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This is my brand new, 10 questions, Employee Engagement/Satisfaction/Climate/All-in-One Survey, or TCP 10. That’s right, this is ‘The Chalfont Project 10 questions’.  There is The Gallup 12 questions, and the TCP 10 questions. Ours is shorter. And Better. Ours is a company MRI.

(My original proprietary Employee Engagement survey has gone complex. It used to have one question. Number one in the list. The shortest Employee Engagement survey has one question)

These are the 10 questions:

  1. Why are you still here?
  2. What would make you leave?
  3. Where would you like to be, if you were not here (what company you’d really, really like to work for)?
  4. If you were the CEO, what would you fix tomorrow?
  5. What’s the headline you’d like to see in a newspaper about your company?
  6. How long do you think you’ll stay here?
  7. Can you name the top Leadership Team of the company (no cheating in Google)?
  8. Are your colleagues human or robots?
  9. Do you like Mondays? How difficult is to get out of bed to come to work here?
  10. Could you answer that question that we have not asked you, and you expected us to ask, but we were too self-centred and missed it?

A thorough, serious, deep, interpretation of the answers, and a critical dialog about them, will give you more than many multi-questions, multi-angle Employee (engagement, satisfaction, happiness) questionnaires. By the way, this is not just an amusing set, we DO use this in our organizational consulting practice.

Crowdsourcing note: please suggest other questions, but tell me which one to substitute, because the total number is only 10.

 

PS. My new book, compilation of a few months of Daily Thoughts, HOWEVER, WORK COULD BE REMARKABLE, is now available. Take a look here and let other people know.

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Comments

  1. Marie

    Really good piece! I’m even thinking about sitting down and taking the time to answer all ten questions just for myself.

  2. Jean

    Why is this type of open-ended survey beneficial to an organization compared to a typical statistically significant survey? Looking for your thoughts as I discuss these with colleagues and look for their buy-in (which is hard) on this concept.

    • Leandro Herrero

      Both approaches are legitimate. The issue is what we want to get out of it, only then what the questions are. You can have a good statistically significant response to the wrong questions. I am not covering any single possible ‘organizational pulse’. However, the Employee Engagement ‘industry’ has created a sense that providing a score gives the answers to many things, amongst other things a benchmark against a ‘norm’. The reliance on long questionnaires and scores is possibly an answer in very large organizations, if what we want is a score-based picture. In the extreme, and if that approach takes over all our air time ( and we are today across the world pretty close to that), we will loose the ability to have normal human conversations. For example the ‘why are you still here?’ question is not new (‘Stay Interviews’ have been in place for a while’ ) but it is a most powerful question to understand all the strengths of the organization, motivational power, magnet ability etc. My 10 questions are a guide for a structured conversation and precisely because they are open, will not force us towards a simplistic scoring. Of course it is a disruptive idea and, and as such, there will me million reasons why people will prefer not to do it, and stick to the epidemic of Gallups. The individual leader should ask these 10 questions.

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