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Runagood® Methods: Review Your Workforce Effectiveness

A powerful but little known fact is the thousands of practical action plans in the Runagood® Online Business System. 

So every week we’ll share selected snippets with you which you are free to use with your clients. 

We’ll cover a different topic every week from the full range of: ‘Marketing; Operations; Systems; People; Finance; Value; Crisis; Exit; Recovery; Growth; Lifestyle; Effectiveness; Diversifying; Risk Management. 

This Method snippet shows you how to discover the extent to which your people are connected with and committed to, what your business is trying to achieve. 

Learn where there is scope for improvement and what that the payback would be in terms higher productivity and lower people turnover. Turn that into money to see what that means for sales and profits.  

General Survey

In most businesses, People, one way or another are the greatest cost and therefore the greatest asset, be they employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, or clients. And they are the most difficult to manage. The great spectrum of personalities, motivations, attitudes, health, wealth and behaviour influence every aspect of the business. So, this Method contains actions you can take to determine their value to you and start along the route to maximising their effectiveness and getting payback on your ‘human capital’.

It starts with asking questions.

1 - Start a spreadsheet and create a master list of questions that everyone will receive. Look at it from the customer, employee, contractor, director, partner, and supplier viewpoint when developing questions. Create tabs that correspond with who is being given the survey and develop a set of questions to ask each of these categories. You can pick and choose according to the audience this way.  

2 - When designing questions, try to use multiple choice options as much as possible so that participants are able to quickly complete it. The survey has no minimum or maximum question numbers but sticks to basic things people know the answers to. There should be no need for them to look things up or provide additional information requiring deep thought. It’s impressions you want. 

3 - Provide a free text box for unfiltered thoughts but use sparingly. These results are hard to analyse for you and respondents get fed up with being made to think. So, use a free text box only at the end of the survey or section with an open-ended such as ‘what changes would you make if you were us’? 

If you are unsure of what to ask and to whom, you should be able to examples and template within Runagood® Business Documents.  

4 - SurveyMonkey is useful as it suggests questions, mails your targets and automatically collects and analyses data. Reinforce the need for confidentiality and the need for honesty and frankness throughout. Explain to recipients that the results of the survey will be used to develop a training and development program for employees and contractors, so participation is vital to improving the experience of dealing with you. 

5 - Customers are happy to speak their minds, if it’s quick and easy, but don’t expect more than 20% to respond. These will tend to be the outliers i.e. very happy/unhappy. So, provide incentives, such as draws for Amazon vouchers, and that it can be completed in 3 minutes.  

6 - Suppliers are generally reluctant to be objective as they fear the loss of business, but they have the most valuable information. They see the business from its real perspective when no one is pretending. So, make it safe to speak their mind, assure them that the survey is done with utmost confidentiality and offer anonymity.   

7 - Be prepared to chase and follow up after the initial send. It may need resending once more after a period of time. Also, be prepared to get on the phone and chase answers if needed. In all your communications provide a clickable link to the survey asking them to help by ‘taking a few minutes to speak your mind’ and if a retailer, place cards on the counter asking for views, and you’ll also collect email addresses for your marketing database. 

Runagood Ltd