“I already know how my employees feel”
We work with a lot of small companies ranging from 10 to 200 employees. We are generally introduced to these companies by a HR consultant or one of our existing customers. The initial reaction from leadership when they learn about what we do is almost always something like “I don’t really need an employee survey, I am close to everyone and have my finger on the pulse of the business and the culture”. While it is easier to know a small company well, it is hard (nearly impossible) to do two things:
Get people to tell you the truth - People are concerned with impressing their managers and especially the CEO and unless you have a superpower (and some people do) to encourage and really hear a culture of radical candor, you are not going to hear the truth. Simply put, you are going to hear what they think you want to hear and that is dangerous.
You can’t process the information you hear without bias - We all have biases and they impact our ability to hear feedback. Some people are better than others at recognizing and acknowledging their bias, but even the best let it impact what they are hearing.
These truths exist in organizations large and small, however, they can be even more dangerous in smaller organizations. Why? Because smaller organizations generally don’t have a process to collect anonymous feedback from their team and assume they know what is really happening. Larger organizations struggle with other issues, but this assumption that leaders in small organizations have “their finger on the pulse of the company” leads to blind spots and potential for serious trouble to develop.
We just brought on a new client with about 25 employees. I was speaking with the CEO after the survey and he said - “I was really wondering what the report would look like with such a simple one-question plus comment approach. The report is better and more insightful than I expected. And the thing I like about it is people typically get turned off from long surveys. It is very insightful, and the recommendations are excellent. I plan to use this and share this to improve in a measured way going forward.”
Fostering an open honest organization based on radical candor hard work and should be the goal for every organization. A first step in that process is giving your employees a path for anonymous feedback and having that feedback processed and summarized by an unbiassed source.