S3E11 – Value and Validity of Culture Surveys

Show Notes

In this episode of The TTL Podcast, Mon-Chaio and Andy dive deep into the world of employee surveys. They discuss whether these surveys truly work, their best practices, and the research behind them. Exploring the role of culture in company performance, they uncover the nuances of implementing and interpreting surveys. The episode provides actionable insights for leaders aiming to diagnose and improve their organizational culture.

References

• Measuring employee engagement and interpreting survey results
• Employee Survey Research: A Critical Review of Theory and Practice
• Diagnosing organizational cultures: A conceptual and empirical review of culture effectiveness surveys
• Following Up on Employee Surveys: A Conceptual Framework and Systematic Review

Transcript

Mon-Chaio: We’ve made it past double digits. It is episode 11 of season 3 of the TTL podcast. I’m here with Andy again and today we are going to be talking about employee surveys and whether they work, whether there’s best practices around them, what the research says about that. I think that we thought it fit into the theme of the season because it is one of the more prevalent tactics in use for diagnosis of what’s going on in an organization, isn’t it?

Andy: I hear about the employee surveys. They’re looking for what is kind of like an engagement number plus what are drivers for engagement. In fact, I’ve seen this on, on some. Um, employee survey software that I’ve used in the past, is that they’ll give you your engagement score and your leadership score and your alignment score.

And then they’ll also break that down into here’s the key drivers of that. And so it’s used as, as not only a kind of KPI system, but also a diagnostic system of your engagement’s low. It could be because your managers are not respected or I can’t, I made that one up. I don’t know what the, what the key drivers are of engagement in those things.

I can’t remember.

Mon-Chaio: Right, and I think that it’s actually used two fold in my experience. One is I feel like it’s a very prevalent tool and instrument that is used when people first come in and say, Hey, how is this organization performing?

What are some of the areas which we might be able to find improvement? The second thing is, I think most larger companies, and most maybe what I would call established companies, run culture surveys pretty regularly.

Um, in the past I’ve seen. the prevalence or the rise of things like micro culture surveys, like Pulse, where they send one question a week or one question every other week. Of course, there are the larger quarterly or half yearly or yearly culture surveys, which are larger, and I think most organizations agree that those are useful signals to have, and so I think it’s a pretty common practice.

Well,

Andy: to do it that way. Um, because. , spreading the measurement out over time can help get a better measurement.

Mon-Chaio: that really kicks us into, well, let’s talk about the research. Where do we want to start? Do we want to start with, should we even be doing them? Or is this a big waste of time? Because honestly, it does take a lot of time, Andy. And it’s not just the time it takes for the employees to take the survey. Um, the front end of the survey, Uh, I think is something that most people forget takes a lot of time to set up.

What does the research say, Andy?

Is this useful? Or have we discovered something which people do, but just really isn’t that useful? And maybe they could spend that time elsewhere.

Andy: So I want to break that down into. Two things. One where I have, I think, an answer, and the other one where I don’t have an answer. So I’ll, I’ll punt the question back to you for that one. Maybe you have the answer. I think what I found was it seems that basically, in the end, an employee survey is a instrument used just like the social sciences and psychology use these surveys.

They’re these things put together to go and figure out a particular thing. And in that case. Yeah, they’re absolutely valuable. We have entire disciplines of science based on doing surveys and interpreting the results and using that to, to measure something. So they can be valid, they can be useful, they can tell you something.

Notice that was all can, not that they do. Um, I, I didn’t get into anything that directly told me whether or not these surveys as done in industry provide that information. I did find a paper that talked about a survey done in conjunction with the researchers to, to put it all together, which was if you treat it a little bit like these scientific inquiries.

Where you have an idea that you want to be testing, you want to come up with a measurement, you want to tie it to something, you want to have ways of validating what you’re doing, then absolutely you’re going to get something out of it and you’re going to get something useful. I have to admit from my reading of the paper though, I wondered how much of the value came from all of the thought that went into it and not the numbers that came out.

