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We use the dialogue to collect the opinion of our constituents

“The dialogue helps us to get the opinions of our constituents and place them where they belong in our organization; with the director, with the teams.”

A Central Works Council wants to talk to its constituents. The challenge within our organization Politie Nederland is that we wanted a representative group within all disciplines to have their say. However, in a large organization with over 65,000 employees, many of whom also work on the street, that’s quite an effort.

Until we deployed the dialogue. The response rate for this tool is high, giving us a representative picture of what is going on within the organization. At the same time, it is also possible to start a dialogue within a certain discipline about subjects that are specifically intended for them.

Ground-breaking success
The dialogue we put out within our organization shortly after New Year’s 2018 brought us immediate success. We felt that much more violence had been used against our employees than the figures showed that had been publicly disclosed. We asked our employees in the dialogue about their experiences and found that many colleagues had not reported the situations involving violence. When we asked why, we received various reasons: from administratively cumbersome to, well, it’s part of the job. We immediately started working on this.

Based on the dialogue, we were able to make a good case for why the numbers were wrong. The results did not remain internal. The influence of the results of the dialogue reached far, even the Lower House. The result is that fireworks bans and tackling violence against emergency service workers are now higher on the priority list and have led to measures.

Giving your opinion safely
The dialogue is fully anonymized, secure and in line with the GDPR and privacy laws. This is a prerequisite if you want to receive honest answers. Employees answer one or a few challenging, focused questions in the first round. In the second round, they respond to statements and ideas from their colleagues, which initiates a conversation. This subsequently result in a ranking of what gets the most support and why, which provides qualitative insights, as the reasoning behind how and why is also addressed.

We get to see the results at group level. Based on predefined criteria such as age group, units and functions, we can filter more insights from the results. This provides interesting and specific information for us, for administrators and for teams. The dialogue can be used by multiple parties.

Not common
It is not common to purchase software. Yet there was no doubt about the need. We first presented it to our own ICT department to keep it in-house, but it turned out to take much more time and money than expected to realize something comparable. The CircleLytics instrument had already proven its strength and the CircleLytics team is a partner who shares ideas and helps refine smart questions.

The dialogue helps us to pick up the opinions of our constituents and put them where they belong in our organization, with the director, with the teams.

Full video with Rob den Besten:

Contact our team if you would like to learn how your employees and organization can benefit from CircleLytics’ online dialogue. You can find more information on the employee participation page.

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The hard truth is that if you want to take your organization into the future with innovations, your organization needs to be a learning organization:

“On the basis of a unique data set covering 2000 Danish private firms, it is demonstrated that firms combining several of the organizational traits of the learning organization are much more prone to introducing new products than others.” (Peter Nielsen and Bengt-Åke Lundvall, Aalborg University).

One of the critical ingredients for creating a learning organization is ensuring that there is a feedback culture. Because let’s face it, how do you learn without asking for feedback?

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Based on our experience we’ve compiled 5 questions you need to ask yourself to evaluate if you’ve got a feedback culture:

Has your leadership identified and communicated the most important competencies needed for the future?

Yes, it’s important to have a vision. Steve Jobs, ex-CEO, of arguably the most innovative company of this decade, Apple Computer, has been quoted saying, “I skate to where the puck is going to be”. Having a vision is knowing where that puck is going to be. But getting to the puck requires identifying those competencies you need in your organization to get there. Identify your most important competencies and monitor how good you are by getting feedback on them.

Does Your Leadership Regularly Ask for Feedback on strategy, obstacles or ways to accelerate progress?

Do your most senior leaders continually ask for feedback? “Walk the talk” and demonstrate that without feedback you don’t learn. This starts at the highest level (McKinsey). Leaders who don’t ask for feedback regularly, are really saying to their employees: “You don’t need to be open to learning to get to my position.” It also works the other way around: people perceive you as more competent when you ask for their feedback and opinion. Gallup and Bersin of Deloitte already explained to their management that making employees’ opinions count actually drives their engagement. That’s what we call a win-win!

