group will influence, correct, supplement, nuance and offer new valuable learning. But the other way around as well: others learn from you and be refreshed or learn new grammar that they never got around to themselves. This is collective learning, better yet, collaborative learning.

Scientifically said: the agents in a network mutually influence each other and jointly store the ‘learning’. This is how language comes about, growth and development and people can relate to each other and be a group. We’re wired to connect and are first of all social animals. Shouldn’t social and collective be key words when designing L&D solutions and programs?

Understanding agility

Another example – from an organization we work with. This organization is concerned with agility. They started a project team to develop agility and to train key roles in the organization, both individually and as a small collective (team training).

But the organization realizes that learning is not just about individual and team training and that thinking and rolling things out top-down is risky. If the 4,500 employees in question do not collectively, as a group, as a network, understand, live through and embrace the importance and the how/what of agility, then agility will have little chance. People are at the heart of any change success, or the failure of it.

By interacting in this way, via asynchronous dialogue at this scale during days, employees experienced involvement, openness and indicated that they understood a great deal about necessity, approach and consequences.

The organization asked us to strengthen their collective and collaborative learning. Together we designed challenging, open questions, based on our unique 1,000+ open-ended question library, and framed the questions with a clear context in the invitational mail, including an inspiring video from management. Employees participated at their own time and pace during a couple of days for the first round, and a couple of days during the second round. In this second round they read, learned from and scored others’ opinions and answers up and down to validate and emerge leading insights. Collectively, they accomplished 300,000+ learning moments.

Wired to collectively learn

Collective learning and interacting with each other is, in my opinion, an immense, and too little tapped, source of learning matching how our social brain works. We need context, and we can only understand and further shape that context in interaction with others.

Without context, what has been learned will not land and without learning, many employees even consider the L&D offer as irrelevant from the start, according to research. If you know that the organization is not working convincingly on for example agility, and the work floor and you yourself are not involved in it, interact accordingly, no one wants to follow an ‘agility’ training.

No matter how easily it is offered, online and in the smallest chunks: people like to skip it if it lacks relevance and applying things together and interactively. And if they do sign up for such training, they forget most of it, or worse: they do it mainly to improve their curriculum on Linkedin and to strenghten their position on the labor market, but not to strengthen the organization.

You get the best out of yourself, with the help from others, and the same goes for all of us.

Nice to learn Spanish or something about agility, or anything else, but only if the relevant context is there, to collectively apply it, and mutual learning takes place, then something really happens. Then you make an impact and that motivates and activates our dopamine system. We are made to wired together, to connect with each other and together. To learn, and change and evolve our minds, in interaction.

In my opinion, L&D programs and – strategies should include and be based as well on collective, social and collaborative fundaments, as well as personalized aspects. You can start by engaging employees to find out what they prefer, request, and aspire, short and long term, and most important: why. Allow employees to learn from each other via co-creation and dialogue. Tie these qualitative insights into your L&D strategy. That’s the first step yourself to learn from the power of collective intelligence and collaborative learning.

What’s your approach and thinking about L&D going forward?

The best ideas come from employees themselves. I put it this way: it is best to take employees seriously, because that ensures the most acceptance of change, the rapid identification and resolution of problems and the timely identification of opportunities. Research (by Gallup, for example) has shown for years that engagement is directly impacted by the extent to which you seriously listen to employees. Change is then better understood and embraced more quickly. Conversely, research shows that change failure is primarily due to disengagement and a lack of employee voice. So, you have to engage employees. Every day.

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But how? We do agree about sending single round surveys (the ones we all encounter so often unfortunately): it gauges the temperature, but that’s all they do. And let’s just say it out loud: no manager bases decisions on ‘often mentioned topics’ and word clouds, right?

Do you leave it to individual managers then to structurally engage their people? That is possible, but research shows that in 80% of cases, departing talent points to that manager as the reason for leaving. And only 1 out of 5 managers effectively follow up on HR’s survey reports. There is also something pinching there …. And as a CHRO, how do you make sure you genuinely activate all managers, and all employees? Measurably? That you spark a culture in which change, solving problems, accomplishing goals, and seizing opportunities are normal things? A culture of co-creation as recent research from Gartner also confirms.

In my view, this requires three things.

One network, one brain

First of all, in our companies, we are not individualists, but a living, learning network of connected individuals. We share, talk, gossip, ask, tell, app, email, lunch, consult, feel, think, organise, reflect and we desperately need that. It happens in that interaction between people. Think of people as one big brain. The collective intelligence you can acquire from approaching people as one big, connected brain and have them co-create just about anything, yields up to 60% more intelligence and creativity than the combined individual performance of individuals’ brains. People are like the neurons in your brain: only the connectedness through synapses make it a brain. Strong networks of connected employees perform up to 2x better. So, pay attention, because 52% of employees do not experience that connection. How do you intentionally increase people’s connectedness?

New leadership

Second, it requires new leadership. Do not make top-down decisions and roll them out, but address and engage the workforce in a structured manner. You gain trust and commitment by engaging them in continual dialogue, via challenging, deliberate open-ended questions and listening to employees how they collectively solve these. This way, you put the diversity of their thinking to work, of all of them in a way to respects diversity and full inclusion. Asking questions challenges them to think about the status quo, about tomorrow and next year, what to keep and what to let go of. About what is needed most and why, what obstacles can be identified and taken down, what can be done smarter, or be simplified, what must change to accomplish ABC, etc. Asking open-ended questions that matter now is the cornerstone of leadership and the heart of engagement. The brain is therefore better able to handle change and people commit themselves to the problem solving you engage them in. Simple right? Engaging people leads to engagement, not the periodical measurement of it. To engage is a verb, more than it is a noun.

One brain requires new technology

Third, it requires a different view on technology. It’s wonderful to have an online meeting with several people. However, it is necessary to involve all employees if you want to accomplish less biased and more reliable results. We need scalable dialogues and co-creation in order to unlock collective intelligence, to increase connectedness and impact people’s willingness to change. Technology can and does, with human power and a piece of AI. With a depth and impact that were previously unimaginable. Qualitative ideas, recommendations, analysis and suggestions can now be processed, given meaning, be validated and enriched in real time by humans and AI. Research and data from our customers show that in this day and age the speed of processing information determines your chance of survival and organizational development.