But, yeah, but what I was wondering, Manchao, is, well, did you find, uh, anything, and did you find anything in particular about the trend that seems to be happening now, which is that you’ve got these companies that put together surveys for you. So you’ve got, uh, these big software as a service companies where they say, we give you your pulse survey.

And we’ve got the question bank for you. You just select the questions that are relevant. We have the software for people to fill in the survey. We keep it anonymous. We do all of the things about making sure that you don’t group in smaller groups than five, and that you do the statistical analysis properly.

We provide all of that. Is that kind of survey valuable? I don’t know, Mancha, did you find anything about that? Or what did you find in the value of these things?

Mon-Chaio: as I was looking around, the value seems anecdotal, would be how I would put it. I think the researchers have agreed that there is a pretty strong correlation between culture and company performance. Weirdly, There is a thread which comes around that says we can’t really define culture as good or neutral or bad yet. Yet there is a strong connection of culture to company performance, which You might think that’s strange. How could that be? If there’s just cultures and not really a topology or not really a ranking, then like, how can you drive better performance? I didn’t really get into that, but skimming some of the reference articles, it does sound like it’s things like, do you have consistency of culture throughout the company that can help drive performance?

Stuff that we’ve talked about already, uh, things like theory and use versus espoused theory, that kind of stuff.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: I wouldn’t take this as gospel here because this wasn’t really what I was looking into. So I kind of just skimmed it. Um, but it does seem like There is pretty universal agreement that culture drive performance. So, that must mean that anything you can do to try to understand and drive cultural change is valuable.

Andy: Okay.

Mon-Chaio: So, that’s the way I see it. Now, the next part is more complex. The next part, I think, is do cultural surveys help you measure culture and understand what’s going on. And

Andy: to me, the central question of this whole thing of, do you get actionable information? if for instance, uh, you do an engagement survey and you find out that people are on average, medium level engaged. Does it give me information about what I should do?

Mon-Chaio: that’s a tricky business. And I’m going to kind of skip to the end and then we’ll go back a little bit towards the middle.

Andy: All right.

Mon-Chaio: there’s a quote that I found in one of the papers. I will give it verbatim. It says, overall, research on this topic has seemed to almost come to a halt. Out of 53 studies, 47 or 90 percent were published before 2010, over 10 years ago.

However, with increasing digitalization and the influx of new tools and ways of collaborating at the workplace, we require more research in this area to meet the newly emerging needs of organizations. This is especially relevant in light of the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic, which has started to change everyday life at work. That’s just one quote, but I think it summarizes it well, because as I dug into the research, there are really more questions than answers around if I notice that I have 53 percent engagement, do I have specific tactics I can use in order to drive improvement?

Andy: Yeah. So for that, I found, um, I wouldn’t call this a study. What would I call this? Oh, just a instruction manual, really, for the NHS, the National Health System of the UK,

Mon-Chaio: Mm

Andy: where it’s measuring employee engagement and interpreting survey results. So this would be whatever their survey is. It doesn’t tell me what their survey is exactly.

And they come up with, uh, some of the things that you need to be wary of, which is that the different ways that the data gets aggregated can completely change what the number means. So they mentioned that if you take the individual responses and you simply add them up and give a percentage of people who agree or disagree, that, that can mean one thing. Or you could do a net score where kind of like you have positive numbers about negative numbers and you add them up.

Uh, or you could do some sort of average, where you’re saying, like, on average, people are responding with this, or on average, they’re responding with that. But each one of those hides information about the individuals. And they point out that in the end, it’s actually the changing the individual responses is what changes the overall thing.

So, if you have the wrong analysis, that doesn’t give you the right, uh, understanding of what’s going on, then, well, you’re, you’re not going to use the right, what they call, treatment. You’re not going to use the right intervention. And, uh, the whole thing was for naught.

