Boost Employee Engagement. Identify Pitfalls. Create Solutions.
Should You Consider a Focus Group Project? Focus Groups are a vital and useful supplement to employee surveys. Surveys are most effective at providing quantifiable data. Focus groups can be used to enrich these results by revealing the more qualitative perspectives of employee engagement underlying the numbers.
The results help organizational leaders strategically plan programs and funding targeted at employee relations and development. Specifically, the results lead to the integration of engagement data with other key metrics, including communication, retention, and performance.
Engagement Project
A client completed an extensive employee engagement survey, the results of which gave the Board and CEO a snapshot of the areas employees were satisfied or dissatisfied with their work. The organization’s leaders took the valuable next step of creating focus groups to bring as many voices to the table to address the challenges outlined in the survey results. Our team came in to facilitate the focus groups. Using the results of the employee survey, five focus groups were identified and assigned a specific area of discussion.
Using an External Facilitator
Using a professional, outside source to run a focus group is critical for several reasons. First, it is more likely employees will feel safe in voicing their opinions. Second, a trained facilitator knows how to help participants dig deep — probe identified problems and causes, and surface suggested solutions. The process allows participants to contribute without much preparation or effort and promotes a healthy sense among employees that they’re genuinely being heard. Fully exploring a challenging issue within a focus group opens up the opportunity for effective, sustainable solutions and lets employees know their opinions are valued.
Our Process
Our process for conducting focus groups and our style of facilitation promotes engagement in the process by giving employees a safe platform to discuss what is important to them, creating a bank of ideas that are delivered to decision-makers, and reminds employees that they play a significant role in the overall success of the organization.
Our Method
Our job in facilitating a focus group project is to ensure that each focus group fully explores the area under discussion and yields key insights that are then compiled and delivered in a report with summary methodology and data together with recommendations.
Our process includes:
1. Identifying specific issues as perceived by the employees within the focus group topic, 2. Defining problems within the targeted list of issues and identify desired outcomes, 3. Identifying actionable solutions once focus groups have justified the need to solve a problem and identify who/what will benefit from making changes.