New listening, connecting and changing

More than 70% of organizations continue to invest heavily in employee engagement, according to Ventana Research. Our advice is to choose technology in which people as a network are central and value is added to the business. Consider even divesting old employee listening technology, such as surveys (pulse or other) that have not proven themselves in the eyes of employees and managers to deliver corporate performance and retention. Change, connectedness and retention demand you to do everything possible and develop a new view on people, leadership and technology. CEOs estimate only 1 out of 3 CHROs to be up to the task and deliver on the company’s priorities, according to Accenture.

The highest priority to rethink how engagement meets corporate performance. What do you do?

Want to talk more about it? Plan your meeting here.

Maurik Dippel, MSc, is CEO and co-founder of CircleLytics Dialogue

Design open-ended questions: our White paper will turn you into a listening champion. Your deliberate open-ended will show others you care, are ready to listen and learn and make better decisions, faster. Click here to access the download area.

Co-authored by Maurik Dippel (co-founder CircleLytics Dialogue) and Dr Dieter Veldsman (The Academy to Innovate HR)

Introduction

In this article, we reflect on the value of employee surveys and the necessity and impact of adding collective wisdom, ie collective intelligence to surveying and engaging employees. Unfortunately, surveys are often used in isolation, and, without context, are challenging to follow up, and can negatively impact employee trust and collaboration. We propose using a mixed-method approach that includes dialogic techniques to drive continual bottom-up influence, gather wisdom from the broader group, and reflect on others to inform and guide action. Dialogue enables employees to learn from others’ perspectives and answers, provides context that helps to prioritize, and gives meaning to others’ textual responses. The ability to interpret within context and harness the wisdom from various interactions and relationships cannot be replicated by algorithms used in isolation. As such, we argue for a data-informed approach that still recognizes the human elements of employee voice strategies. Within this context, we reflect on the nature of the changing employee/employer relationship and how we believe this should be reflected in elevated employee voice and listening practices to be future-of-work-proof.

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At the outset of this article, we need to state that we believe employee surveying is a critical component of any employee listening strategy; however, we argue that they need to be used as part of a broader employee listening, leadership, and culture perspective.

The origin of the employee survey

The utilization of employee surveys can be traced back to the early 1920s when surveys were first used to better understand employee attitudes. A notable figure during this time was J. David Houser, who is credited as one of the first practitioners using advanced quantitative analysis to better understand employee attitudes. During 1924 and 1925, Houser interviewed numerous leaders and realized that there was very limited understanding of employee views and opinions, impacting factors such as employee morale and job satisfaction and that more methods were required to gather these insights.

Despite all the progress made during the 1920s and 1930s, only a few innovative firms utilized surveys as part of their employee engagement strategies. In the US, the rise of polling organizations post World War 1 started with companies such as Gallup, Roper, and Crossley focusing on the commercial market research sector in the 1930s. During the Second World War, the Office of War Information (OWI) in the United States employed firms such as Gallup and academic psychological researchers such as Rensis Likert to better understand civilian morale. During this time, the debate regarding the value of open/closed survey questioning and interviewing started to take shape. The government demanded swift processing and delivery of results and methods that could be utilized at scale. This need slowly tilted the preferred method of inquiry towards surveys as opposed to more detailed open-ended qualitative analysis. Challenges associated with open-ended data and the amount of time available versus the time required back then for interpretation contributed to organizations’ preference for survey-based quantitative methods.

Speed over context, scale over depth, and generalized themes over in-depth understanding reigned supreme. Unfortunately, for a long time, this preference has remained, and is still, favored by numerous organizations today, even though the potential barriers that inhibited the use of qualitative analysis on a large scale are no longer relevant.

The changing nature of employee voice and listening strategies

The last number of years have seen significant shifts in the employee/employer relationship and psychological contract expectations. Employees demand more autonomy, they want to contribute and have a say in decisions that impact them, as well as be able to influence the direction and scope of their work. Collaboration and ways of work have become paramount considerations for how work is designed within the theme of co-creation and involving diverse and varied perspectives. In terms of leadership, we have also seen a move away from hierarchical leadership styles and more contextual and situational styles becoming the norm, e.g., distributed leadership and “asking questions” instead of “telling the answers.”

Against this backdrop, employee voice and listening strategies still need to evolve sufficiently from their roots described earlier in this article. Even though technology and analysis techniques have improved since the 1920s, especially in the last years, mixed-method approaches are not utilized in most organizations, except those with significant and skilled organizational development or psychology teams. This, however, is not the norm, and as such, in most organizations, employee feedback is restricted to an annual employee survey, simplified pulse surveys, focus groups, and interviews for some qualitative understanding. These efforts, even though valuable, often lead towards interpretation outside of context, delay in taking action, and leaves employees feeling unheard and their problems or needs unaddressed.

The absence of co-creation during surveying and the lack of contextualized, prioritized textual outcomes slow the process of taking effective measures and actions. Therefore, HR and managers have a hard time turning employee survey data into swift, supported-by-the-people action, typically showing follow-up cycles of many weeks. Point-in-time feedback, i.e., pulse surveys, does not solve the absence of allowing employees to collaborate, collectively process and give meaning to others’ answers, and emerge more reliable or even new insights and priorities. These, still single-loop survey techniques allow limited opportunity for the workforce to collectively contribute towards the solution and remain merely a diagnostic exercise that is great at identifying areas of concern but limited in its ability to find solutions. “Gauging temperatures, but lacking sufficient, validated insights to make decisions, “a Director from Phillips, the multinational conglomerate, expressed to us.

Furthermore, the acceptance by employees of change has dropped, according to research, by 49% over the last years. In addition, scientific research proves that employees are key to the successful implementation of significant company decisions. “Nothing about us, without us.” A saying that represents employees’ willingness, hence instinctive demand to be heard, to be included in change that concerns them. A fair, inclusive process that allows a timely voice to employees is essential to make sustainable change happen. At the same time, leadership is regarded to take listening and thus asking questions to the next level, hence to take employees (finally) seriously for what they think, see and experience in their own words.

A revised approach must be adopted to allow the organization to co-create the solutions required to move forward through and with employees. We position three shifts required for a reframed perspective to employee listening strategies.

Shift 1: From single-loop methods to multi-loop continual dialogue

Regular survey methodologies (single loop), long or short, require an additional layer of dialogue for contextualization by people before being processed by AI. Multi-loop surveying enables leadership to include people in company matters that are most pressing, complex, and impactful and allows them to submit answers and successively review and enrich others’ answers. Look at this example:

Single loop:

“How would you score trust in management. Please comment.”