Mon-Chaio: that’s interesting because I also found this concept of individuals versus organizations, and I’ll just read the quote. It says, Another set of issues has to deal with the shift from individuals to organizations as the primary unit of analysis. Several studies cited in our review committed atomistic fallacy by inferring organization level relationships on the basis of regressions or correlations with individuals. Unfortunately, this type of evidence does little to substantiate criterion related validity for an organizational assessment because culture performance relationships among organizations may not reflect the individual level relationships.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: And so that exactly gets to your point of how you aggregate what comes up at the individual level, what they actually call multi level data is really important in getting the right results. Now, I’m not sure that the paper that I saw. Came to the same conclusion, which is ultimately you’re looking at the individuals and changing the perception and behaviors of the individuals.

Although that seems to make sense since on an individual level, the better each person rates their culture, the better the company culture. Right? So I can see that.

Andy: And I should say that they do have what they call organization level actions and team work, work group level actions and individual level actions. But in, in the end, it all comes down to how do you interpret this and what do you do? so on that kind of pessimistic route, uh, another paper that I found was a critical review of employee survey research. I, I was, I was looking more for things that are, are giving me an overview, so I don’t have to read 20 different papers.

Mon-Chaio: yeah. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm

Andy: some interesting things and, and they’re all just useful foods for food for thought when you’re thinking about how can I interpret what this is. If you start to think about how the data is being collected, what data is being collected and how it’s being interpreted to you.

But, it goes through a few of these mistakes that can easily be made. One was overlooking the limitations of cross sectional design. Now, quite often, what these surveys are trying to say is that there’s a causal relationship between things. And a cross sectional design means that you ask this single set of questions across a group all at once.

Andy: But that can’t tell you causation. Because for causation to be shown, you need a time dimension as well. So, some of these surveys, they try to make up for that by asking things like, over the past few weeks, or over the past couple months, have you ever, or does this happen? The thing is, is you don’t know when the person is answering from. You don’t know, like, is this something that just happened and so it’s on top of their mind, and we’ll get to that when there’s another problem with these things. But if you want to be able to say that something is happening which is causing um, motivational issues, you need to do longitudinal design. Which means following a single person, following their path through what’s going on. Now, the next thing that people try to do is that they’ll try to compare this time’s results versus last time’s results. But they’ll do them against incomparable groups. And this gets where, this is where it starts getting even more complicated where, like, if the HR department isn’t, uh, grouping people together properly, they’re in trouble.

Because maybe it presents it and says, Oh, your company alignment score is up over the past six months. But maybe my entire team just changed. Maybe everyone on my team just got hired, and now they’re all feeling great. They’re kind of like got this new employee euphoria, and that’s what’s actually happening.

Because you, you can’t compare the group now as, as to the group before. Yeah, they all report to me, but that doesn’t mean that they’re the same

Mon-Chaio: Right? Yeah.

Andy: then you’ve got, uh, other ones which is that they say that you’re only surveying what they call the remembering self. So if you ask someone that question of, over the past six months, my work life has improved. What you have is, what do they remember right now?

But the story of what they were experiencing through that six months can give you a completely different answer.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: And so you, you, you may want the remembering self, but this is part of the survey design. You need to make sure that that is really what you want, is the remembering self and not the experiencing

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. And that actually ties into a tactic that I see a lot of that I think does well to pump up survey results, also colors them, which is before you do your survey, you present all of the things that you did to tackle issues from the last survey. And that’s to change sort of the remembering self and experiencing self, like, uh, factors of that survey to get people to say, Oh yeah,

Andy: Oh yeah, they are doing

Mon-Chaio: you’re right.

