I Am Always Learning

Since November I’ve been working on one of the biggest projects of my post-coding career: Helping our Product Development organization digest and process the results of our annual employee survey. This survey is a strong part of our tradition; it was first conducted in 2010, and eight years later we’re still doing it in largely the same way. Of course, in 2010 we had 14 people in the department, and now we have 150, so it makes sense that we need to do a few things a little differently. Because the tradition is so strong, however, we need to be deliberate and careful about making changes to the process, and we need to do so in as transparent a way as possible.

A key piece of that happened yesterday, when we wrapped up the first major phase of the project with a status report of sorts to the entire department. It was well-received, and I’m excited to start on phase two. Here are a few things that I’ve learned along the way that I plan on taking advantage of as we move forward:

• Creating space for employees to talk to each other about issues raised in the survey was useful
• Treating the survey responses as “objects of discussion” helped make it safer to talk about difficult things
• The model we used for looking at the data help people make sense of what they wanted to happen
• The same things were perceieved both positively and negatively by different people… and talking about that was valuable
• Groups of three to five people are awesome
• Scheduling is hard

None of these things should have surprised me, and yet…