Multi-loop:

First step: “How would you score trust in management, and can you clarify your score for others and leadership to learn from? [deeper thinking instead of ‘leave a comment’]
Second step: “Which answers inspire you most, get your support, and what’s your tip to turn this into action?” [actionable, validated insights]
Third step: “How do you score the question about trust in management on second thoughts while viewing others’ answers?” [revised, up to 60% more reliable numbers]

Deliberate open questions and disclosing everyone else’s answers to employees is not merely a sign of trust, hence increasing people’s openness to change their perspective, but also a way of collectively processing complex information and collaborating to solve problems together. A single-loop surveying process approaches employees as mere individuals by seeking their feedback quantitatively (scale questions for structured feedback) and, quite often, allowing a comment field. A multi-loop listening process allows employees to review the textual answers submitted by others on questions that deepen your topic and allows them to re-do their closed answers. This new level of listening considers people as a living, learning network of individuals, hence a collective, inter-connected group, instead of only individuals.

This innovative step triggers interpersonal learning, makes employees more informed about a diversity of thoughts from others and allows them to rate others’ answers and explain their scores via a recommendation or explanation. This means they analyze, validate and enrich each others’ answers. Based on that, they may re-do their closed answers, which research shows is done by up to 60% of individuals, hence, impacting positively accuracy of numerical results compared to a single-loop survey.

Example from the field:

A company listened to 6,500 employees to co-analyze why retention metrics were decreasing, and illness was increasing. 70% of employees explained in their own words what they considered most important for these challenges. Over 4,000 feedback items were processed via the first round (first loop). AI and natural language processing resulted in a list of possible leading topics. Still, no conclusions could be drawn, and no decisions were made. Not until the 2nd round (second loop) was executed: 6,500 employees were included to review and validate, ie. prioritize the best contributions from their co-workers, and were asked for their recommendations. Their second, more valuable thoughts revealed that many (frequently mentioned) topics from the 1st round, were no longer considered the most important. Other topics were pushed up and some contributions and topics were pushed down, hence rejected. In a matter of days, the company made a tremendous impact by taking people seriously and improving on these key matters.

Shift 2: Seeking organizational wisdom through connected employees

The African proverb “the wisdom of the fish lies in the water” describes the idea that the wisdom of the organizational system lies within its people. Importantly, this approach does not differentiate between level or role but instead views the organization as a collective consciousness that moves and contributes to the collective perspective the organization holds. Expertise, solutions, and critical thinking can be found anywhere in the organization and are not represented by reporting lines and organizational charts.

Given the rising complexity of organizations and current trends towards less top-down and more bottom-up driven decision-making (even towards fully “decentralized autonomous” organizations), this further positions the requirement for parts of the organization to solve problems independently within their context. To make this practical, decentralized systems need to be given the power to make decisions in the best interest of the broader organization, yet with the knowledge of the context and localized realities that would make the decision meaningful. Furthermore, employee listening strategies in this context need to provide more opportunities for input from others and to build upon the ideas and contributions, regardless of rank, role, or status. To truly leverage the power of diversity of thought and multi-perspective thinking, an organizational culture that prioritizes psychological safety, open feedback, and transparency will be paramount to the success of a more open dialogical approach. This deepens connectedness, hence connecting people to topics that matter most. Increased connectedness positively relates to higher retention and better company performance.

Shift 3: Reframe the purpose of feedback

Traditionally, diagnostic approaches relied on the premise that feedback was provided to look back on last year’s – or now with pulse surveys, previous quarter’s or month’s – results and key topics. Executive teams spent hours poring over numerical survey results and identifying themes from a collection of comment fields and language processing results. By pursuing a dialogical approach, the purpose of feedback is not to seek an answer but rather to contribute a new perspective to build upon the collective intelligence of the organization. Feedback is provided with the goal and intent of someone else responding, building upon, and incorporating the feedback into their actions. The dialogical approach sees value in the process of connecting through feedback. It uses the opportunity to enhance collective learning, and to engage and build new perspectives in a much faster way, reducing time to action by 90%, as practices show. A shared truth and meaning are constantly created through conversation with a factual and evidence-based contribution toward the ever-evolving dialogue.

Example from the field: SpaarneGasthuis*

Leadership strives for a culture of dialogue, connectedness, and collective learning and sacrificed benchmarking-oriented survey technology (engagement surveys) to replace this with continual dialogue. While deploying dialogues at any scale, centrally (full workforce) and decentrally via teams and departments, they’ve identified and improved many key matters, such as patient safety, learning & development, leadership development, retention, and so on. Employees highly appreciate being involved in matters that concern them. A culture of engaged change enables leadership to move forward faster and respond to new circumstances more efficiently and effectively. Employee listening is genuinely about listening to their voices and how they reflect on each others’ perspectives.

*Healthcare provider with 4,500 employees

Conclusion

Surveys have a place and are important, but they need to be used in context as part of a more thorough mixed methods inquiry process. Primarily, surveys can collect numerical data to gauge temperature, not to understand nor solve problems and underpin decision-making. We now have the tools to incorporate qualitative and validated insights at any scale and in real-time, giving richer and more robust insights based on collaborative intelligence: produced by connected people, challenging, reflecting on, and assessing others’ views. Continual dialogue is required to harness the wisdom of the organization, yet this can only be done by leadership that promotes a relationship of trust and transparency towards employees and a deep understanding of people being the cornerstone of any change or organizational development.

Please contact us for any further exchange of thoughts, follow CircleLytics Dialogue, or contact or connect with Dieter Veldsman and follow his company AIHR.

References:

JOhan Berends worked at Fortis Bank Netherlands, was a member of the works council and lost his job after a reorganization. In 2012, he decided to offer training and consultancy for the works council of his company Metamorfase. JOhan: “I provide advice and training for the works council, but also focus on management and HR, because it’s all about sharing knowledge on participation and understanding each other’s role within the organization. The added value of a works council is not always clear within organizations. At Metamorfase, I already trained over 5,000 people under the Employee Participation Act in all industries, from smaller organizations to large multinationals.

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The installation of a works council is mandatory at 50 employees or more within an organization and represents all employees. Members of the works council often have an opinion that is at most fed by some colleagues they know, talk to or work with. That is their own, informal network. Hugely valuable, but too limited to say they represent the opinions of all employees. It now appears that managements and HR heads understand that the voice of all employees must be heard. The works council is a tool for that, but with input from the rest of the organization. The striking thing is also that Article 17 of the Works Councils Act obliges the employer to facilitate the works council amply with resources and budget in doing so, and that the employer must also enable all employees to participate in a constituency consultation of the works council during working hours.

