Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: "employee focus group", "human resources consulting", Communication, employees, focus group, Human Resources
January 11, 2011
Focus Groups – Understanding Employee Needs or Concerns
by Ted A. Kirchharr
A highly effective tool in understanding the needs and concerns of your employees is the use of employee focus groups. When facilitated properly, focus groups will give you significant insights into what your employees are thinking. We’ll review a few of the essential elements.
As Stephen Covey would say, “Begin with the end in mind.” What is it you hope to achieve with your focus group? For example, are you responding to issues that your employee survey revealed or are you trying to uncover other issues that you may suspect may be a concern?
Once you know the purpose of your focus group it is important that the facilitator (or moderator) of your focus group is skilled in promoting good group discussion. A trained facilitator will know how to encourage everyone to participate, and can draw out the shy personalities or quieten the loud voices. Many organizations employ outside facilitators to encourage open and honest discussion on the part of employees. If you choose not to employ an outside facilitator, you should strive to find a facilitator that will be trusted by the whole group.
Next, it is important to select your focus group participants. Typically a dozen or so individuals should attend focus group meetings and these groups should reflect the job duties and departments within the organization. It is important to note that supervisors should not participate in a focus group with direct reports.
There are a number of ways to spur discussion during the meeting. A method we regularly use involves taking the participants on a virtual tour of the organization. This method generally produces a number of issues from throughout the organization. A typical session will generate between 75 and 150 issues. We’ve seen the count go over 200!
Now that you have the issues, what do you do? We have found it helpful to have the participants rate the issues. With this bit of data we are able to focus (pun intended) our efforts on the issues that are most important to our employees.
Our next step is to share the results of the focus groups with our employees. While on occasion this might be painful for some in management, we want to make sure our employees know we heard them, and more importantly, that we intend to take action on their concerns.
Finally, we typically form cross-functional teams to develop recommendations to address the issues. You probably cannot or, in some cases, should not take action on an issue; however, you should communicate to the employees why you can’t (or won’t) take action on an important issue they raised.
Employees are your most valuable asset. Listening to them and taking their concerns seriously will pay big dividends for your employees and for your organization.
Ted A. Kirchharr, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Landrum Professional Employer Services and Landrum Consulting Services.
Ted is responsible for Landrum’s strategic planning, benefits administration, risk management, human resources and marketing.
He has helped hundreds of organizations pursue strategic planning, institute quality control management, hone organizational development, instill leadership training and improve employee retention. He is Past-President of the Florida Sterling Council and has a Master’s in Administration from Central Michigan University.
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