Do you have an easy tool for getting frequent feedback, askingopen questions that matter most?

We believe that the days of just-a-survey-and-a-dashboard are over. In our mobile device lifestyle, we handle 65% of our emails on our mobile device. That means that your request for feedback, ideas, solutions, will be handled safely on any device, at the employee’s most convenient time. Make sure your employees can take their time to respond; slowing them down will crack your puzzle faster.

Evidence also shows that firms seldom learn and innovate alone. Innovation requires open cooperation and an inquisitive mind (read for example the book “A More Beautiful Question” from Warren Berger). Learning is very much an outside-inside process.

Do you embed feedback into your business processes and easily enable growth?

We’re in a learning economy now, which means that globalization, deregulation and information technology has created an environment with more intense competition, rapid transformation and change. A VUCA world. To compete in such an economy, the ability to identify the competencies you need, and attain them (whether by yourself or by adding others to your team) is crucial to the performance of organizations. Make sure continuous feedback and dialogue becomes a habit, instead of an incident.

Do you have a way to enable the sharing of knowledge and insights to improve collaboration?

Organizations can learn only as fast as the slowest link learns. Change is hindered unless an organization can enable knowledge to be shared. In feedback and learning organizations, knowledge flows freely, and talent becomes visible and what we call “liquid”. “The best performing teams have talent that comes together in a complementary way. Teams must tap the potential for many minds to be more intelligent than one mind, the collective intelligence. If teams learn, they become a microcosm for learning throughout the organization” (The Fifth Discipline, Peter M. Senge, MIT), or superorganism as others call it. We believe this can only be achieved when social collaboration mechanisms are in place, an ecosystem for people to accelerate their growth, together.

Our first step, together with you, could be to evaluate your feedback culture in your organization by engaging your employees in a series of pulse dialogues. Collect their feedback and thoughts, and make them rethink matters like: “What’s the main obstacle in the organization we could take away together so that it become open to feedback and why do you think so?” or “What’s your best example of compliments in our organization that made a difference for your motivation?”, etc. This will clarify how, when and in what context feedback and recognition can be introduced, and identify the work that needs to be done. Feedback is worth a lot, yet very complex, no matter what others say. Together, we will work out the steps to introduce a sublime feedback culture.

MaurikDippel, co-founder of CircleLytics.

+31 (0)611 78 80 47

The works council of Reclassering NL has been working with CircleLytics’ dialogue solution for works councils and employee participation for some time.

What does employee engagement accomplish for you?

More diversity and spread of respondents and their responses. It also supports the dialogue with both the director and the constituents.

Mention a theme or themes as an example of how you deployed CircleLytics, and the resulting benefits.

Fast and direct feedback on the progress of setting up casuistry and intervision for specific groups of employees. This made it possible to quickly identify the regions in which this had not yet got off the ground sufficiently. After 6 months, almost the same repeat question showed that the interventions had delivered results.

Are there other areas imaginable where employee engagement can be used?

Yes, in various domains within and outside the direct role of participation, perception and judgement of management takes place. This is now filtered and takes place almost without details. We would also find this form of dialogue interesting via feedback panels on fixed topics, regular monitoring or in real time during meetings. This is more in line with the ‘bottom-up’ approach promoted.

Why should other organizations work with CircleLytics?

It is a simple but effective way to quickly and concretely collect feedback from (groups of) employees. It is very important to form good perceptions and judgments that result in decision making that is better supported.

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NATIONAL POLICE: “PROVEN STRENGTH: RANKING WHAT GETS THE MOST SUPPORT AND WHY”

INNOVATION REQUIRES AN INQUISITIVE MIND: LEARNING IS VERY MUCH AN OUTSIDE-INSIDE PROCESS.

Reclassering NL: “Important to work on perceptions and judgement”