Through regular surveys, it is best to ask open-ended questions and receive many open-ended responses. Then what? Are you going to measure those? Based on what? How many times something has been said? How often something has been said? How often something has been said does not mean that people will stick to that when they hear other people’s opinions: you learn from each other’s opinions and change your own. It is therefore risky to rely on retrieving open answers without asking people what they really think of each other’s answer. Apart from this, it just takes too much time to dive into Excel yourself and peer responses from others. When something is initially often mentioned, does not mean that the whole group is behind it. That is still subjective and dependent on that small group of people so again, not ‘on behalf of everyone’.

It is so much more interesting to explore what all colleagues really think and the solutions they see for certain problems. A professional constituency consultation therefore has two rounds. The first to collect answers from everyone and then to have those given answers weighed by again those same employees in a second round. This is how you determine whether an idea or solution is widely supported in the organization. When you present that result, you can at least be sure that there is broad support for the implementation of precisely those solutions.

Works council dialogue

JOhan has run the dialogue with the works council at several organizations. It is striking that ideas that previously got stuck in work meetings, the suggestion box or in the selection process in the works council are now getting through. Apparently, we still think too much for others while employees often come up with simple and economic solutions. They are incredibly smart, have a lot of experience and often deal with problems on a daily basis. So remove those obstacles (work meetings, hierarchy, selection by a few), the works council dialogue with its two rounds is a very good tool for that.

With the works council dialogue, you ask some open-ended questions in the first round. Employees will answer these and those in the second round, they see a random selection of all the answers given anonymously and rate them with a score. So in the second round, you see that people literally change their minds because they see good answers from colleagues. Don’t we all have that, that you think differently after thinking for a while? Especially when you find out how colleagues think? A surprising top five comes out based on the high rating of employees, which includes answers that no one in the works council could have thought of beforehand.

Broadly supported solutions

There are so many examples from my practice. For example, a question in the works council dialogue about the physical workload among Toyota employees was about: What would you think of yourself to ease the ‘burden’? Mechanics came up with a surprising solution; give each mechanic a wagon, so they can take all their gear to the location they need to go to in one go. This was the highest-rated idea out of a large number of ideas. A simple and cheap solution that came straight from the organization. The idea came from young breakdown mechanics and they helped their older colleagues with it. The older colleagues were now more willing than before to serve as buddies for the just-starting young service mechanics. This was something the young people really needed, the dialogue showed, after the 2nd round.

At a care organization, the works council dialogue probed how the workload could be reduced for employees. Care and district teams wanted a small budget to enable them to do something fun with the team a few times a year. Think of it as a valve function, just taking the pressure off together. Again, a simple solution that was widely supported within the organization regardless of care type and/or location. Neither HR nor the works council had thought of that so far. After the first round, it was not yet clear that this was the very best idea, but in the second round – by means of weighting – this idea came out on top in the top 5. The works council dialogue is actually a very intelligent constituency consultation.”

Read here what Landal GreenParks says about co-creation, dialogue, collective intelligence, deep democracy, leadership, engagement.

Participation of 50% or more

People working in organizations always have good ideas and are keen to share them. And in a works council dialogue, these ideas come out well. More than 50% of the people within an organization participate in the works council dialogue. This is only successful if the works council communicates well beforehand. JOhan now has a strict script which he draws up together with the works council. This contains all moments of communication and the content of the messages. In larger organizations, a lower percentage is already statistically valid, but reaching all people and achieving a high response rate is always the goal.
JOhan: “For example, we send an e-mail from the works council a week before the first round of the works council dialogue starts that says: Next week the works council dialogue will start and it will take you about 25 minutes to fill it in, reserve time in your calendars for this in advance. Nobody suddenly has time available; if you announce something on time, it does work out time and again. To conduct a works council dialogue, we have to deal with various departments within an organization; we help our clients with this too. Just recently, in consultation with the head of the workshop, the works council had four desks placed between the machines to enable all employees to answer the works council’s questions.

Good questions deliver quick results

The total lead time of a works council dialogue is 10 weeks. The preparation takes 6 weeks, partly because works councils do not meet full-time and sometimes only meet once a week or 2-3 weeks. The first round then starts, which is open for ideas for 1-2 weeks and then there is the second round which is also open for (over) a week for weighting. The system produces a top 5 which we share with the works council and directors and employees in a presentation. Depending on the outcome, the works council makes a proposal. Incidentally, a bottom 5 is also revealed; what do they reject and why? So there is no support for? That’s what you want to know because that’s where you may find resistance.

Metamorfase offers works council dialogue in three packages and we find that once organizations have experienced the power and originality of this tool, they want to use it for many more topics and themes within the organization. An additional effect is that the visibility of the works council increases enormously. Employees are more aware of why there is a works council and what it does.

Curious about what CircleLytics means for you? Schedule your demo or introduction here.

It is very important to ask well-phrased questions. I always say a good question is a short sentence with no opinion in it, which proves to be difficult time and again. This is how I help works councils. The questions are also included in the works council dialogue script. Experience shows that a set of 10 to 15 questions in the first round is manageable. Each question offers room for 220 characters to formulate an answer. This limitation is also there to force people to be concise and clear. With this number of questions, we manage to complete the first round within half an hour. And the response does show that most employees feel the same way. We get high marks for dialogues from the participants themselves. This is important because they need to find it fun, relevant and interesting.

Themes and concrete questions

Recurring themes in all sectors are workload, job satisfaction, working from home, working conditions and also organizational developments, vitality, sustainability and employee health, as well as organizational changes in general. This can also be very concrete, such as at a healthcare institution: Do you want the timetables to be made centrally or decentrally? At another organization, a works council had to advise on the appointment of a new director and they wanted to collect the required competences. Through the works council dialogue, they could also ask all employees: What question would you ask the candidates for the position of director of our organization? This resulted in a top 7 of challenging questions that employees would like to see answered by the candidates.

The trend I see in the job market now is that employers and HR are thinking quite reactively about how to be an attractive employer. The most important thing to be just that is to make employees feel that they are truly heard, only then will commitment and loyalty surface. The works council dialogue is a strong tool that encourages just that. It is also very transparent, because in the second round you are allowed to weight the answers yourself. In effect, you tell all your employees that they are allowed to influence the best policy for the organization and themselves. Employees are perfectly capable of doing that and won’t come up with nonsensical or unaffordable ideas. Ask your own professionals what it takes to engage and captivate them, instead of offering a ready-made programme devised for them. Ask them for their opinions beforehand.”