Or this did get better. Even if perhaps yesterday was, Worse than two weeks ago, and that’s what they were gonna put in the survey, but then you just reminded them that well Yesterday was better than six months ago. Oh, yeah, right

Andy: yeah. And that, that gets to, I think, another point that we can touch on, which is that, that’s gathering more data or providing more information to someone. And they say one of the. Uh, problems that people might make, uh, which is assuming more is better. You might say, well, if I can ask five questions, then asking 10 questions will be even better.

or if, uh, getting a score of six on this is okay, getting a score of eight is even better. If you take everything in isolation, uh, that might make sense. But things aren’t in isolation. And also, It may be that improving that one thing doesn’t do anything to help you on other stuff.

and this, this was actually a thing that I found, I think, in a couple different places, which was, I think the common interpretation I’ve, I’ve seen used, and I’ve propagated myself, and this has caused me to question it, is that the point of the survey is to find the places to take more action. And so do more, because that’ll be better.

But the, the actually much more interesting thing is, where are you putting effort where the effort doesn’t matter?

Mon-Chaio: So

Andy: you do less?

Mon-Chaio: right so do more here, but the survey should tell you to do less there

Andy: Yeah. So this is, if your survey is actually set up to tell you what is connected, then it might tell you that you’re doing great in making people feel like they belong. And that has absolutely no connection to customer satisfaction. Something like that. So, you don’t need to put as much effort into that.

But, if, if people are getting out and talking to your customers, say we’re talking about developers, that does help with customer satisfaction. So, if you need to spend more time on that, the, the helping people feel like they belong in the group might be the place to cut. Because You need to spend effort there, so it tells you where to make that trade off. And hearing that when I read this research, I was very happy because I had, my interpretation on a lot of these things was it always told managers, do more, do more. You have to be doing all of these things. And that was my reading of the NHS one. When I read the NHS paper, it felt like, why wouldn’t I just do all of these? Because if, if this all drives engagement, why wouldn’t you just say, do all of these things? They’re all good things to do. And the answer is, the much more interesting thing to try to get out of your survey is, what are you doing that doesn’t matter? Doesn’t drive the results you’re aiming for?

Mon-Chaio: I like that a lot because I hadn’t thought about it before that way. And yet we talk about that in so many other places, right? A common thing we say is it’s not a strategy if you don’t talk about what you’re not doing.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: Because it’s all about trade offs, right? If you’re talking about rank ordering, you’re talking about strategy, you’re talking about prioritization.

All of those things, if you don’t have a, what am I not doing because I’m doing these things, it’s not valid. Well, it’s not as valid, but I’ve never thought about that from the cultural survey perspective. And I do think that that’s super interesting.

Andy: Yeah. It gave me a completely different perspective of like, Now I can see how properly managed, properly done, properly researched Your central question shouldn’t be, like, are people happy? Your central question should be, Are we spending the time on the things that are impacting the outcomes we care about?

Mon-Chaio: And I think this gets into, you asked me earlier what I think about all these SAS companies that do all of the research and have this stock questions. This gets into something that I was reading in the research that led me to believe that these companies are actually much better positioned to do these surveys than doing them yourself, rolling your own R queries or whatever you want to do. The research that I found on cultural surveys pointed out that the best ones have an alignment to some sort of research backed model. So if you’re going to do that, you have to first choose a model of culture, of performance, or of whatever that you want to be surveying against.

And I feel like most companies will have a very difficult time doing that. There are a lot of research based models out there. How are you going to pick the one that makes sense? Once you pick the one that makes sense, how are you going to decide on which questions you should ask? And one of the papers talks a lot about the fallacies.

Uh, in designing surveys, and this isn’t whether you design it on your own. They even talk about fallacies in researchers who have designed surveys, uh, that are purportedly research based and supposed to give you results, right? Um, there’s fallacies like, uh, using typing, for example.

So, surveys that just put you in one of three buckets or four buckets. Um, oh, you’re an autocratic culture. Oh, you’re a, you know, democratic culture. Things like that. Um, there’s fallacies around how you decide, which attributes to measure and how well they end up mapping to the individual company factors that you want.

