What’s a best practice when it comes to an employee focus group?
To help you successfully lead employee focus groups, we asked people managers and business owners this question for their best insights. From setting up the right composition and size to implementing ideas discussed, there are several best practices that may help gain a more accurate depiction of your employees’ experiences.
Here are five employee focus group best practices:
- Setup the Composition & Size of the Focus Group
- Get Representation from Various Groups
- Identify Data Point Parameters Ahead of Session
- Avoid Giving Your Opinion
- Follow Up & Implement Ideas Discussed
Setup the Composition and Size of the Focus Group
The best practice would be to establish the composition and size of the employee focus group. It’s vital to possess a wide array of employee perceptions; hence, you need to organize your group’s makeup precisely. In terms of sizing, the focus groups must have no more than 12 employees.
Smaller groups give everyone a chance to contribute and allow conversations to flow more easily. In addition, it makes it hassle-free to keep accumulating to a briefer time. Keep in mind that maintaining isolating sessions for managers will inspire more honest input of thoughts.
Caroline Lee, CocoSign
Get Representation from Various Groups
A good employee focus group should include team members from various teams throughout the company. Make sure that you’re inviting people from different departments (finance, marketing, sales, etc.), locations (get participants from different geographies), and experience levels (entry-level vs. senior). Bringing individuals from a broad set of departments, locations and experience levels will give you a clear indication of how people feel across the org…not just from a portion of it.
Logan Mallory, Motivosity
Identify Data Point Parameters Ahead of Session
It’s easy to organize a feedback session with employees and have a discussion. However, in order to ensure that the discussion leads to reliable data that you can use as a basis for decision making, it’s a good idea to define parameters ahead of the focus group that you can rate and expand upon during the session to help keep you on track for collecting these data points.
Jessica Miller-Merrell, Workology
Avoid Giving Your Opinion
While paying attention to all the “dos” during the employee focus group, don’t forget about the “don’ts.” And one of the best practices within things you should avoid is inferring your opinion and imposing judgment. Otherwise, the whole conversation will be shut down due to your contribution. And as you want to get helpful feedback and honest opinions from your employees, you can’t make that happen. Employees seeing that their opinion differs from yours will not be willing to share it with you, fearing the consequences or disagreements. So it would be best if you remained as neutral or impartial as possible. Only this the meeting will be successful.
Nina Paczka, MyPerfectResume
Follow Up & Implement Ideas Discussed
The problem with many employee focus groups is that ideas don’t turn into actions. Even if your employees find creative ways to tackle issues within your organization, but your HR team or management doesn’t plan the next steps, nothing will change. That’s why it’s important to follow up after an employee focus group meeting and show your staff how you’re going to put their ideas into practice. By doing so, you will show your employees that their contributions matter and are of great value to your company.
Also, make sure that you inform your other employees that a change in process or a new policy resulted from a recent employee focus group. That way, your staff will know that your organization takes inputs from its employees seriously and is willing to implement changes that respond to people’s needs.
Dorota Lysienia, MyPerfectResume
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