The attached blog offers inspiration for questions you can ask in case of consent, advice or an initiative; questions are ready for each article/member of the WOR. Get tailor-made answers with partners such as Metamorfase and its Works Council Dialogue.

Edith Scholten is programme manager of ‘Working Contemporary’ within the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports. Edith: “Some 1,300 employees work at the core department of VWS and when research is done, everyone receives a survey. Employees did complain that they are a bit survey tired, and I can understand that. Still, as an employer, you want to keep testing certain topics. For instance, during the Covid period last year, we asked about their state of mind via various online employee experience surveys and later also about their experiences of working from home: ‘What do you run into when you work from home and what would it take to solve this?’

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Working from home: what can or should be done differently?

These online surveys, the last of which was conducted in September 2021, did show that people were still really struggling with Covid and how it affects their work situation. We asked if employees were willing to answer questions about working from home in an online panel and decided to use CircleLytics’ dialogue for this purpose. In February 2021, the ‘Working Contemporary’ programme was launched.

The CircleLytics dialogue process

Our colleague from HR analytics prepared the dialogue in collaboration with CircleLytics. With a limited number of primarily open-ended questions, you want to get to the heart of the matter. Open-ended questions, limited in number, avoid survey fatigue. In doing so, you have to think carefully in advance about what you want to pick up in the second round. That second round is a necessary step because with a collection of open answers, you still don’t know what is considered important by employees themselves. Besides the online dialogue with employees from our panel, we also started a physical information round along our boards within VWS. We slightly adapted the questions we asked during these visits and used them in the dialogue. The dialogue and information rounds ran simultaneously and the latter are still ongoing.

In total, 72% of the invitees (panel of 130 people) participated in the dialogue. We found that the subject provokes a lot of reactions from people, so it is good to engage in dialogue and to keep it going. After all, all sorts of things may change over time that we cannot yet oversee.

Asking the right questions
We started our dialogue on the advice of Circlelytics with a closed question: What are the two most important elements of Contemporary Working? They could choose two themes from the five options. This immediately gave us insight and guided the energy of the participant; you deliberately choose themes about which you are then asked open-ended questions for in-depth study via 2 rounds. The results showed mainly ‘digital facility’ and ‘attention for each other’.

Evidence for support

In the second round of the online dialogue, minority views may still be given more weight by people themselves. It can also happen that positions that were frequently mentioned in the first round are not supported after the second round (in which sentiment/appreciation is asked). This is exactly why I find CircleLytics so appealing; it also shows what employees do not consider important. More than half of the participants rated more than 15 responses from others per open-ended question. In that second round, we see a huge commitment to the topic. Some even rated more than 30 opinions of others. As a result, participants reveal the themes and opinions that they think matter most.

HR analytics then used the analytics capabilities in the CircleLytics platform to take the results to the next level and present them, including supervised topic modelling on top of the weighted, enriched results from the second round. Regular surveys (i.e. with one round) often give you the same answers or different ones but without weighting, whereas with the CircleLytics dialogue these answers have value because they really come from the employees themselves. I see it as proof of what you may have already thought and to build support. However, the group may also surprise you with what it really wants or means, or rejects. By the way, in our dialogue, that second round yielded almost 4,000 ratings! With a one-round survey, you don’t have these enrichments.

Read here what Spaarne Gasthuis says about co-creation, dialogue, collective intelligence, leadership, engagement.

From results to concrete actions

We compiled the final results in a final report and published them on the intranet. Some ‘tension’ also emerged from the responses and weighting by the group on some themes, which is an interesting and a new insight compared to the regular survey without that 2nd round. A high score on being able to schedule own time, but also a high score for having a team day in the office. Each management team can decide what they will prioritize, or alternate or fill in in a different way; they have the opinions and justifications of each other’s opinions as input.

One of the main results concerned ‘digital facilities’ with most supported views. We are making tool manuals more findable as a result.

Furthermore, we started experimenting because one of our major concerns appears to be social cohesion. If you see each other physically less often, do you still feel connected? And when do you still speak to other – not direct – colleagues if the chat at the coffee machine is no longer there?

We have devised and implemented additional activities and more small promotional activities are planned to improve social cohesion. We are also experimenting with alternative setups. For us, the final report has provided insight into what we need to do first and what we need to focus on vigorously. And most importantly, why we need to do it. Most of it is not rocket science and fortunately we already understand our employees pretty well; it now spurs us into action to actually implement it.

Dialogue is highly deployable

The dialogue can be used for many topics. This was a successful dialogue for us, one that we can use more often for this or other topics. Our cooperation with CircleLytics was very pleasant and they shared their thoughts and acted in an excellent way. I can highly recommend them.”

Is dit wat je bedoelt met presenteren ‘op’ de resultaten van de 2e ronde?

Vreemde zin: met meest gedragen standpunten van mensen ter onderbouwing?

People like open-ended questions so that they can tell another person how they see, experience and mean things. People are also very curious about how others think about something. Our brain not only seeks out routines, but also new things. This keeps our brain fit and energetic and we learn from it. During changes in organizations, being open to something new is crucial; this is how employees keep an open-mind and they learn that you can look at and think about something in different ways. Employees are more likely to accept change in the organization if they are open to others, and if they are involved in what is important in the organization. Involvement secures change.

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Employee engagement has been one of the hardest-growing and most important priorities for organizations, and HR, for years. Organizations usually use surveys to ask employees questions, such as about their engagement, retention, how they view the organization, value their manager, etc. However, employees have grown extremely tired of those regular surveys, and until recently there were few alternatives. The survey consists of one round, which means that what makes people so happy (being allowed to tell their own opinions and learn from those of others) does not take place. Such a way of engaging employees, with one round, does not move people or change forward. The brain needs a night’s sleep and likes to learn from others, only then to really know how it thinks about things. CircleLytics Dialogue therefore consists of two rounds, with a total of three steps to secure what people and organizations so desperately need. A survey was only half the truth, and now you have the other half. Participants learn from each other and react to each other’s answers in our built-in 2nd round, scoring them up, but down is also allowed. You discover what the group wants and what the group does not support, and why. In summary, the power of dialogue compared to the survey boils down to the following:

– it is smarter to use both open-ended and closed questions, rather than just closed questions
– it is more logical to ask specific questions about our own organization than general questions that are not relevant
– it is more appealing to ask questions about the present or future, rather than the past
– it is more reliable to have open answers read and valued by employees themselves rather than by an algorithm
– it is necessary to stimulate a culture of connection and willingness to learn and change
– it delivers more meaning and success and high quality decisions.