And whether you use broad factors or individual or second or first level factors, these are all things that I think are really difficult for a company to do. The other thing is surveys are a lot like other types of research, and there was a quote in one of the papers that said several of the limitation described reflect the usual criticism that a company developing research, not just surveys, but research and you mentioned some of these already, right?

The need for longitudinal evidence. You talked about that more and better effectiveness criteria, larger and more representative sample sizes of organizations. And so I think with all of these things, it makes a lot more sense if there’s a company that’s extremely focused on this type of stuff, and they have to be the right company. If they can say, look, over time, I see that these types of buckets are the big buckets that affect company performance, then you can take that and put it into your company knowing that there’s a lot of, uh, the sample size is much larger than just kind of making up your own questions.

Andy: I agree with you on the principle of that, but I’m, can I throw a little cold water on

Mon-Chaio: Oh, of course.

Andy: Which is another one of the mistakes that you can make with employee surveys. Now, I think the, I think the, the fancy word for this is reactivity. But the, the mistake you can make is assuming survey results will lead to change. Now, it could be that on, it’s on the management side, on the leadership side, that you’re assuming, Oh, we’ll get this and we’ll change things. But it also happens from the people taking the survey. You can start setting up an expectation that because you are showing this interest in measuring something, that things will get better.

Things will get, uh, more controlled for them. Their life will be better. But the reality is A lot of it is actually outside of control of most people. They’re not going to have any particular thing that they know what to do to fix something. Every once in a while you will. You’ll find out like, Oh, people are upset that we don’t run town halls and they don’t know what’s going on.

Okay, let’s do that. Everyone’s suddenly happy. But now they’re going to be unhappy that you’re taking their time. Who knows?

Mon-Chaio: Too many meetings.

Andy: Yeah. So it’s, it says. As leaders have become more aware of the role that broader systemic and cultural issues play in determining organization performance, survey researchers have expanded their questions to wider and more complex issues of organization effectiveness.

These elements of organization functioning are hard to change, and usually require significant coordinated activity across various teams and leaders simultaneously. So, the effort involved to achieve this type of coordinated shift that is needed is usually beyond the resources that many organizations are willing to apply, unless they are in dire need. So, yeah, they might provide you an easy, simple, validated approach. But are you actually going to put in the effort to make the changes that they show that you might be able to make? Or might want to make?

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, absolutely. And I think. Um, we’ve talked a lot about survey design, but we’re starting to get into the tail part of it, uh, we’re right around the edges, which is what do you do once you have the results of the survey? And I think there’s other research that says, you know, it’s not the survey that’s the most important part. It’s that latter part. It’s whatever your survey is, and the data can be good or bad or incomplete or, um, and I guess most survey data is probably incomplete. But it’s what do you do? And this paper that studied what you do again came out with um, You know this idea of like more study is needed that there’s not a lot of great data but they do point out look like there’s not a one size fits all approach and You’re going to have different models and you’re going to have different organizations with different cultures different work environments but they did lay out a set of Tactics I would say of like best practices of what to do with these results And for them, they say that it’s not only important to provide the data for the survey, but you also want to make sure that action planning takes place.

A lot of, most companies do that. Um, some companies don’t actually, many companies don’t or they do it very incompletely. But, uh, you want to make sure that action planning takes place. Uh, they also say it’s beneficial when the questionnaire fits the organization and the items are actionable for managers and their teams. Managers should be properly involved in the follow up process as their key change agents. And then this last part, managers have to have the necessary tools to do the job. That includes training, sufficient time, and support from top management and necessary resources. High involvement of all stakeholders is beneficial because it increases accountability and deeper understanding and acceptance of the actions following the survey.

So, All of this, I think, gets back to your point around are organizations willing to put in the work it takes to truly action on these survey results? And I think that becomes, in my mind, that crux. Because if you are not, and honestly, sometimes it’s difficult to know a priori whether you’re going to be able to do that, right?

