Avoid the most common pitfalls
Tips for a successful Assessment
10. Use surveys to complement face-to-face discussion
Surveys are not essential, but they can be valuable as a tool to strengthen the process: to obtain input from a large number of people: to gather clues as to what is happening in the workplace.
Used in this way, surveys can add to the rigor of a workshop-style assessment, or provide an assessment team with a 'heads up' regarding some of the issues that need to be explored in the interviews. They can also allow more people to take part in the assessment than could ever be interviewed.
Surveys are also seen sometimes as a quick, clean and easy way of conducting an assessment, without all the work of actually talking to people. Some surveys are claimed to be 'calibrated' to provide similar scores to a real assessment.
But surveys can never be a substitute for the face-to-face dialog of interviews. They provide none of the richness, the insights and the examples that are shared in interviews. It it the interviews that enable an assessment team to fully understand what is going on – and to articulate this information convincingly to the senior leaders.
So by all means use surveys, but use them to complement face-to-face information gathering, not as a substitute.
Further reading
This
article just touches on some of the key issues.
For lots more information on how to conduct an assessment effectively, see
"From Baldrige
to the Bottom Line".