In this blog, we explain how to move from survey to dialogue. Put this way, it seems to be about the ‘means’ rather than the goal at hand; achieving a culture of committed people who together drive the organization forward. When you move from survey to dialogue, you move from a vision of employees as individuals, as resources in an organizational chart, to employees connected to each other like a living, learning, changing network. In this, dialogue is a more intelligent technology, a social innovation, to achieve such a culture. Dialogue requires structure, direction, phasing and completion. This is a continuous process, because we remain in dialogue. Listening to each other and understanding what that produces, based on intelligent questions from management and HR are essential in this.

We sometimes compare the CircleLytics Dialogue to how you cross the street; you ask your brain if you can. You don’t ask many, individual neurons, but your brain as a network of neurons, synapses and astrocytes. That network brings the answer through your directed question “how can I cross safely”. Our brain is not an organizational chart. Neither, however, is your organization: through collaboration, interaction, inspiration and mutual learning and adaptation, people form an unprecedented network, a brain. The single-round survey method views employees as individuals in an organizational chart, who individually “know something” and collect, add up and present that in a dashboard, not doing people serious justice. Together, we are a complex, rich, intelligent and learning network.

Dialogue, where you seek each other’s opinions, learn from them and arrive at better insights, is exactly what takes place in networks. You can track the interaction, and the richer insights developed in that network of individual contributors, collect data from it and aggregate it. That collective intelligence is many times richer than adding up the individual intelligence of a survey. The human brain revives from other perspectives and ideas and that spurs learning, from getting a new idea to an improvement on someone else’s idea. Or something no one thought of at first, but now collectively does. That’s called emergence. Steve Jobs talked about “serendipity”; chance encounters that result in unplanned discoveries. Diversity of thought.

CircleLytics Dialogue offers the latest technology to deal with such a network. But how do you make the switch? We’ll start with a story from a customer to show how simple it is. Technically silent. Employees become a good deal happier, because it fits so much better with how we already work and are in our nature: we were always a network, a collaborative set of diverse opinions and ideas. It also makes management, HR and the Works Council a lot happier: you remove partitions and connect people with people, with issues that matter.

An organization working with our dialogue still has a contract with a survey party, due to a government-wide tender. It has nevertheless chosen to discard it for two reasons. First, employees no longer want a survey. Second, staff and management indicate that there are too many current and future issues to sort out and improve together. Questions that look back and are about the past no longer motivate them. They took four relevant questions from the old set of 50, put them in CircleLytics, with closed (score) scale and open answer for clear explanation or improvement suggestion. And, we designed and added 3 additional open-ended questions that respond to current events. That is their new employee listening: dialogue in 2 rounds. Seeing each other’s answers, reflecting on them and scoring in round 2 ensures weighted results, for support and for happy employees, HR and managers.

You can also do nothing. Stick to the vision and your tools

This is exactly what a number of organizations are doing. HR often still has reasons not to let the fatigue in the organization and among employees be decisive and stick to the old. We disagree. Moreover, don’t forget that in our platform you decide for each question whether it should be open-ended, closed, or a combination, and whether to turn on the 2nd round, and even let participants reenter the closed scale. The survey or dialogue has become a semantic discussion. However, in the CircleLytics platform, you can simply choose whether a question gets a text field and the unique 2nd round, or whether you ask a closed question, such as a Likert-7, a 1-10 or multiple choice. A regular survey platform does not offer these options; you are forced to limit yourself and employees to 1 round. you don’t get a natural language understanding of round 2, meaning no weighting/prioritization by people themselves. We believe flexibility is important in this day and age to serve managers, employees and HR quickly and dynamically. As far as we are concerned, forget the word survey; it starts with your vision of people and change. How you want to connect them and gain reliable insights that lead more easily to impact. After that, you can start designing themes and questions, choose scales, set text fields and the 2nd round.

Reasons cited by HR for still sticking to surveys with just one round (also read dialogue after employee surveys or replacing the old survey):

“A contract is still running” -> we say: break it, or accept as sunk costs and allow renewal and at least start immediately to introduce dialogue
“All kinds of reports are attached to the survey” -> we say: with unreliable information like survey results, your reports are not reliable either, department managers will get reports that cannot lead to decisions that lead to supported action and desired behaviour
“Benchmarking is very important” -> we say: general questions are non-specific, whereas your people, context, market and organization are specific and do need specific questions to measure, increase engagement and solve problems; benchmarking is more relevant over time and between departments or units, but that is internal benchmarking, so you can let go of the fact that you need benchmarking with the external organization
“Our HR team is used to it” –> we say: you get used to dialogue after just one time, results are immediately available and executable, and employees find dialogue attractive and are happy to participate in it; you get used to it quickly and you will have to put the employee and organizational interest at the forefront of your HR team’s mind, in our opinion
“No budget” -> we say: for quality, demonstrable commitment and better performance and development of your organization, you can always free up budget; you can start a pilot with as little as €2,500, to have evidence in your hands for further budget requests within a week.

Pay attention to whether you still need to overcome one or more of these hurdles and take people and resources through this change. Keep your eyes on the ball; employees and managers no longer want surveys. In CircleLytics, you decide how to design the question per topic, per question. So if you want to measure the temperature of your organization with scores, you can do so, also in CircleLytics. By asking directly for improvement, explanations and tips in the process, you deepen the score results and understand what is behind the numbers. If your organization does not want to stop the survey provider (now), we recommend considering the survey (engagement survey, MTO, MBO) only as a temperature measurement. After that, you still engage in dialogues with the departments, whose survey has shown that there is a problem. Surveys can then signal something, but dialogues with employees lead to solutions and decisions.

From survey to dialogue is a change.

For employees first

Yes, dialogue is a change, and for employees, a very positive one. Every first dialogue gets off to a flying start with a good introduction if you design it with our tips. Research shows that dialogue with employees has a huge, positive impact on their engagement. Dialogue engages them in issues, they become co-creators, it becomes theirs. They get to work together, to achieve results. The insights from dialogue are given meaning and priority by the whole group.

What do they have to do in practice? They receive a link and click on it, without the need to download anything or create an account. They will receive another link for round 2 a few days later. Both rounds will motivate them tremendously and you get the chance to be open to their opinions and what they think of other opinions, giving them serious influence. Their activity is very high and the rating for the dialogue is a 4.3 on a scale of 5. According to employees, it is “a relief”, “finally” and “it really feels like doing it together”. Other important changes are:

They can safely (anonymously) tell what is important, or even be a bit critical
Stronger sense of ‘we change together, not alone’
Less resistance about decisions because they have influence
Instructive because they learn from other opinions (collective learning).

