Facilitation Tools: Survey Feedback

This facilitation tool is particularly useful for helping groups identify and solve problems.

Survey Feedback enables participants to anonymously compare their individual views against the group as a whole. Once completed, participants have an action plan to which the group feels committed.

The Process

1. Create a survey for participants to complete anonymously. For this stage to be effective in a group setting it should be completed in silence. Example topics:
   - Customer satisfaction
   - Meeting effectiveness
   - Management effectiveness 
   
   Questions are scored on a scale of 1-5. For example:
   1 = Poor
   3 = Satisfactory
   5 = Excellent
    
2. Once the survey has been completed, one participant is asked to tally the group's answers on a flip chart. Resist any temptation the group may have to discuss their results.
    
3. Once all the participants have read the results, ask the group to answer the following questions, based on what the results indicate:
   
   - what is going well?
   - Which questions received high ratings?
   - Why did they receive high ratings?
   
   - What isn't going well?
   - Which questions received low ratings?
   - Why did they receive low ratings?
    
4. If there are several low ranking items, ask the group to rank them in priority order.
    
5. Divide participants into smaller groups, around five people is ideal. Assign a specific item to each group and ask them to answer the following questions:
   
   - What is the cause of the low rating?
   - What went wrong?
   - What is the nature of the problem?
   - What solutions are there?
    
6. Ask the sub-groups to present their ideas to the rest of the participants. Encourage people to add their ideas so an action plan can be finalised.
    
7. Ask participants to once again rejoin their sub-groups and finalise their action plan to ensure improvements stand a reasonable chance of being implemented.

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