Andy: Yeah, sometimes you do the survey with all the best intentions, you get the results back, and you’re like, we’d have to, what would we have to do to fix this? And you start talking through it, and you realize, we can’t do that. That would be a different organization, and I don’t know how to lead it.

Mon-Chaio: But I think there’s also cases where you absolutely, with a little introspection, can know before you do the survey. If you come into the survey, you’re like, Hey, what I’m really interested in is just improving collaboration. And I’m hoping the survey tells me whether I do well at that or not, I would say don’t do the survey, you know, like you’re probably going to get, you’re probably going to get results out and action items, which you are not willing to take on.

You just know, I mean, you have a six month runway. You have to get your next round of funding. You’re trying to, um, you know, squeeze every last drop out of your machine in order to be able to show revenue. You, you probably just shouldn’t do the survey.

Andy: I’ll expand on that a little bit, though. You could say, don’t do the survey. You could also say, Do it differently. Now, let’s go a little bit back to theory of surveys,

Mon-Chaio: Hmm. Mm

Andy: there’s multiple ways of collecting data. So, even if you’re answering something along the lines of, yes, I do this five times a week, or I’m, uh, Uh, highly likely to do that or very unlikely to do that. That’s all quantitative data.

Mon-Chaio: hmm.

Andy: That kind of data works best if the question you’re answering has a clear theoretical model. So basically, you have a very specific model.

You need to collect data to find out, is this what’s happening? How are things playing together? But If you’re more curious what’s happening, and this, this kind of gets into a lot of the other things we’ve been talking about the last few episodes, things like the six box model and that kind of stuff.

That’s a qualitative model. So one of the things this paper, again, they say is learn to use multiple methodologies. So be comfortable saying we’re not going to do a survey. We’re not interested in quantitative. What we’re interested in. is, uh, qualitative information. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to get, uh, all of the managers, all of the leaders, to go through a bit of a, a bit of a question with their reports.

It’s going to be a semi structured interview, and they’re going to collect some information that way. And then we’re going to pull that all back together, and we’re going to do some analysis on that, and we’re going to do some analysis together, and then we’ll talk about what we’ve learned.

And you could say, Maybe that’s what we want to do. Because that gives us the interaction with each other that we find valuable. It gives us, um, a much better set of questions we can ask about what’s going on. And then maybe we’ll end up with the, the Software as a Service survey, and we’ll know what questions to put on there that we think are actually useful for our organization.

Mon-Chaio: Interesting. Or maybe, as you were talking about earlier, the work of doing that is enough for the organization. The fact that that drove conversation, drove introspection, is all you need for now, or all the time you have for now.

Andy: Yeah. And it might be that just training your leaders on how to ask those questions and how to interpret the results actually starts resolving a lot of your problems because maybe they just never had those skills about how to listen and ask questions before.

So

Mon-Chaio: I think, um, this gets to sort of localized versus global change, right? I think, um, Teaching your leaders how to ask those questions, I think, can generally drive localized change, uh, which can be big depending on where your leaders sit. If your leaders are the CTO, localized change is global change, right?

But, um, but I think that there are other things that need to happen in order to sort of drive and align across an organization global change. So, this sounds pretty pessimistic. Like, well, maybe we just ask some questions, maybe we do qualitative surveys, maybe we don’t use these companies to do surveys, maybe we’re not ready to take on the action that these surveys provide, and maybe we don’t even know the right questions to ask since the research is pretty sparse in this area.

So, what do we take out of this if you’re an engineering leader thinking about cultural surveys? Should we do them? Should we not do them? Do we have sort of best practices on how we approach this?

Andy: I would say feel free to do them. Recognize that the simple act of doing the survey will create an expectation that something will change and be, be prepared for that. I think the biggest thing is to go into it with a clear idea of what it is that you want to achieve with the survey. and set it up so that it, is clearly aligned to that.