In short, your story to employees is a good one; not a survey but a handful of real (open) questions; they can learn from each other and influence their work.

What change does this require from managers?

Managers are very happy with dialogue. Surveys look back and do not clarify priorities, whereas the impact of dialogue is to look at present and future in particular and come up with priorities. What managers need is the security that work can be done smartly, smoothly, and in an inspired way. They used to get a rigorous report after a survey, with no qualitative, weighted interpretation, nor actionable, reliable recommendations. Now they get a summary of key solutions and recommendations from employees that they can start working on immediately and have demonstrable support for. Managers leave quite a bit behind regarding topics like retention, L&D, D&I, safety, growth, etc., and that is good news. Read how this manager at Philips learned through 3 dialogues in 2 months how the transition was for him and how it accelerated his work and how he could make quicker and better informed decisions. Partly because employees tell what they reject and why.

“With this dialogue, I had evidence that the answers were also the most supported within my team. The least supported answers also emerged from the CircleLytics results. That too is information you can use. When making decisions and weighing up options, you also want to know understand the risks.”

Managers get clarity and commitment from employees. That 2nd round is decisive in this; it shows where employees stand and why. This delivers:

Most supported and most rejected themes and suggestions: never guess again
Understanding risks and potential resistance
Non-threatening for managers: focus on recommendations, tips, improvements
Dialogue can be ready in days: you can take action quickly and immediately.

Make sure you include managers in these benefits and set up pilots in departments, teams, business units or regions so that they get direct exposure to results and happy employees. You can spread these initial success stories throughout the organization. We are happy to set up these pilots with you and deliver the good news together.

What will be different for HR, and especially for People Analytics?

For HR and the PA team, things do change and you will have to pay attention to that. If you consider employees as a living, learning network and deploy dialogues, it will have different results.

The basic points for any dialogue:

Focus on a few themes, using roughly 3-5 questions per dialogue
Combine closed scale and open-ended question in one: what, why and how to proceed
Designing an open-ended question is a skill and goes beyond ‘Explain’
Open-ended responses are ranked and given meaning by people themselves.

You will spend considerably less time processing textual answers. After all, this is done by the employees themselves in the 2nd round. This round brings them new thoughts, they don’t hold on to their own opinions unnecessarily as a result, and HR gets everything back ranked according to scores from the 2nd round. Your team can now be deployed for follow-up, assigning ownership of (partial) results and preparing new dialogues. Unlike surveys, you remain in dialogue with employees. This is ongoing.

What activities should be implemented, procured and/or supported by CircleLytics?

Selecting topics for dialogues and planning them over time
Designing questions by topic (our 700+ validated questions help)
Determining ownership of results by topic/question
Analysis of results (15 min to 3 hours per question)
Creating partial reports (standard from CircleLytics)
Follow-up monitoring.

The big difference is that you regularly deploy dialogues, the time to analyze lies mainly with employees, and follow-up can be done easily and quickly because you have qualitative results instead of just graphs. Your organization can work at a different pace and adapt faster to internal and external changes and demands. The use of dialogue means the commitment to a different culture. A culture of cooperation, mutual trust, a learning network, commitment and high agility. Dialogue is much more of an intervention of employee behaviour and thinking. It also prevents overlooking things, or making wrong decisions based on incomplete information.

We are happy to share another example:

An organization with 3,000 employees asked for HR spearheads for the next 6 months. Employees mentioned all kinds of themes in the 1st round. Too many to list and too many to do them all. Where do you start? What do you not do and what do you do? And why? Because it was often mentioned? Vitality, for instance, was hardly mentioned in the 1st round, only by 6% of employees. With nice, interesting justifications attached, still only 6%. Topic modelling and other ways of natural language processing delivered other themes. After the 2nd round, however, these themes no longer appeared important! Employees started reading and scoring the opinions of others, which revealed that more than 65% of people overwhelmingly supported the minority’s ideas, with 90% of their scores for ‘support’ to put vitality on the agenda. HR: “we almost made a mistake by only half listening after 1 round. Round 2 is pure necessity.”

What else do we think you should look out for?

Old surveys: what do you take away?

What do you learn from old surveys conducted among employees? Were there themes or questions that are still valid? So valid that you want to keep approaching employees about them? Then collect these on a list. Are there any outstanding actions that, for whatever reason, were never carried out? Decide what to do with those. You don’t want your initial dialogue to be negatively affected by unfulfilled expectations or promises. Read what one organization did with its first dialogue.

An organization had done a regular engagement survey 2 years ago. As many as 60 questions were used. Since they had nothing but numerical reports after that, follow-up did not happen. The organization looked at the vulnerabilities; important to the organization and scored low by employees. For example, trust in managers was scored high, but trust in the organization very low. The first dialogue addressed exactly that. The management honestly said “We did not have clarity on what was meant, and therefore it was left unresolved. Because we consider your trust essential, we are coming back to you now.” They resubmitted the questions on trust and collected scores with detailed recommendations. In the 2nd round, others’ recommendations were rated by everyone with scores. The most and least supported recommendations came in a week. The HR’s MT, together with management, were able to pick up 3 themes immediately and make this visible to the employees. This made a very positive impact!

What else can’t or shouldn’t you ignore?

Every organization makes policies and strategic plans, has to deal with regulations, laws, covenants, agreements with the works council, unions, industry agreements, etc. Moreover, the organization’s management may have a vision of culture and how it wants to deal with people. For example, you see a huge growth when it comes to “listening” and “asking questions” as traits of new leadership. They are more aware of the importance of a “networked community of people” and the potential of collective intelligence and co-creation.

Dialogue can be used to retrieve this information from the top of the organization. This allows you to safely and quickly find out well what lies ahead, what is important and why. Interviews with management can uncover themes based on their view of people and culture and their own leadership style. First, talk about how dialogue is different from a survey. CEOs would rather see things resolved, with employees showing high commitment, than a survey report, but explain that to them first. Moreover, once CEOs realize how dialogue strengthens visibility and leadership, they may want to seek ownership of the dialogue and have it sent from the board. In the coming years, we believe they will increasingly be the ones asking questions directly to all employees. CircleLytics Dialogue expects CEOs to increasingly take the initiative when it comes to employee listening and delegate it less to HR. Especially when they realize that by doing so, they are driving change and influencing culture and behaviour. Asking open questions, learning from each other’s answers and coming to co-creation together also leaves CEOs with the sticking point of survey fatigue, low trust and low commitment to change.

