Ask, Listen, Act, Measure: Drive change with AskYourTeam’s framework

Ask, Listen, Act, Measure is a proven framework we've developed to help organisation's drive real, results-focused change. Borne out of insights from leading organisational models from around the world, it’s been refined through 10 years of active collaboration with our customers. Not surprisingly, Ask, Listen, Act, Measure is also at the heart of the AskYourTeam platform. 

It involves a four-steps:

• Ask 
• Listen 
• Act 
• Measure 

These steps generally follow one after the other, although there are some situations where they overlap. 

For example: 

• To create actions that will move the needle, you need to listen to suggestions from the people that provided feedback. 
• To measure your organisation’s progress, you need to ask participants the same questions again.  

Let’s learn a bit more about each step and the key tasks involved.

Ask

This step is about setting you up for success. It focuses on ensuring you ask the right questions in the right way on the right topics to the right people.

🟠 Start with your goals

Think about your organisation’s short-term and long-term goals. What are the areas you need to focus on? Do you want to explore employee experience? Are there legal requirements you need to fulfill? Are there productivity issues, but you’re not sure where or how widespread? Do you want to build leadership capability? Are there any targets you’re aiming for? Choose what goal you'd like your survey to support.

🟠 Design your survey

Log into AskYourTeam and consider which survey templates or question sets best match your goal. For example, you might select the Business template to align with a goal around improving productivity.

Review the questions in the template or question set. Remove any that aren’t a focus for you or create new ones tailored to what’s unique about your organisation or priorities. Make sure the majority of your questions relate to the organisational goal you’ve chosen to work on.

🟠 Get leaders onboard early on

Take your key stakeholders and senior leadership team on the journey with you. You will need their support to invest time and resources into the process.

Make sure to explain:

• the timeline
• the expected ROI (return on investment) e.g. progress towards organisation goals
• any responsibilities they might have.

🟠 Provide pre-survey communications

Let the rest of your organisation know what is happening and when with clear pre-survey communications. Don’t forget to mention the ‘why’ – why you’re running the survey in the first place, so they understand how their feedback will be used and how it’ll make a difference. Providing this information will help drive participation and show that your organisation is invested in the process.

If you’re running a Leadership Effectiveness 360 survey, we recommend checking our Guide to running a Leadership Effectiveness 360.

Finally, set your survey live and invite your participants to take it.  

Listen

This step is about listening to what your people said and getting to the heart of what matters most. Although you can look at results as they come in, it’s important to perform your analysis when the survey closes to ensure you don’t miss any insights and don’t set up unintentional biases early in the process.  

🟠 Provide access to others

Consider who else needs to review and access the results, for example the Senior Leadership Team or Team Leaders. Set them up as Report Viewers (this allows them to log into AskYourTeam to view results) and select what reports and demographics they can access. 

Remind anyone viewing results that it’s normal to get a mix of feedback. All constructive feedback is a gift. It will either reaffirm the positive things that are happening or give you insights into where improvements can be made.  

🟠 Review results and reports

We recommend the Insights Dashboard as a place to start understanding your survey results. It provides an overall summary of the key insights including what's working well and what needs some work.

You can then dive deeper into specific areas or angles using reports like the:

• Questions Report
• Heatmap Report
• Alignment Report
• Text Analysis Report
• Benchmark Report
• Participation Report. 

🟠 Share initial insights and a timeline for action planning

When you’ve been through all your reports, think about: What surprised you the most? What has been confirmed for you? How do the insights progress your organisational goals? Share initial insights with your full organisation to show you’ve listened to their feedback.

Set expectations around action planning timelines and when you plan to retest key questions. Setting timeframes for re-testing is one of the single most important actions you can take to help drive change and improvements.

Act

This step is an important opportunity for you to build trust and boost morale. 

🟠 Run an action planning session

Start by running an action planning session within two or three weeks of your survey closing. This session should be informed by the insights gained from your results and your organisational goals. Depending on the size of your organisation, you may want to run an organisation-wide session or smaller team-specific sessions.

Here is a suggested structure for your action planning session: 

• Run through results of the survey in more detail 
• Celebrate successes  
• Prioritise a couple of areas to work on
• Brainstorm actions together to address those areas 
• Decide on and assign actions for people to complete before your retest

Don’t feel like you need to have all the answers. Encourage your people to get involved in prioritising areas to work on and suggesting actions.  

🟠 Select a mix of quick wins and longer-term actions

Make sure to include a mix of quick wins and longer-term actions. Quick wins allow you to maintain momentum and provide rapid evidence to participants that their feedback has had a real-world impact. This encourages them to further invest in the process and continue to provide honest feedback in the future.

🟠 Write up and share the action plan

Write what you’ve agreed upon into an action plan and circulate it with the rest of the organisation (or team, if applicable), so they can see there is a clear path forward. Keep it updated and share progress regularly.

Set some targets you’d like to aim for when it comes time to re-test. For example, a 10% increase for a specific question or category of questions.

🟠 Confirm the date you'll retest

Lock in the date for retesting key questions from the survey. Make sure you give people who are assigned actions a reasonable window to complete them before re-testing. We recommend retesting as soon as is practical, for example after the organisation has time to make progress on actions they've agreed to work on.

Measure

This step allows you to measure the impact of any actions you’ve taken.  It closes the loop, allowing you to to prove success or identify actions that aren’t having the impact hoped for (giving you time to quickly course correct).

🟠 Retest survey questions

To measure the impact, you’ll need to re-test questions from the last survey that relate to the actions you’ve taken. We recommend duplicating the survey to save time, and then removing questions as needed.  

🟠 Review and compare results

When the new survey results come in, compare them to the results of the last survey. You can do this using the Compare section of AskYourTeam. This is located in the left main menu, not your survey’s report section.  

Look for the % difference in responses. Have things gotten better? Are they pretty much the same? Have things gotten worse? Regardless of the result, it is important that you are transparent. If you’ve made a public commitment to re-test and share results, you must do that.  

If the result is positive, celebrate your progress! This provides people proof that their time and feedback was met with accountability by leaders in the organisation.  

If the result is negative or hasn’t really changed, explore why. For example, were actions partially completed or not completed when the questions were re-tested? Make sure the reason is communicated so participants don’t become disheartened.  

🟠 Commit to regular re-testing

To ensure that continuous improvement becomes a habit in your organisation, commit to retesting at regular intervals. Not only will this show your journey over time, but it will set a baseline score for your organisation – providing you an extra data point against which to measure progress. Regular retesting also allows you to include new questions over time as your organisational goals change.  

FAQs

How does this work for ongoing surveys?

You can still use Ask, Listen, Act, Measure for ongoing (long-running) surveys. Instead of using an end date as a point to review results and plan actions, you can choose a period of time that makes sense for your organisation.

For example, if you choose to do it quarterly, then each quarter you will:

• compare the current quarter's results to previous quarter(s)
• measure the impact of any actions you’ve undertaken 
• create any new actions if needed 
• consider if you need to ask any new questions as your organisation changes. 

Can AskYourTeam help me with the Ask, Listen, Act, Measure process?  

Yes, we can help you in a number of ways depending on what level of support you’d like. 

• Help Centre: Visit our HelpCentre for easy-to-follow guides on how to use the AskYourTeam platform, understand reports and more. 
• Support Hours: You can purchase support hours which give you access to an AskYourTeam expert who can help you with specific tasks. For example, survey set-up, participant import and training. Purchase support hours in-system in Account Settings > Manage Subscription or select Contact us at the top of this page to send us a message.