So if it, if it is, we are a company that has a strong belief in happiness at work. That we believe that people being happy while at work, uh, will really create the company that we want. Then set it up as a very simple, uh, way of measuring people’s happiness levels on a regular basis. And that’s it. make sure that you’re collecting that data in a way that gives you not only that people are happy or unhappy, but answers why, so that you can, you can learn from it.

So it’s kind of tie it to what it is that you want to do, what you want to be, and why you want to be asking this question. I think for much larger organizations, that probably starts to fall apart a little bit because it’s so big that there are so many different things that are going on all the time, which makes me wonder, maybe you also come up with just small, internal, more local things, try to be a bit more local for the stuff that’s local and global for the stuff that’s global.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I like that. I think there’s a lot of Uh, what would you call it the conway’s law or team topology stuff around this or triple a organizations We talk a lot about how organizations are different some may be an expand others may be an explore or extract That’s probably true for culture, too You have little subcultures and sometimes improving the localized subculture is probably all you need to do. So I like what you’re talking about in terms of understanding the why behind what you’re reaching into this cultural survey for in the first place. And I think the important part about that is really that introspection of yourself. Because While I like what you’re talking about in terms of, hey, if you’re interested in employee happiness, let’s do the little things that measure employee happiness. You also have to understand that culture and getting better at culture is multifaceted. To your point really early on in the episode where you talked about improving one thing might take time away from improving another thing or that the higher one thing goes, maybe the lower the other thing goes.

They are tied in. They’re not independent factors. And so this again gets back to how I think about whether you think you have a model for measuring the culture of your organization and whether the culture you want to propagate aligns with that model. An example being, let’s say there is a model that really drives engagement.

Um, it’s very popular these days for there to be multiple engagement models. But you don’t believe in the power of teams, right? You believe in like the power of individuals and, um, you know, expert assholes over here can do great things for your company.

Andy: Mm

Mon-Chaio: It’s probably not useful for you to then do a survey that’s based on a model around team engagement and then selectively filter out things that are like, Oh, well, obviously people don’t feel like a part of a team because you know, we’re individually focused. So let’s just take those things out and then look at the other data because all of this data corresponds and correlates up to a particular model, right?

Andy: Yeah,

Mon-Chaio: So I think that introspection to see what are you getting out of it? What is the culture you want to set and is the. Survey that you’re using based on a model that you believe in and can ascribe to, I think is important as well.

Andy: I like that. Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: And then I think just the last thing we talked about is pretty simple, but it’s the follow up, right? Um, this gets back into, are you going to do it in the first place? Are you really going to follow up? Do you really have the resources to follow up? Um, and

Andy: And, and is your survey telling you anything? Not only what you need to start doing, but also what you can stop doing.

Mon-Chaio: yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, on the follow up thing, I think a lot about, uh, bug backlogs or Or feature backlogs.

Andy: them.

Mon-Chaio: I hear so many times of, well, it’s good to know, right? Even if we’re not going to do anything. Well, I mean, yes and no. One, there’s the human aspect, which is if you give the survey, people expect you to do something. And it’s almost worse to give the survey and not do anything than to not give the survey in the first place. But then the other thing is, to your point about the temporal side of it, a survey is a, And so what does it mean to do a bunch of work, to know something about six months ago, like, is that valuable six months from now? And so I think like, absolutely, if you’re not willing to truly put forth the effort to do the things that need to get done, perhaps something a lot smaller, some small conversations, some localized changes, maybe much more valuable for your organization.

Andy: Yeah, I like it.

Mon-Chaio: All right.

Andy: I think we’ve done a good survey of this area.

Mon-Chaio: So not exactly engineering focused, but I would say most engineering companies do surveys. And I think engineers, especially as I’ve seen, have a lot of different opinions on the validity and usefulness of cultural surveys. So hopefully if you’re an eng leader, you’re hearing some things from your engineers or you have to propagate the company standard.

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