In other words, from a top-down perspective, what are the requirements from which you extract themes that you want to steer, monitor, understand, change or base interventions on with dialogues?

You have now done the preparatory work and made a list of themes.

The next step could be to present these themes to internal stakeholders (board, HR, Works Council and other management layers) through dialogue. You can ask which are most important and why, which are least important and why, what is missing and should not be missing. This allows stakeholders to tell you anonymously and honestly what they think of the themes for the organization. The result is that you have a nice, condensed list of themes that have internal support. At least …. support among management…. Now all that remains is support among employees!

Look at what this organization did:

“CHRO: the board, HR as well as the works council set up themes. How can you do research, and engage with employees on themes, if you haven’t asked them what they think is important? So we went to the employees with our (top-down determined) themes and asked what they think is important ‘on behalf of the organization and why’. After all, I consider employees to be the organization because they organize the work and determine with their behaviour what becomes successful. As a result, we found the optimal set of themes.”

So engage with employees. For example, ask them using multiple-choice questions which topics they think are most important from the list you have now, and especially why they see it that way using the open text section. Ask what is missing and should not be missing according to them. The 2nd round ensures that it is clear and reliable which theme is really considered important by the group and why they see it that way. Of course, you can’t figure that out yourself when you receive 1,000s of themes from round 1; you really need the help of 1,000s of employees for that. It is also a wonderful launch of your first dialogue and introduction for yourself and your team, by the way. You can also ask this question (what is missing and why?) at the end of each dialogue and repeat it regularly.

Now you have a final list of themes, supported by all stakeholders.

Repeat the above process every year or more often if necessary. In doing so, stay current and close to your organization and market, and close to your people. The next step is to determine which themes are so dynamic that they need to be surveyed more often throughout the year. Create a matrix in which you plot themes against target groups; these can be all employees, or for some themes, specific groups, departments. You can put the frequency in the cells of the matrix itself. Keep in mind that for each dialogue you should check whether there is a current theme that needs to be surveyed, and whether a theme is still not relevant now. This way, you ensure that employees have a much better experience; it’s about something that is really going on, and not ‘because it was on a list we want to repeat every year’.

Now you can assess the regular use of dialogues. Assume you design a maximum of 2 questions per theme. Keep in mind that you usually combine closed scale and an open answer. That is the strongest combination and provides numerical insights and qualifiers. That calculation brings you to a total of themes and questions. Keep the number of 5 as the optimal number of questions per dialogue. Less is certainly possible; more is sometimes possible. In your matrix, which we mention above, you can indicate in the cells in which month or quarter that theme falls for that target group.

The final steps!

Determine the owner for each theme you want to question; the person who will act on the results concretely and directly. Involve this person in the question design (the question is essential) and receive the results for the fastest possible follow-up.

The data is processed in real time mainly by people, the platform and algorithms. Owners can therefore get to work quickly with meaningful, clear results. That is important. Our advice is not to ask questions on topics that don’t have an owner. You should only ask questions about topics where you can show willingness to work with the results. Because the owner knows that the results have been processed, weighted (prioritized) and clarified by the group, the owner can work with them. This is completely different from surveys where answers are neither validated nor prioritized by the group and follow-up is not possible, other than after a long follow-up process (with no privacy for employees). Mention the owner and the (intention for) follow-up immediately in addition to your question so employees see that. This shows employees that you mean business. That you are seriously asking for their opinions, asking to validate and enrich each other’s answers. The owner is ready to act on it.

Now you can start designing questions for each theme. To do so, use our library of 700+ questions for themes such as safety, retention, collaboration, culture, D&I, etc. Or read up on our white paper “Design Rock-solid Open-ended Questions“, and read this blog on designing and setting each question in your dialogue. You can approach our team to help with the design, a proposal, or just a final check. You can always schedule an appointment directly in our calendar, demo, training or other guidance to make your dialogues successful. Our advice is to mention the owner of the topic in your question (in the additional context of your question), that way participants know that someone or a project group will work on the results which is highly motivating. You can even indicate who the sponsor is from, for example, the board of directors.

So now you have established themes, committed owners, and designed questions. The questions are divided into dialogues for each target group and staggered over time (3-6 questions per dialogue). You might hold monthly dialogues or perhaps quarterly. A quarterly dialogue is our favourite. We do not recommend a lower frequency, nor does it seem conceivable to us; there is so much to do in any organization that you need everyone’s intellect, commitment, experience and willingness to change! You can’t put that off until next year!

Finally, keep in mind that owners may hold their own dialogues as a direct result of a completed dialogue. After all, suggestions, recommendations or priorities may emerge that need further elaboration/implementation, and this is usually best done with the group concerned. It may also be the case that department managers independently conduct dialogues for current topics; these are ‘just’ their own dialogues that they can conduct at any time. You can enrich your organization-wide (e.g. quarterly) dialogues with a routing question that allows you to choose for certain themes to:

ask the question for a topic only to a certain subgroup
tailor the question for a topic that is specific to that subgroup.

Change for change’s sake itself. What does it mean for the organization?

Change is people work. Participation is the start and the essence of change. Because we increasingly see people as a network, any change is therefore something that involves this network and needs to be activated.

By engaging in dialogue with people, inviting them as a network to solve issues, raise awareness, identify what is changing in the market, what is needed in the team, stimulate their thinking etc., you gain their attention and trust. Trust to work out issues together creates greater agility. You start understanding opportunities and uncertainties together and come up with solutions, reactions and innovations, putting change into action immediately. This makes the dialogue and deployment of collective intelligence an intervention in itself. Besides the aforementioned stakeholders such as employees and HR, other stakeholders who can or want to deploy dialogue are project managers, transformation and innovation managers. They are constantly looking for change readiness and realization. Human behaviour and people’s willingness to adapt behaviour are driven by the extent to which they have confidence in the change they themselves have to realize.

Practical matters

– We sign your Processor Agreement
– You whitelist our IP/mail address for messaging if necessary
– You may audit our ISO 27001 certified organization
– We put your own Account on the server live, in your own house style, within 24 hours
– We can offer technical integrations, Single Sign On, etc.

The most important thing is, however, to take the step of renewing the survey method, based on 1 round, based on a renewed vision of people: as a network rather than an organizational chart. And asking people to give meaning, to help prioritize and make recommendations. The rest will then follow almost naturally.