The importance of neutrality within a workplace investigation is oft-discussed and, at this point, well understood. I frequently tell participants in our Workplace Investigation Fundamentals workshop that to undertake a fair investigation they need to be capable of being open to the possibility that any person they interview – complainant, respondent, or witness – is telling them the truth. What can be less understood, in my experience with clients, is that an open mind is similarly required when conducting workplace assessments. Given the goals of a workplace assessment, it is essential that the individual or team conducting the assessment takes care to minimize the impact of their process choices on the information gathered. This will help ensure that any subsequent actions taken by an organization in response to the assessment are truly informed by the feedback of participants. In this blog, I will note four areas within a workplace assessment process in which there is a risk of the assessor’s approach lacking neutrality:  setting the mandate, “messaging” the process, selecting participants, and creating questions.

Setting the mandate

Before kicking off an assessment, it is necessary for the organization undertaking the assignment to provide the assessor with a mandate. Sometimes when clients have reached out to me for an assessment, they have done so proposing a process mandate that is insufficiently neutral. I have been asked to “validate employee concerns” or “confirm the impact” of certain organizational decisions. The purpose of an assessment is to gather information about the subjective experiences of employees that may validate or confirm, but which may also invalidate or deny. Assessments will almost always be triggered by information the organization receives that suggests there is a particular issue (or issues); in my experience, sometimes that information is accurate and sometimes it is not. Starting with a more neutral mandate (for example, “determine if…” or “gather information related to…”) will better set the tone for an effective assessment.

“Messaging” the process

One of the tensions within an assessment process is how much to share with employees about why the assessment is happening. Share too little and people will fill in the gaps – this can lead to gossip, suspicion, or even fear about the “true” purpose of the process. Share too much and you might impact, and specifically limit, what people will feel invited to tell you about. In addition, just like an investigator who conducts public-facing investigations might feel pressure to make positive findings to justify their process, an assessment that is announced as addressing specific issues might lead to pressure on the assessor to find feedback and make recommendations relating to those issues, even if employees are more concerned about other things. Accordingly, I always encourage clients to be transparent about the triggers for the assessment while making clear that the process is intended to hear from employees about the things that are important to them, regardless of whether their feelings are positive, negative, or somewhere in between.

Selecting participants

In most cases, inviting all members of the area that is the subject of the assessment (which could be a small team, a full department, or the organization as a whole) will best ensure that all perspectives are heard and considered within the process. That said, sometimes that will not be possible due to timelines, availability, budget, “survey fatigue”, etc. Where only a subset of employees is being invited to participate, it is key that the assessor seeks to ensure that those invited to participate are representative of the group as a whole. Only speaking to people who have raised issues in the past, only speaking to leaders, only speaking to long-term employees…all of these choices would likely skew the information gathered and lead to recommendations that may not address the feelings of the team as a whole.

Creating questions

Perhaps most obviously, the questions an assessor drafts for a survey or an interview will impact the information that participants provide within the process, in terms of both topic and tone. Therefore, questions should be written in a way that allows for both positive or negative feedback and that does not feed the interviewee the type of answers that are being sought. Starting and ending with broad, open-ended questions will allow people to speak about the things that are important to them. Even where it is necessary to target a specific topic, for example role clarity or the communication style of management, utilizing a neutral framing of the question will best allow employees to speak for themselves.

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Workplace assessments can be an effective tool to encourage employee feedback and effect meaningful organizational change. By ensuring they are not influencing the feedback provided by participants, an assessor protects themselves from providing a list of recommendations that miss the mark. At their best, assessments are the matching of neutral, thorough information-gathering from participants with the expertise of the assessor to respond to such feedback with thoughtful, forward-looking recommendations. That combination helps organizations make informed decisions based on employee feedback rather than assumptions.